Thinking about a quality of contact tracking for amateur ball

Dominik85 posted:

Obviously you don't have exit velo and launch angles so there is a big amount of guessing.

But for approximation purposes I was thinking about 3 categories:

1. Terrible contact: infield fly balls and very weak grounders. Now infield flies is easy but very weak grounders not so much. For the tracking guy you might tell him balls that roll or bounce 3+ times by the time they reach the fielders.

1. Average contact: decently hit grounders (1 to 2 hoppers with decent velo albeit that is subjective again), routine outfield fly balls and flares (hit or not)

1. Good contact: smoked grounders (hard hit balls that only hop once and don't hit the ground until after the pitchers mound), solid line drives and fly balls over the outfield (caught or not) that land or would land within 25 feet of the fence and obviously balls over the fence.

That would work all right, but only under certain constraints. The same person would have to do it all the time would be the main thing, and players from other teams wouldn’t be compared.

I think if you tracked that with a guy with decent tracking skills it would tell you a lot. 

Good contact rate would be nice but I would especially like to see how avoiding terrible contact plays.

If you looked at K rate plus terrible contact (almost as bad as a K) you would probably learn a lot about the quality of a hitter. A guy that strikes out or makes terrible contact 50 percent of the time probably is a bad hitter, no matter if it is 10% k and 40% terrible contact or vice versa. But if a hitter makes average or better contact 80% of his at bats he likely is a solid hitter for his level.

You could maybe even create a point ranking, like -5 for a k, -3 for terrible contact, +5 for average contact and plus 10 for good contact. Maybe work in another plus 5 for a BB and HP and you might have a more decent outcome tracking system over a small sample size than BA or OPS because you take luck and defense out of the equation. Has anyone tried something like that?

Why don’t you test your theory and track it for your team? I’d be interested to see what you come up with. And you wouldn’t need to score the game to do it. All you’d need is the result for every PA. That would be easy enough to track on a 4x6 card. Throw it in a spread sheet or something else that would store and manipulate the data, and you’re on your way.

I think you’re on a bit of a snipe hunt because there’s a lot more to being a good hitter than having a good contact rate, but I don’t want to discourage you from testing your theory. In fact, I wish more people would do that.