Can the D-backs Exploit Batted Ball Matchups in 2016?

Last seasons, Chip Hale earned a gold star for his work mixing and matching players in the outfield. With five players initially, then four players for the three spots, he allocated the time about as perfectly as possible. Down the stretch, A.J. Pollock played roughly 95% of the time, David Peralta played about 85% of the time, Ender Inciarte played about 85% of the time while Yasmany Tomas, then Socrates Brito, picked up the rest. Deciding who to start and who to sit was generally a matter of who made up the best trio – Pollock, Peralta and Inciarte were the obvious group. The gap back to Tomas and Brito, and even Peter O’Brien if you really want to go there, was pretty large.

But what if I told you that gap was closer depending on who was pitching? Would we still insist on the same core of players day in and day out? Maybe in the exact case of last season, the trio above would have still made the most sense, but now that Inciarte is gone and Tomas will try to fill his shoes, there may be even more incentive to mix and match. Platoons are well-known around here and have grown in popularity throughout the game. Generally speaking, they allow the manager to put his batters in the best position to succeed by selecting their matchups carefully.

This is usually done in a lefty/righty manner as batter and pitcher handedness splits are well-understood, at least in principle. This team is young, however, and we know that left/right splits for a hitter don’t stabilize until around 2,000 career at-bats. I, personally, have been guilty of jumping to conclusions much quicker than this based on the eye test, but it bears repeating is yet another reason to think Jake Lamb should get more exposure against left-handed pitchers. It’s also a reason to think that maybe David Peralta isn’t as good against lefties as it appeared at times last seasons. Frankly, we’re just not in a position to say yet.

But batted ball profiles stabilize a lot more quickly for a hitter. After about 80 balls in play, we have a pretty good idea of where a hitter rests on the ground ball/fly ball spectrum according to FanGraphs. Based on the fantastic work of Andrew Koo at Baseball Prospectus back in 2013, we also know that there are matchups that can be utilized effectively based on these profiles. For hitters who are either one or two standard deviations above the mean in ground balls or fly balls, Koo showed that they see increased production against either ground ball or fly ball pitchers. Putting it simply, fly ball hitters fair best against ground ball pitchers while ground ball hitters fair best against fly ball pitchers. From Koo’s original work:

The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball devotes a chapter to platoon effects. Five pages discuss handedness, a mainstay of baseball analysis today. Two pages cover a less visible effect: batted-ball tendencies. Authors Tango, Lichtman, and Dolphin found that fly-ball hitters had an advantage over ground-ball hitters, simply because they are better hitters—you can’t homer on grounders, after all. They also found that fly-ball hitters are especially good againstground-ball pitchers, because the former tend to swing under the ball while the latter want the hitter to swing over the ball.

However, Tango et al. noted that this platoon advantage is hard to exploit because players tend to be neutral rather than lean to either extreme. Also, the advantage itself is very small, and hence overshadowed by the handedness platoon. Such a minimal advantage would (theoretically) require being multiplied through several hitters to become meaningful.

As Koo goes on to explain, the 2013 Oakland Athletics did this very thing, utilizing many platoons to play up this admittedly small advantage. The cumulative effect was something special, however, as Oakland’s offense churned our runs at a rate that drastically exceeded expectations. The Diamondbacks are in a different situation since they’re expected to score often as-is, but losing Inciarte could prove to be a bigger deal than some might think and it never hurts to simply put your players in the best possible positions to succeed at the plate, at least when you have the opportunity to do so. After all, the effects really could  be something special, as Koo established:

Those numbers are from 2007-2013, but there’s no reason to think they don’t still hold true in principle (although perhaps teams have already caught on and have started exploiting these matchups more frequently than they did pre-2014. The green (good) and red (bad) areas are highlighted to draw your attention. What we find is that ground ball hitters seem to fair best against fly ball pitchers. Fly ball hitters seem to fair best against ground ball pitchers. The rest is really just a wash of league average production.

Keep in mind, we’re defining ground ball and fly ball hitters as players who are least one standard deviation above the mean, which is a lot. Who do the Diamondbacks have that fit this definition? I’m glad you asked. Using the last three year’s worth of data, there are four players who fit into this category, suggesting they might benefit from seeing increased at-bats against certain kinds of pitchers.

• David Peralta (ground ball hitter): should face fly ball pitchers as often as possible
• Yasmany Tomas (ground ball hitter): should face fly ball pitchers as often as possible
• Welington Castillo (fly ball hitter): should face ground ball pitchers as often as possible
• Tuffy Gosewisch (ground ball hitter): should face fly ball pitchers as often as possible
  • Everyone else is effectively neutral

David Peralta is going to play pretty much every day, so this may not matter a lot. If anything, it would be a good idea to align his rest days against left-handed, ground ball starting pitchers if possible. Yasmany Tomas will probably play a bunch, but it might be especially useful to get him in there against fly ball starters. Welington Castillo and Tuffy Gosewisch have a nice little batted ball platoon going on, so while Castillo will play 85% of the time, it might be smart of Chip Hale to pick those off days based on who’s on the mound rather than just inserting Tuffy for every day game on Sunday. This could conceivably help the offense produced by the catcher’s spot compared to other alternatives.

But remember, Oakland got a big boost out of this by implementing it on a large scale. The Diamondbacks don’t appear to have the opportunity to do that here. That doesn’t mean they should abandon the principle, it just means that the effects of organizing their lineup using this information will be reduced. I believe they can still gain a very, very small advantage by being strategic with days off, however. When given the option, Chip Hale can pick and choose to put his beset lineup on the diamond. This information, batted-ball matchups, is part of that equation beyond simple handedness.