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Byron Buxton has proven that he will provide multiple wins above replacement, if he stays healthy and hits at an acceptably average level. The bad news is that Buxton failed to stay healthy for the latter half of 2019, limiting what could have been. The great news is that he appeared to be making major swing and philosophy adjustments that may lead to above-average offensive production going forward. The first step was reducing his strikeout rate (K%), that allowed him to have a chance to put more balls in play. While Buxton may never have a strikeout rate below 20%, his 2019 K% of 23.1% decreased by a difference of 22% year-over-year. He also doubled his walk rate (BB%) from his disaster 2018 season, to significantly improve his BB/K ratio to 0.28. If Buxton can continue reducing his strikeout rate (it was over 30% in his first two seasons), and keep his walk rate steady, he will have many more chances to receive more pitches and drive the ball. Another major problem in the beginning of Buxton's career was watching too many early pitches become established in the strike zone, and he would proceed to flail at the third strike when he was in protect-mode. Pitchers threw nearly the same amount of pitches in the zone from 2018 to 2019, but Buxton continued his 4-year trend of swinging at more of these pitches (Z-Swing%). Buxton's contact of pitches in the zone (Z-Contact%) has remained constant throughout his career at roughly 82%, but that's not a bad thing. If contact is constant, but his trend of an increasing ZSwing% continues, Buxton will continue to increase his total contact events on hittable pitches. More aggression on pitches in the zone also reduces pitcher's counts, and ultimately strikeouts. He's come a long way from watching nearly 40% of pitches in the zone go on by in 2015. Increasing total contact on hittable pitches is swell, but the contact result is what matters in the end. Buxton's balls in play had encouraging results in 2019, establishing a career low in groundball rate (GB%) and a career high in flyball rate (FB%). Our new savior, Josh Donaldson previously said, "...they don't pay you for groundballs. They pay you for doubles, they pay you for homers." Well said, Josh. Buxton clearly took note of this philosophy, but how did he increase his flyball rate? Launch angle. Buxton's average launch angle of 19.5 degrees ranked 17th among all MLB players with a minimum of 250 plate appearances, and this also led the team that set the single season home run record. In addition to lifting the ball more often, he was also making stronger contact than ever before. Buxton set career highs in barrel rate, exit velocity, and hard hit percentage in 2019. He was also above the MLB averages in each of these metrics, becoming a below-the-radar Statcast darling. It was an absolute shame Buxton's season ended prematurely, but his trajectory is promising if he can stay on the field. Buxton's changes - reducing his strikeout rate, increasing aggressiveness within the zone, higher launch angle, and harder contact - resulted in a 111 wRC+ for 2019. The path to becoming an above average offensive player has been a long and winding road for Buxton, but he finally arrived after trending in the correct direction for years.

Max Kepler says his 2018 season was sidetracked when he got caught up in thinking about launch angle. “I’ll be honest,” the Twins outfielder confided this spring, “I bought into it a little bit -- the launch stuff -- and I wanted to see if it would work for me. I wouldn’t say that it didn’t [work] but it certainly opened my eyes to my strengths and what works for me.” The confession was strange considering Kepler had been an advocate of hitting down through the ball. As more hitters sang from the gospel of getting the ball in the air, heading into the 2017 season he went so far as saying he found the idea of elevating the ball to be “completely bogus” as he based his philosophy to advice from Barry Bonds, who told him to focus on hitting “hard ground balls” and “hit the ball through the pitcher’s forehead”. The growing trend was too strong for him to resist.By his own admission, Kepler’s ultimate goal was never to hit ground balls. He wanted a level swing. One, he said, that imparted backspin on the ball to help it carry. While batted balls can certainly travel with different variations of spin (back, top, side) more recent research has found that concepts like chopping or cutting a ball to create that spin is a fool’s errand. In fact, physics show that more spin can even suppress the distance, regardless of spin direction. The end goal, as Twins hitting coach James Rowson so eloquently put it in his instructional video, should be to hit the ball square. In 2018 Kepler would post the highest launch angle average of his career (15.2 degrees) but also learned the lesson that if you hit too many balls into the vast wasteland of the middle of the ballpark, many of those can be tracked down. Target Field was especially unforgiving for him when he wasn’t pulling the ball. “Last year I tried to work on my swing mechanically, and that’s the result I got, popping up a lot of balls,” Kepler said. “One of the lowest batting averages on balls in play, someone brought that up.” He hit .203 on fly balls well below the league’s .283 average on fly balls, so you can see how that can grind. You find the money part of the barrel only to watch another well-struck ball land in a welcoming center fielder’s glove. Kepler acknowledged it was frustrating but resigned himself to concentrate on the process, not the results. The thing the Minnesota Twins evaluators enjoyed about Kepler’s 2018 season was his ability to make consistent solid contact. He finished the year just behind Joe Mauer and Miguel Sano in terms of average exit velocity. They figured it wouldn’t take much to tweak that into improved production. The Twins worked with him on his bat path into the zone (trying not to be as steep into the swing zone), his posture including straightening up in his stance, and had him close his front side up a bit. Download attachment: Kepler Stance Difference.png All the moves have aided in his increased power production but one element has been more of a catalyst for the home run totals. Removing the wider front leg starting point helps keep from cutting himself off and frees him up to pull the ball more. Watch his front leg travel inward a longer distance in 2018: Download attachment: FSFrameGIFImage (6).GIF With momentum carrying toward home plate, this limited his ability to turn and open up on a pitch effectively. This is why he hit more of his hard hit balls to center instead of pulling them. You might also notice is occasional toe tap he implements in 2019 as well. With the shortened stance, this helps him stay back instead of aggressively attacking the pitch and pulling it foul. Even with a vow of returning to his previous methods and avoid getting caught in a launch angle-centric trap, Kepler entered 2019 hitting the ball in a very similar manner that he did the year before -- in the air. The difference was that rather than sending the balls with premium contact into the big part of the field, with adjusting his set-up, Kepler started to pull the ball: Download attachment: Max Kepler 95 Spray Chart.png After pulling all balls in play 48% of the time last year, he’s yanking 64% of balls in play this season. That shift in approach has led to more power and the added home runs has inflated in that average on fly balls to .342. Now, after hitting a career-best 28th home run of the season, Kepler has increased his home run percentage to 6.4 percent -- one of the top 15 home run rates in baseball. It must be far more satisfying watching those balls disappear over the fence instead of into an outfielder's glove. Click here to view the article

By now, you are probably sick of hearing the words “launch angle”. I assure you, you are not alone. On a recent spring training broadcast, Twins radio announcer Dan Gladden noted that more teams are “teaching launch angles” but the practice has been out for several years. However, you know if Gladden is talking about it then the concept has certainly gone mainstream. This is how baseball works: Several teams find an advantage in something different – be it infield shifts, outfield shifts, catchers with superior receiving skills, or having hitters focus on lifting the baseball – and, if that works, other teams quickly saturate that edge until it is simply the norm. Consider this, infield shifts are now commonplace across the board. This was once a practice that only a handful of forward-thinking teams would use sparingly. Eventually, even Ron Gardenhire started instituting the shift. Think about that. According to Fangraphs, in the 2008 season there were just 2,350 plate appearances where a traditional infield shift was used. This past season, the shift was used in 28,072 plate appearances. Everyone is getting shifted to some degree. If you show a tendency to hit a ground ball to a certain location, odds are a team will choke that space into nothingness. In 2017 hitters who put the ball on the ground had a batting average of .241. Meanwhile, hitters who put the ball in the air as a fly ball hit .251. Why is a higher launch angle so vital as well as such a wedge topic? In a recent Twin Cities Business article, Minnesota Twins’ Director of Analytics, Daniel Adler, put it succinctly. “The uppercut swing is like the three-point shot in the NBA,” he said. “When they go in, you get 50 percent more points. Fly-ball-based hits become home runs, which justify [a swing that gives up the opportunity for] ground-ball-based hits.” It is impossible to defend the long ball. More long balls is better. Ipso facto, it is beneficial to have your hitters hit more long balls. (And that’s even before you consider MLB has introduced a juiced ball to the game.) In short, there’s so much more value to be had by putting the ball in the air versus putting it on the ground – even with the added risk of striking out. Teams are beginning to understand that. At the same time, baseball purists may argue that they don’t care to see contact sacrificed in the name of offense. Some would prefer to see a well-placed grounder through the right side of the infield to move a runner up a base. While this may hinder some fans viewing experience, the game is clearly trending that direction. Given that more teams have observed this value and have more players, like Justin Turner and Josh Donaldson touting its merits to teammates, it’s no surprise to see the concepts are catching on with others. Turner’s teammate catcher Yasmani Grandal spent the offseason trying to gain more lift. "If I just took 50 ground balls out of the equation, that could give me the opportunity to be great in this game," he told the LA Times. Grandal has already shown some power so why would he risk more strikeouts for more fly balls? “[Y]ou still come to the conclusion that you're still not the best in the game," he said, "so why not try to make a change to hopefully be the best?” Grandal is not alone. The Braves’ Christian Colon has been working on it. Mets center field Juan Lagares spent the offseason working on increasing his launch angle. The entire Nationals team is jumping on board. On the other end of the spectrum you have guys like Cleveland’s Jason Kipnis and the Twins’ Max Kepler. Kipnis recently hit a ton of home runs in a spring game and was asked if he changed anything. "If you ever hear me say the words, 'launch angle' or anything like that, I'm lying right to your face," Kipnis told reporters. "That's not anything I've ever worked on or cared about. I work on hitting the ball hard where it's pitched and staying balanced and on time.” Kepler echoed Kipnis’s thoughts. “For me it’s not about launch angle,” Kepler said. “It’s about getting my bat head in the zone as early as possible. I used to enter straight down. Now I’m just trying to enter more on a level path, but I’ve still got my hands going a similar route.” While they don’t have to care about launch angle, launch angle is happening whether they care or not. Launch angle is like velocity, it’s always happening (unless, of course, you swing and miss). Then there is the confused Justin Upton. In a recent interview with Fangraphs, Upton said “I don’t try to hit the ball in the air. To be brutally honest with you, I’ve never in my career tried to hit the ball in the air. I’ve always tried to hit line drives, and if you just miss a line drive it becomes a deep fly ball.” This is where the misunderstanding comes in. Most people hear about increasing launch angles and fly ball revolution and assume it means taking a home run derby g-hack. Getting the ball in the air is not just about deep fly balls. It’s about keeping it off the ground. Line drives, by the way, are hit in the air. Don’t you want to hit more line drives? Despite his argument to the contrary, Justin Upton is very much trying to hit the ball in the air. Here’s the dirty secret: You don’t necessarily have to have an uppercut swing in order to increase your launch angle. Yes, long flies equal power but long line drives are just as potent. Getting the ball in the air is about the point of contact, both on the ball and where in relation to the plate. For Turner, who was trying to hit few ground balls, he was focused on where he was hitting the ball. “If you hit down on the ball and hit the top of the ball, you’re still hitting a ground ball. If you hit the center of the ball, the margin of error is so tiny to create backspin, you have to really, really good to do that. That’s where this new swing plane comes in. This loftier swing plane makes it a lot easier to hit the bottom of the ball,” Turner said. The second part is about being able to add lift is where the contact in relationship to the plate. Turner said he was trying to attack the ball – catching it out front, in the parlance -- rather than letting it travel deep. When you let it travel too much, the contact point often results in ground balls. Over the last two years, Joe Mauer has had a 4.3 degree launch angle – one of the lowest in the game. Part of that is due to his approach of letting the ball travel in the zone before making late contact. For Mauer, that is by design. He’s trying to shoot the ball the other way or up the middle. He rarely pulls the ball because of this. https://twitter.com/ParkerHageman/status/968666007580573696 Twins’ Derek Falvey recently discussed hitting with the Star Tribune and he brought up a key aspect about training – the notion of internal versus external cueing. External cueing is the practice of telling a hitter to swing with an uppercut to hit the ball in the air more versus internal cueing which sets up various practice methods in order to a hitter to incorporate those methods on their own. For instance, what the Rays recently did by placing screens across the infield is a form of internal cueing. Hitters will have to adjust their swing to achieve the desired results of adding lift. A person has a better chance of success if you provide them with activities that will force the person to accomplish the intended goal – just like how Kris Bryant’s father had him aim for targets up on the top of the batting cage in order to create an uppercut swing path. These practices lead to more balls in the air and thus a higher launch angle. An uppercut swing will certainly led to more bottom ball contact but it isn’t a prerequisite. Hitters can be trained without even knowing they are training. Bottom line: Hit it in the air.