Thursday, April 2, 2009

Oriole Power 2008 - A Retrospective

Just finishing up a few fillers while waiting for Opening Day...

I never followed up on this mid-year post that examined Baltimore sluggers using data from HitTrackerOnline.com....so here it is.

Home run leaders for 2008:


HR
Huff 32
Mora 23
Scott 23
Markakis 20
Millar 20




Now, who hit the longest shots of 2008?

Top home runs by Standard Distance:


Distance Date
Scott 450 5/20/08
Scott 437 9/8/08
Jones 435 9/1/08
Markakis 434 8/30/08
Huff 429 8/24/08




Look at Adam Jones in there with the big boys. He's got a lot of potential to hit 20+ very soon.

Who hit the longest home runs on average? Give them the Golden Sledgehammer!

Golden Sledgerhammer

Avg. Distance
Scott 401.6
Huff 394.6
Mora 390.5
Markakis 388.9
Millar 372.5




Now for three classifications of home runs: No Doubts, Just Enoughs and Lucky. The names are pretty self-explanatory but if you want to see how Hit Tracker determines this, look here.

No Doubts

HR
Scott 11
Huff 7
Markakis 3
Mora 2
Millar 2





Raw power. Look at Luke Scott! Nearly 50% of his homers were never in question. See Nick Markakis? Make a note of that while we look at the next category.

Just Enoughs

HR
Huff 11
Mora 10
Millar 9
Markakis 9
R. Hernandez 8




Nearly half of Markakis' homers were just making it over the fence. Why? He's a line drive hitter, not a classic power hitter. That's why I don't think Nick will ever hit 30 homers regularly; he's just not that type of hitter even though he might have the power to do so. I don't think that's a bad thing either.

Lucky Homers

HR
Markakis 5
Millar 4
R. Hernandez 4
Huff 4
Mora 2




And just for kicks, let's take a look at the Isolated Power leaders.

ISO

ISO
Huff .247
Scott .215
Mora .199
Markakis .185
Millar .160




Mora's ISO is startling, we haven't seen power out of Mora like this in years. From FanGraphs.com, Melmo's ISO compared to league average from the past few years.




Mora's power was up in the 2004-2005 range again. Can he maintain it for one last season?



1 comment:

Femin said...

Mora is so superb