For the last 6 months or so, FanGraphs has really be on a roll by providing new features on it’s site. Today, David Appleman, announced that FanGraphs has updated it’s leaderboards section of the site. You can now search the leaderboards by career instead of just yearly chunks. This new career leaderboard function applies to things like batted ball data, win values, and the other advanced stats the site provides.
Really cool stuff. For some of the advanced data — things like batted ball and win values — the numbers only go back to 2002, so keep that in mind.
Just playing around with some of the leaderboards, here’s 3 random graphs based on the new career leaderboards.
Note: All data sorted by the minimum requirement of 1,000 PAs.
The Big Hurt doesn’t like to hit ground balls. Since 2002 he’s posted the lowest GB/FB ratio of any other hitter — with a limit of 1,000 PAs — in the majors. Frank’s strategy is to hit the ball in the air and hit it hard. It’s not surprising to see other sluggers like Jonny Gomes and Russell Branyan make the top five for this statistic.
On the other side, these are the hitters that hit the ball on the ground a lot. From 2002-08, Joey Gathright has the highest percentage of batted balls that went on the ground. Almost 70% of his batted balls were on the ground. For a hitter with zero power, hitting the ball on the ground is a good thing. Yes, that is former Royals prospect Ken Harvey. It’s pretty amusing to see Ken Harvey make the back-end of this list. He just doesn’t seem to fit the player-type when you think of guys who hit a lot of balls on the ground. Most of these guys are speedster types but BB-Ref lists Harvey as 6’2″ and 240lbs.
I mean, seriously, can you image this guy hitting a lot of groundballs and trying to beat them out?
Not gonna happen. And on to our last quick graph.
Eric Byrnes has hit a ton of infield flyballs over the years. He’s got the highest IFFB% among hitters in our sample. Since 2005, he’s posted an IFFB% of +20% or greater. Since infield flyballs are easily turned into outs, smacking %20 or more of your annual flyballs in the infield isn’t a good thing. In 2007 Byrnes hit 243 flyballs of which 65 were of the infield variety. Also making the list are such greats as: Tony Bautista, Einar Diaz, Steve Finley, and Randall Simon.
