Originally Posted by
GovClintonTyree
One other thing, while my intelligence is being impugned....that thread was the result of me pointing out in a game thread soon (maybe 10 days) after Albies' call up last year when I said he was an extreme fly ball hitter and Enscheff said he was not, the data clearly said he wasn't, that I was stupid for saying so, and wondering how I could reach such an erroneous conclusion.
I said, simply, that I watched him. Then I looked at the stats to see if they'd bear out what I saw, and his launch angle average was 19°, "higher than just about anyone's", I said at the time.
Within an hour he had started his thread about, "Why Albies needs to stop hitting the ball in the air so much."
Here we are four baseball months later, his launch angle is still 19°, he's leading the league in home runs, hitting the ball in the air 47% of the time and seems to be doing all right.
So while analytically speaking his launch angle is too extreme for his average exit velocity and he should, within the analytical framework Enscheff has defined, change his style in order to be more effective hitter, the unreliable eye test would seem to suggest the analysis is wrong - or at least in need of questioning, would it not? That it is probably sample size weirdness, but maybe it's not?
One thing that I've been toying with is that when you're talking about exit velocity you're talking about averages, not discrete events, and maybe Albies hits a lot more balls 95+ than other people with his average exit velocity. Maybe there's something about Albies that makes him out-power his expected quantity because of other, unaccounted for variables - that happens with FIP, right?
I'm not as data-driven as some, but I shouldn't have to hear that I should just focus on the pretty uniforms and green grass because I'm not looking at the game through a saber lens. I promise you, I appreciate the game just fine even without reducing it to a spreadsheet.