What is Launch Angle?
- it is the vertical angle at which a ball leave the bat of a player after being struck.
How is Launch Angle Measured?
- calculated by dividing the sum of all Launch Angles by all Batted Ball Events.
There are Launch Angle with four different types of contact and they include:
- Ground ball: Less than 10 degrees
- Line drive: 10-25 degrees
- Fly ball: 25-50 degrees
- Pop up: Greater than 50 degrees
More sabermetric articles in the Baseball Spotlight Library.
One thing about launch angle is that is measure a pitcher better than a hitter. It describes what kind of pitcher is on the hill. A ground ball pitcher or a fly ball guy. Launch angle is expected to answer that question. It is accepted that ground ball pitchers tend to be more successful because they avoid allowing the home run and many types of extra base hits.
It does have some importance for hitters, too. A hitter with a high launch angle is a fly ball hitter and is likely to smack more home runs and/or extra base hits. On average, fly-ball hitters generally drive in more runs than ground-ball hitters.
About the author– Tom Knuppel has been writing about baseball and sports for a few decades. As an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan he began with the blog CardinalsGM. Tom is a member of the United Cardinals Bloggers and the Baseball Bloggers Alliance. He also maintains the History of Cardinals website. More recently he has been busy at KnupSolutions and the primary writer of many sports at KnupSports and adds content at Sports 2.0. Tom is a retired High School English and Speech teacher and has completed over one hundred sportsbook reviews. He also can be followed on Twitter at tknup.
Feel free to contact Tom at [email protected]