Buck the Trends: How Batted Ball Profiles can help the KC Royals

Welcome back to the latest installment of Kings of Kauffman's "Buck the Trends," our continuing series honoring Kansas City legend Buck O'Neil. Today, we consider Batted Ball Profiles and how they can help inform KC Royals decision-making as the club strives to get better.

Sabermetrics theory is based on a pretty simple idea: wins are the result of effective run production and run prevention. The underlying logic is also simple — teams that produce more runs than they allow tend to win more games.

Statistics junkies use an actual mathematical equation to lend support to these notions. Taking the square of a team's run production (676 for the 2023 Royals) and dividing it by the square of runs scored plus runs allowed (676 + 859), results in a theoretical winning percentage. Based on this math, the Royals should have had a .383 winning percentage in 2023.

But Kansas City lost a franchise record-tying 106 games this year, which resulted in an actual winning percentage of only .346. Where did the math go wrong? What did it miss?

The Royals need to identify the "how" and not rely just on a formula

In the famous 2011 film Moneyball, Brad Pitt as Oakland general manager Billy Beane asks the Athletics' scouts if he cares how a player gets on base, to which he responds he doesn't. It's a key moment in the film, designed to emphasize the conflict between the old ways and the new.

Baseball isn't so simple. There's no magic stat. To be competitive requires deep analysis of modern data, ideas, observations, including the nature and dimensions of individual ballparks. But it also requires player identification and development, proper coaching, and a deep understanding of how you hit a ball, or pitch to induce contact.

Decoding run production and run prevention is key for the Royals

The key to breaking the code to run production and run prevention lies in Batted Ball Profiles (BBP), which for purposes of this story refers to the way batters hit the baseball. There are three basic types of batted balls: ground balls, fly balls, and line drives.

One of the biggest trends in the majors today is a focus on increasing team home runs. The logic behind this is that if a team can hit enough home runs to overpower its opponents, it doesn't need to rely so much on singles, doubles and triples. Let's call this the "Bully Strategy" — bullies try to overpower their opponents.

Bully Strategy teams spend big money to buy batters who hit home runs and pitchers who miss bats. They coach hitters to take as many pitches as possible, resulting in high walk and strikeout percentages, a strategy known as the three true outcomes: walk, strike out, home run.

On defense, bullies smother opponents with pitchers who throw impossible-to-hit pitches. They rely on strikeouts to lower their team WHIP, reducing opponents' at-bats and baserunners. The Royals are in no position to be bullies; they can't afford to compete for pitchers and their ballpark isn't Bully Strategy-friendly. Kauffman Stadium is, after all, huge, and plays like it. Bullies don't play well to Kauffman because, as Statcast data reveals, The K allows 50 fewer home runs a season than Great American Ballpark, which produces the most and is where the Reds play.

That's an advantage for the Royals. And knowing they'll play half of every season's games at Kauffman, where they and their opponents struggle to hit homers, the Royals can use BBP to buck the trends and better inform their decision-making.

But how?

Batted Ball Profiles directly impact run production

Basic to the game is this: when a batter hits the ball, the contact he creates can result in significantly different results.

For example, and according to Fangraphs, Kansas City's MJ Melendez hits a flyball 42.2% of the time; his batting average on fly balls is .179. He hits line drives 20.3% of the time and averages .693 on that collective contact. That's an astronomical difference in batting average.

Singling out Melendez is easy because FanGraphs' spray charts so plainly reveal his issues with the bat — he smacks a lot of flyballs to left field which results in a high number of outs. Melendez is an interesting case because Kauffman Stadium is a poor place for him to play. He hit 16 home runs last season, but per Baseball Savant would have it 31 if he played for the Reds in their homer-friendly home venue.

Lower batting averages are not limited to fly balls, though. Ground balls also result in suboptimal averages because they tend to become infield outs. One result of the baseball's home run revolution is that many teams employ pull hitters, who tend to a lot of ground balls; but because they're so intent on chasing home runs, most major league teams don't concern themselves with their hitters' high ground ball or flyball rates.

Comparatively, batting averages on flyballs and groundballs fall between .200-.250; simply put, line drives are typically three times more effective than flyballs and grounders. When a ballpark doesn't play well for home runs, the home club needs to find another way to produce runs.

So, why don't more teams lean into hitting line drives? Actually, they do. The 2023 average line drive rate for the major leagues was 23.9%, and the two top "liner teams" were Kansas City and Colorado, the two clubs that just happen to have the largest ballparks.

What's the take here? Line drives play better in big stadiums like Kauffman.