Loft the Ball, Yonder

Yonder Alonso takes his place as another positive data point as hitters experiment with lofting the ball.

As Travis Sawchik has noted in roughly half of the posts he’s written since joining FanGraphs, a lot of people are talking about the positive impacts of elevating the ball this year, so Alonso isn’t the only one who said he was trying to get more fly balls this spring. However, it’s always helpful when a player notes that he’s trying to do something before he actually does it, and no one has succeeded in changing their batted ball profile more than Alonso this year.

The article is well worth the read.

It’s also interesting that Alonso is doing this with the Athletics. One of the points of Moneyball when it came to OBP was that you couldn’t really teach selectivity once a player reached the majors. Teams needed to drill that in at a young age. I wonder, however, if a batter can change his swing if he can also improve his pitch selection.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2pVvNGF