There's a Revolution Brewing Among Hitters

It has probably always been evident to you that for every physical action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You realized it in some vague way you couldn't articulate long before you ever heard of Newton's Third Law. You knew that if someone threw a dodge ball at your head in school gym, the ball and the melon each bounce in opposite directions.

You probably had some unformed understanding of gravity too, since everything you threw in the air mysteriously came down.

The same kind of old discovery becoming new is happening today with a small number of batters in baseball. It's been fueled by Statcast measurements of launch angles but it goes back to the days of Babe Ruth.

What J.D. Martinez Figured Out
Let's look at the career of J.D. Martinez to see what the revolution is. In his first three seasons as an Astro, Martinez followed the counsel of all the hitting gurus and attempted to put a level swing on the ball. If he blasted a liner up the middle, that was considered perfect contact.

Employing that philosophy, Martinez compiled a .251/.300/.387 line, roughly 12% below average -- for an outfielder, about replacement level. It began to occur to him that perfecting his swing was getting singles.

The he started noticing teammate Jason Castro, who in 2013 increased his OPS 100 points -- almost all of it in slugging percentage -- by swinging upward. The wheels began to turn. He started watching the swings of the best hitters in baseball. They all sported similar uppercut swings. It's something Babe Ruth introduced to the game in the 1920s and has been employed by every Hall of Fame home run hitter since. But it's always been seen as the province only of sluggers, not of ordinary hitters.

Well, what made those hitters sluggers?

Martinez spent that off-season with a hitting instructor whose motto was "ground balls suck." In fact, ground balls are somewhat more likely to result in hits, but obviously never home runs, and rarely doubles or triples. The OPS on fly balls is much higher. 

Chicks don't dig the ground ball. Neither do front offices.

So Martinez rebuilt his swing, and the next season in Detroit, looking for pitches he lift, he more than doubled his extra base output. In his three seasons as a Tiger, he's become a star, triple-slashing  .299/.357/.540. That's a 210-point rocket launch in OPS, and it earned Martinez an All-Star nod, some MVP votes, 13 wins against replacement and $11,750,000 in his last season of arbitration eligibility. If he hits like that again this year he'll be looking at $100 million.

Where Statcast Comes In
It might have escaped notice, except MLB now measures launch angle and exit velocity of every ball hit. And when you look at the numbers it's pretty obvious, so obvious that pitchers are now throwing, ironically, more pitches up in the zone to Martinez. It's hard to golf a chest-high fastball.

It's a secret that's been hiding in plain sight for a century but it may be enjoying a renewed heyday. Word is that some teams are introducing their players to a more angled swing path. We'll see: maybe it's just an isolated thing; after all, Castro's performance plummeted after the 2013 season. But for a handful of guys like Martinez, hitting the ball in the air has been the path to success.