Who is Displaying Power to All Fields?

There are a plethora of ways to consider power in the context of hitting a baseball. One may count things like home runs, extra base hits, hard hit balls, barrels, blasts and more; alternatively, one might consider a player’s maximum exit velocity, batted ball distance or, more recently, swing speed.

When it comes to batted ball metrics, maximum exit velocity has found a meaningful place in the minds of fans and talent evaluators; that metric offers a glimpse at a player’s raw potential, a ceiling —umm, maximum— of sorts. While maximum exit velocity has a lot of usefulness, I have wondered for some time why it hasn’t been cut by other data points, but rather is most often presented without accompanying context.

In this case, I briefly delve into the the intersection of exit velocities and direction. Of course, there is no shortage of documentation relating to batted ball direction and launch angles; many statistically interested fans are familiar, for instance, with the gaudy slash lines of batted balls pulled —or pulled and barreled— in the air. A lot of players, aware of these outcomes, have made a good living unlocking their pull side pop.

What seems a bit less considered, at least from my perspective, is how for any given player pull side pop directly compares to opposite field pop, let’s say. Maximum exit velocity may capably cover a player’s power, but what it doesn’t necessarily inform is whether, or to what extent, that player has power to all fields. To that end, I have pulled data from Baseball Savant for all hard hit balls in 2024, with direction included. Here, direction is captured in its crudest form: whether a ball was pulled, hit up the middle, or the opposite way.

Among all hard hit data, it is clear that hitting the ball hard the opposite way is less common than hitting it hard while pulling the ball, or sending it back up the middle, when controlling for direction frequencies regardless of exit velocity; while 24.4% of all hits have gone the opposite way this season, just ~16.5% of hard hits were hit to the opposite field. As a result, hard hit balls over-index in the pull and middle directions. This maybe isn’t particularly surprising, but it is notable and helpful context when considering individual players.

Given that I am interested in player-level information, data has been grouped by player and filtered to only players with 50+ hard hits. Data was pulled on July 2, so it captures roughly a half-season.

To get a sense of the data, below is the leaderboard of players with the highest fraction of pulled hard hits.

Isaac Paredes is something of a poster child for pulling the baseball, so it is fitting that he tops this leaderboard. Indeed, Paredes ranked third overall in Pull% in all of MLB at the time data was collected, with roughly 54% of his batted balls landing on his pull side. However, his hard hits are even more extreme: 72.15% of those hits have been pulled and, despite hitting the opposite way just 15.2% of the time, a considerably more minuscule 1.64% of his hard hits head that direction.

Given that only the most extreme Pull% players have rates over 50%, it is interesting to see how many players get the healthy majority of their hard hits to the pull side. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum are those players with the highest fraction of their hard hits going the opposite way.

Comparing these two tables really drives home how much hitter approaches can vary. This second list also serves to put the emphasis on hard hits to the opposite field, a key point when considering players not just with considerable raw power, but with power to all fields. However, in the tables above only hard hit frequency has been considered, not maximum exit velocity.

When considering power to all fields, a very simple approach was taken. It is probably reasonable that most players’ hardest hit baseball was either pulled or hit up the middle, but I am curious about how that value compares to their hardest hit baseball that traveled the opposite way. With that in mind, I grabbed data for opposite field maximum exit velocity as a percentage of overall maximum exit velocity. Below is a list of those qualified players with the highest and lowest “Oppo EV as % of Max EV” values.

Before diving in, it should be noted that data was limited here to those players with 10+ hard hit balls to all three fields. This was an arbitrary threshold, but the thinking was that any player with at least 10 hard hits in each direction probably has a reasonably healthy sample of hits, and thus a player’s max oppo exit velocity won’t simply represent the single ball they hit the opposite way all season.

To this point, just five players have struck their hardest hit ball this season to the opposite field. Setting more rigorous sampling methods aside, these players seem to display their power to all fields. Brandon Marsh in particular has tapped into his power while going the opposite way; he is the only player with an opposite field maximum EV that is 2+ mph higher than his max EV to the other fields. In addition to those five, many more players have opposite field max exit velocities that very nearly match their overall high water marks.

The bottom of this list highlights the considerable gap between players’ max EVs and what they have hit hardest the opposite way. Clearly, not all players’ power appears to extend to all fields though; in the most extreme case, Lars Nootbaar has a maximum opposite field EV that is a full 10mph slower (a value that represents just ~91% of his pulled max EV) than his overall maximum EV.

Finally, I wanted to summarize things with a catchall, albeit very simple, measure of power to all fields. “Opposite Field Max EV as a % of Max EV” aims to describe how balanced a player’s power to respective fields is, but it doesn’t take into account their actual ceiling. For instance, Isiah Kiner-Falefa has balanced power by that measure above, but it is hard to say he has power to all fields with a maximum EV that is in the bottom 10th percentile. So, in the spirit of simplicity, I multiplied each player’s “Oppo Max EV as % of Max EV” (or rather their percentile rank) by their season’s Max EV percentile rank. Below are the results.

Note that exactly 150 players qualified for this exercise by having 10+ hard hits —and 50 hard hits total— to each field. Given that the table above covers the top 15 in so-called All Fields Power Score, this list represents the top 10 percent. That said, there is some selection bias going on as players without many hard hits have been excluded entirely, so this list really does represent the top fraction of players despite the wide range in individual scores.

On the podium of this made up metric stands Ketel Marte, Aaron Judge, and Matt Chapman, all of whom possess power that is both robust and on display to all three fields. There is lots of room to refine this metric, let alone to determine if it actually relates to outcomes, or performances, of interest. For these purposes though, it is interesting simply to consider exit velocity from a slightly adjusted perspective.

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