Large home outfield swallowing up best Tigers hits

Last week, we here at the Statcast™ lab introduced a metric called “barrels,” which looks at a combination of exit velocity and launch angle to find the highest-value batted balls. You should read the entire introduction to it here, but the short version is that it’s the type of batted ball that has a minimum of a .500 batting average and a 1.500 slugging percentage. Put together, the average of all “barrels” are above .800 and nearly 3.000. It’s the best thing a hitter can possibly do, and it’s a skill to barrel a ball up; for example, Billy Hamilton, for all his other talents, has barreled just one ball all year.

We bring this up here because looking at these numbers have shown us two very interesting things. First, the Tigers are really, really good at doing this, which is spectacular. And two, they may be the unluckiest offensive team in the Major Leagues.

Let’s explain. The Tigers are second only to the Orioles in terms of barrels hit, and remember, we’re talking about the type of ball that falls for a hit more than 80 percent of the time, the kind of ball you want the offense to collect as often as possible. Individually, no one has done this more often than Miguel Cabrera, who’s done it 67 times. That’s a big part of why Detroit ranks so well here:

Most barrels hit in 2016 1. Orioles — 330 2. Tigers — 309MLB average — 237 29. Braves — 183 30. Reds — 182

As you can see, 30th-place Cincinnati has managed just 182 of them, barely more than half as often as first-place Baltimore. The numbers hold steady at the top if you prefer barrels per swing, too. We know that this is a new and unfamiliar stat, but it should be easy to understand that hitting the ball really hard at the right angle should lead to a lot of success, hence the gaudy average/slugging numbers, and that teams ought to want to do it as often as they can. It should be no surprise that the Orioles, who are leading the Majors in home runs by a lot, lead in this, too.

That out of the way, let’s now look at team production on those barrels, and something extremely interesting stands out. Though the Tigers have done this very good thing more than 28 other teams in the Majors, no team has found less success on them:

Batting average on barrels in 2016 1. Padres — .888 2. Brewers/Rockies — .886MLB average — .823 29. Angels — .768 30. Tigers — .761

That’s a huge difference — these are the type of hits that …

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