Just over a year ago, the winemakers created the best baseball history: weird baseball history. On May 31, 2024, they hosted the White Sox in Milwaukee to shell them 12-5. That part is not surprising. It’s hard to imagine a weirder game than the White Sox losing baseball game in 2024 (unless the Rockies lost baseball game in 2025). The weird part is how the brewers beat the White Sox. They hit 23 hits, 16 of which hit the ground ball. This is the best ground ball base hit rate recorded since the start of the sales tracking era in 2008. Do you want to see them? Of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZI74KBSDYM
That’s what the record looks like. The ground balls found various corners and gaps, making the 2024 White Sox defense so similar to the English muffin. We’ve been waiting for the anniversary of this game to write. According to Savant, since 2008, only another team has exceeded 12 ground balls in one game. On September 14, 2017, the White Sox played 15 games against the Tigers. That’s it. That was the only team that had a three-point shooting percentage in Milwaukee. First, let’s talk about how brewers can achieve this huge burning creativity.
As with any record, a little bit of luck is involved. The ball snatched crazy hops from the mound and the first base bag. The winemaker hits a perfect chopper and sends a ball to embrace the third baseline on the check swing. If any of these balls bounced in another way, they wouldn’t break the record. But as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design, and a lot of design is involved here.
For beginners, the 2024 Brewers offense aims to accumulate low release angle hits. They featured young speed guys like Brice Turang, Sal Frelick and Joey Ortiz, with the team leading a mile above average with a softball game of 19.7. Even the winemaker’s powerful batsman is not a powerful lift. We’ve been writing about Christian Yelich’s launch angle since he appeared in the big leagues, and the brewer let him do his own low-altitude effect to a large extent. Since 2021, 109 players have participated in at least 2,000 sets. Yelich has the lowest 3.3-degree emission angle. Receiver William Contreras has a 5.7-degree mark in third place.
In 2024, winemakers are good at machetes, and they are good at hitting the ball directly back into the middle. Their ground ball ratio is the fourth highest and the third lowest starting angle in the league. Although high walking rates and medium strikeout rates mean they are ranked 20th in the game, they still lead the league with 511 hits. Because they also like low-line drives, they also hit less than 201 feet in 715 base hits. In the game in question, Jelich led by four ground hits, including two doubles. Contreras and Turang were three behind him, and Blake Perkins split into two. All of this is saying that it makes sense that the brewer is the brewer who sets this particular record.
On the other side of the field, the White Sox Defense is designed to give up the basic hit. The -87 defensive runs they saved were the worst in baseball games in 2024, the 13th place since Sports Information Solutions began calculating statistics in 2002. Infield isn’t necessarily the main culprit throughout the season, ranking -12 in the game DRS ranking -12. But on the day when there was a problem, they sent out one of the worst defensive infields. The four infielders from Chicago that day took together the -11 dr in their respective positions, although none of them spent half a season at those positions.
May 31, 2024, White Sox Inside
One thing that doesn’t support ground balls is pitching. Almost the entire match submitted by Tim Hill was based on ground-induced , but he threw only one-third of the innings, during which he allowed two ground balls. (As you’ll see later, he got a goal and barely missed the hit.) Starter Erick Fedde and reliefist Michael Soroka both ran the ground ball in the middle in 2024. That’s enough in itself, but two of them are on high fastballs. Throughout the season, Brebia has a ground ball rate of 30%, ranking 462nd out of 474 pitchers with at least 30 innings to pitch! This is indeed an impossible sequence. Jared Shuster, ranked 412, allowed the last hit. It turns out that winemakers can turn any pitcher into a ground ball pitcher.
So, it’s an obvious question: On May 31 last year, the winemaker won the most ground balls in the stadium tracking era. But are they the most ground balls ever? The simple answer may be. The slightly simpler answer may not be. The answer is much easier than we are never sure. All of these answers are correct, but we can still do some investigation.
Sports Info Solutions has its own batting data that predates Statcast and Pitchf/X. Mark Simon, head of editorial content operations at SIS, was able to study 2004-2007, and he confirmed that during this period, there was no ball over 12 grounds in a game. We’ve added three more years of data, so we can now say the brewer’s record goes back to the past 22 seasons, accounting for 17.6% of modern baseball history. After that, we venture into guessing and probability.
Many historical factors are opposing Milwaukee’s chances of keeping a record. The further you go back, the more likely it is to look like a game like this. Since the Babe Ruth era, baseball has been trending towards more strikeouts, more power and higher launch angles. If you go back to 1910, then there were more balls, more and more of them, and when the shots were worse, it doesn’t sound like an impossible hit to get 16 ground balls.
Again, the ball used to be softer, the grass used to be longer, and overall, the attitude of the players is not as wonderful as it is today. All of this leads to slower ground balls, giving field players more time to attract them. Although the league-wide BABIP has been declining since the mid-1990s, it is still higher than at any time since the early 1940s. As Mike Petriello recently reminded us, the best way to hit the ground ball is to blast the ball through the infield like Judge Aaron. Maybe not That Now, putting the ball in the infield is harder than when you are back.
In the history of the pitch tracking era, 46.9% and 33.5% of singles were on the ground. Obviously, a game is a small sample size and anything can happen, but based on these percentages, the average team needs to get 30 singles or 48 hits to get 16 ground ball hits. In nine innings, no team almost reached the two totals. The Brewers played against the Blue Jays on August 28, 1992, setting a record for most singles with 26 in 9 innings. They also tied for 31 times with the 1901 New York Giants. The Internet contains three sets of highlights from the game, which combined together show the hit percentage of 13 teams. They are in the video below. Only 3 of these 13 hits are ground balls, which means that even if you want to connect to the 2024 brewer, 13 of the remaining 18 hits must be hit on the ground. This is impossible to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iibhnhtgfai
Remember that this is the hottest song recorded in nine innings and was played on fast turf, and we can still say with certainty that it doesn’t even get close to 16 ground balls. We can also say that it is certain that other recent games feature a large number of hits. On July 22, 2022, the Blue Jays tied for fifth with 29 hits against the Red Sox in a 28-5 victory. Only 9 of their 29 hits were on the ground. On June 24, 2023, Angels hit 28 against the Rockies, with 8 of them on the ground. Obviously, it takes more than just a team to need a lot of hit singles. In the stadium tracking era, a total of 24 teams hit 25 hits in one game, without a team that matched the winemakers.
The brewers only need 23 hits to get 16 ground balls, but as we’ve determined, they’re a special team designed to hit a lot of ground and beat them. They hit the ground goal 30 times in the game, a feat that has only 13 times since 2008. Presumably, this kind of team is more common in early versions of the game, so the best we can do is use the Stathead database to see how many games have 16 chances of ground balls on 16 ground balls.
Since 1901, 350 teams have hit at least 23 times in nine innings. Because we know no one matched the brewer since 2004, we could eliminate those vintages and reduce the 23 damaged game list to just 269. If we further reduce the list by asking for at least 14 hits, it is that the Brewers play the same against the White Sox because the extra shots are higher, because there are more base lines of Flay back of Flay of Shortive of Spiender of Spiender of Spiender of Spiender of Speer of Speer of Speer of Speer of Speer of Speer of Speer of Speer of 239, which is 239 of 239, which is your 239 count. It seems like it is conceivable that a team can do what a winemaker does. This is the closest way we get to the answer, but before we go, there is one more thing you need to see.
In fact, you need to see four more things. Look at these dramas, all of which take place in the May 31st game where the brewers might have historical significance.
Yes, all four ground balls are the width of the razor, because so is the basic hit. Three of them popped up a man’s glove before being picked up and turned into a man! This is the distance between brewers.
These four outs are easy to end, and this is the other four ground ball base hits, which will give the brewers four knockouts, which may give them a chance to get more ground ball base hits. We will never be sure that the record of the tone tracking era maintained by brewers is actually a record ever. But no matter what record they keep, they will surely win it.
