During the 2015 season, MLB.com used a program called "Statcast" that measured every hitter in the major leagues to determine what players made contact with the ball the most times in a way that they considered to be 'extremely likely' to become a hit.
To define that, we set the parameters as being "batted balls over 100 mph, with a launch angle of between 10 and 25 degrees," (where zero is defined as being right back at the pitcher). The Major League batting average on those types of balls is .595, which is to say, you really,really want to be hitting balls like that.
To a degree, the study ended up being flawed because power hitters who swing and miss often, but tend to make very hard contact when they do connect with the ball, ended up on the list. For players who have high contact rates, however, being on the list is a pretty good sign of how good of an individual hitter the player is.
Two Philadelphia Phillies' ended up being on the list. As mentioned above, player who tend to hit the ball hard but not make a ton of contact made the list, and Ryan Howard probably is the poster-boy for that. 13.9 percent of the balls Howard hit fell into the criteria, despite him batting just .229. Howard finished eighth on the list, while his then-rookie teammate Maikel Franco, who batted .280 with 14 home runs in 80 games, finished 12th with a 12.2 percent rate.
Someone like Franco, who hit .280 and theoretically will probably top that this season, being on this list is impressive because other players who aren't strictly sluggers that are on this list are Paul Goldschmidt, Mike Trout and Yoenis Cespedes. That puts the 23-year-old in pretty good company.
Tim Kelly (@TimKellySports) is the Managing Editor of Philliedelphia.com, focusing on news and features.
