The Brewers Chopped Their Way to the Top

[Davy Andrews]

The Brewers offense did things differently from the rest of the league all season long, and they led the league in one surprising category.

Image courtesy of © Max Correa / The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK

So here’s how this started. I was on Joey Ortiz’s Statcast page, and I noticed this one particular dot. Have you ever noticed how many dots are on all those Statcast pages? There are so many dots! The sliders, the spray charts, the graphs; they’re all full of dots. If you ever find yourself wandering around your house searching in vain for a dot you lost, don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Statcast stole it. Anyway, here’s the dot that caught my eye. 

See that little dot right by home plate? Like, the one that’s almost directly on top of home plate. It’s an orange dot, which means it represents a single, so given its location I figured it must be either a bunt or a swinging bunt. Like anybody, I love to see a good bunt, intentional or otherwise, so I clicked on the dot. But I didn’t see a bunt. Here’s what I saw.

Not only was that ball not a bunt, it was a rocket. It came off Ortiz’s bat at 105.4 mph, and even though it landed approximately a foot and a half in front of his own left foot, it bounced so hard that it next touched the ground some 125 feet later and ended up all the way in left field. Ortiz may have been traded away from Baltimore, but he brought the chop with him. The ball had a launch angle of -19 degrees. As it turns out, Ortiz had 29 different base hits with a negative launch angle. That sounded to me like an awful lot, so I looked up the league leaders.

It turns out that 29 hits with a negative launch angle only puts Ortiz in a tie for 38^th place. But I noticed something else. William Contreras is in first place. Jackson Chourio is in seventh place. Brice Turang is in 11^th place, and Sal Frelick is in 18^th place. Now you may not know this, but all four of those guys in the top 20 play for the Milwaukee Beer Makers, I think they’re called. As it turns out, the Beer Brigade led all of baseball with 310 such base hits. No other team had as many as 280.

But that’s maybe too big a category. After all, a ball hit at a launch angle of -5 degrees isn’t exactly a chopper. That’s probably just a regular old ground ball. I decided to narrow down the parameters of this exercise through various searches. For example, if you look for base hits that made it to the outfield despite having a launch angle below -15 degrees, you’ll find that the Brewers led baseball with 29. If you search for base hits that were hard-hit and traveled fewer than 10 feet, you’ll find that the Brewers led baseball with 42. Pretty much whatever you search, the Brewers led baseball, because it turns out that this season, they were just really good at smashing the ball directly into the ground and ending up with a base hit.

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[Brock Beauchamp]

THIS ARTICLE IS SO GOOD

Brilliant work, Davy!

[Michael Trzinski]

From sabr.org:

Union Park, Baltimore

And that in no small part began with the hiring of a new head groundskeeper, Thomas Murphy. With 10 years of experience under his belt, Murphy no doubt knew what improvements were needed at Union Park. He assured Ned Hanlon he would have Union Park as “level as a billiard table” by the time the Orioles returned from spring training.

Although the improvements to the field noted by the press made for good copy, Murphy’s changes to the diamond resulted in a great offensive weapon for Ned Hanlon’s brand of “inside baseball.” The advantages afforded by Murphy’s work were detailed in Peter Morris’s Level Playing Fields. The infield soil was mixed with clay and water, and when rolled became as hard as concrete. Placed in front of home plate, it led to the invention of the “Baltimore Chop.” The players would “hit down on the ball so sharply that they could make it to first base before any infielder could make a play.”