Expected

This is a screenshot of Andrew Benintendi's Baseball Savant profile. Many of the statistics in these percentile rankings are self-explanatory, and some are more ...

If a player walks or strikes out 34% of the time, but the expected walk and expected strikeout rates add up to 31%, how do you account for the change in plate appearances?). On the other hand, a player that hits for power but has more of an opposite-field approach might be more likely to underperform compared to his xwOBA because his best contact is occurring toward areas of the field where it is hardest to collect extra-base hits. This might be more of an ambitious request, but one thing that has always bothered me about xwOBA is the chasm between batted ball events and plate appearances that result in a walk, strikeout, or hit by pitch. Anderson, who hit toward the opposite field 30% of the time in 2022 (against a 25% league average), is one of the few hitters in baseball who is talented enough to still try to hit the ball through defensive gaps on a regular basis despite the league-wide increases in pitch velocity and movement. Spray angle is the “other” angle of a batted ball that is explored in the mainstream, but not as precisely as launch angle. The main distinction is that spray angle allows us to look past the three classifications from the prior sentence in favor of a more specific figure. While launch angle refers to the y-axis of a batted ball, spray angle pertains to the x-axis. The first, and perhaps easiest, is that the wOBA and xwOBA formulas change both due to constants (which can reflect league-wide trends) and, from a Statcast perspective, the constant influx of new data. Occasionally cited in jest due to the “-BACON” aspect of the name, it is actually somewhat useful and not very difficult to understand, given a baseline understanding of Statcast metrics. However, based on the high exit velocity and probability of a hit (including a 3.837 xSLG, which essentially means that it was extremely likely to be a home run), the batted ball had a 1.930 xwOBA. For me, it is easiest to think of wOBA as a stat that is similar to wRC+, which is another popular statistic that measures all-around production on offense. If a player has a .285 batting average and .288 xBA, it would be foolish to act as if the player has been very unlucky.