Fangraphs: Betting on Soft Contact

[weams]

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/johnny-cueto-and-betting-on-soft-contact/

We were once taught that pitchers could do nothing to manipulate the ball in play, but we?ve been shaving at the sideburns of that bombshell for a while now. Eric Seidman and Matt Swartz showed in their SIERA research that elite ground-ball pitchers had better batting average on balls in play outcomes, at least.

We?ve begun tracking things like soft-hit rate on this website, and testing the year to year stickiness. Turns out, it?s not great. Alex Chamberlain found a .25 year-to-year correlation on soft-hit rate for pitchers, and Rob Arthur found that hitters affected exit velocity five times more strongly than pitchers.

Still, there is some stickiness, even if it?s on the level of home run per fly ball suppression, or just a little better than BABIP. Pitchers do affect the exit velocity, even if they do so much less than the hitter.

Are there other skills that lead to soft contact? After running the soft-hit rate of 179 qualified pitchers against various PITCHf/x and outcome metrics, almost nothing stuck. The only one that was actually close to being significant was reach rate (p value = .017). And that makes theoretical sense ? nothing seems as likely to get a weakly hit ground ball as a swing on a pitch outside the strike zone.

As tiny as that finding sounds, it does line up a little bit with what Arthur found ? exit velocity is naturally suppressed in two-strike counts and on the edges of the strike zone. Theoretically, at least, a pitcher who could get batters to reach should be able to entice this soft contact.

[Can_of_corn]

Doesn't sound like something you want to bet very heavily on.

I'd still play with the infield in when Britton was pitching.

[DrungoHazewood]

I hope people don't read this as "see, DIPS really is stupid." Seems to me this is very much at the margins.