The ground ball rate is falling – the batsman is not the only one to blame
We have been in the launch angle revolution for about 10 years, and the reasoning behind it has not changed much. The WOBA for ground balls this season is .228, while all other balls have .462. Hit the ball to the ground and you are Christian Vázquez. Knock it, and you are Judge Aaron. Players are working hard to cause damage in the air. They are optimizing their own bat paths to achieve an upward trajectory. They encountered the ball in front. They want to hit the bottom third of the ball. Knowing all of this, I doubt you would be surprised to find that 2025 is developing the lowest ground ball rate record since 2002, when Sports Information Solutions started tracking things like this for the first time. However, you might be surprised to learn the extremes of this transition.
So far, I’ve talked about all the reasons Butters tried to play the ball more into the air, but that’s only half the story. Five years ago, Ben Clemens wrote a great article trying to determine if a batsman or pitcher has a higher rate on the ground. After separating the batsman from the pitcher, he divided each group into quartiles based on their 2018 ground ball ratio, and then looked at the results as each group faced in 2019. He found that the effect was almost the same. When you move the batsman one like a limited time, the new paired ground ball speed increases by 5.2 percentage points on average. When the pairing rises in the quadrant in the pitcher pool, the ground ball rate rises by 4.8 percentage points. Knowing this, don’t blame the batsmen all for this. Is the pitcher responsible for the batsman’s reduction of the ground ball rate as the batsman does? Let’s update my 2023 league-wide pitch mix update.
The biggest change over the past decade is the increase in well-documented blast balls, while four aerial vehicles usurped the use of sinker pieces. However, these numbers have been more or less stable in recent years. Recently, though, we have seen cutting machines and speed pitch usage, so in the year of the cutter/splitter/kicking year, all business. The pitch of the speed drops and fades into the pitcher’s arm side and is usually thrown on the opposite batsman. They will only fall behind in the ability to produce ground balls. If this picture is all we have to continue, we may expect a better ground ball rate this season, thanks to an increase in crossover balls, not the other way around. But, of course, that’s not all we have to continue.
As we all know, pitchers don’t have to chase ground balls. They are more concerned about chasing and blowing, and these two goals sometimes conflict with each other. For example, pitch height has a practical effect on the type of hit. This is the average for four salesmen this year: those who became the ground crossed the plate at a height of 2.61 feet, line drive at 2.67, fly balls flying to 2.76, and pop-ups at 2.91. We only talk about the spread of four inches in total, but it depicts a very clear picture. Meanwhile, the Four Axes earned more reputation at the top of the area, so pitchers threw them higher and higher, meaning fewer ground balls. This is how all pitch heights change.
As expected, the four isolators have grown higher, but in the past decade, each pitch type has been higher in addition to speed pitch. There are logical reasons. The pitchers increasingly instructed to trust their stuff and let it tear it, aiming at the center of the strike zone and letting the movement take it to the edge. The rise of the sweeper and bullet sliders means that the average slider drops less than before. The high-sinking sinking flake is no longer just a mistake. Pitch height is definitely not the only reason for falling grounds, but each pitch type drops from 2021 to 2025.
Putting all of this together, our secret to the huge change in the composition of the overall batting. According to Sports Info Solutions, the A’s pitchers have ground ball rates so far this season, which is 36.8% of the things that have been tracking since 2002. This is the lowest ground ball rate recorded by SIS. The second place belongs to the Blue Jays in 2025, and the fourth and tenth places also belong to the 2025 team. Those are the four teams in the top ten this season. In terms of batting, the two teams this season, the Tigers and Cubs are in the top 10. According to baseball racers, this will be the fourth consecutive year, and the eighth year is ranked eighth in 10 years with a record ground ball rate. I’ve been saving it at the end, so take a look at this picture and be ready to make the best Sarah Langs impression.
Everything we cover so far is intuitive enough, but you get a huge drop when you put everything together. From 2015 to 2025, the league-wide ground ball rate dropped from 47% to 42.3%. In other words, 10% of all ground balls become air balls. Both batsmen and pitchers contributed to it in their own way, but it was a big shift, and as long as the current trends remained, the only mitigation factor was a slight increase in speed courts in recent years. The struggle between pitchers and batsmen is always evolving, and adjustments and counter-adjustments throughout the league are permeating. The batsman swayed the swing steeply, so the pitcher attacked them with a high fast ball, so the batsman began to swing where they expected the high electric ball to come in, so the pitcher began to throw a high water drop, and so on. The problem is that all these adjustments tend toward more air balls and fewer ground balls. We have to wait and see what the next adjustment brings, but for the moment, it looks like the ground ball rate will only continue to decline.
