F/X VisualizationsSeptember 25, 2009
A Last Look at Home Runs
By Dave Allen

In my last post I looked at how the horizontal location of a pitch hit for a HR related to the angle of that HR in play. I thought the result was aesthetically pleasing and did a good job of showing the strongest trend (most HRs are pulled), but I thought that it may have hidden some other underlying structures or patterns.

So in the short post I want to take a last look at the data in a slightly different way. I broke up the plate into 10 bins and angle of HRs in play into 10 bins. Then counted the number of HRs that went from each of the 10 plate bins into each of the 10 angle of balls in play bins. Here is the result for RHBs.
cdm_r.png

Here you can see that most HRs are hit from pitches middle-in and pulled to left field, just as the previous figure showed. What this shows even better, though, is that the majority of opposite field HRs come on pitches away. In fact inside pitches are very rarely hit for opposite field HRs.

The same overall trend is seen for LHBs
cdm_l.png

Comments

Maybe it's just me, but putting "angle of HR" on the y-axis is confusing. I think the previous post's charts waere much easier to understand.

Posted by: Dan Novick at September 25, 2009 10:34 PM