Introducing the HIM metric

Introduction

Rogelio was awesome and referred to a new metric in his recent Wenceel Perez article that has been in the works. This article is the first of a series and is the explanation of what it is, what it should measure, and a sneak peek at who has what in some of the Tigers minor league organization right now. Without further ado, let’s get into it!

What is it

It’s supposed to be a metric that helps combine how hard a player hits the ball with actual power production. It’s still in it’s infancy and could very well see some changes along the way. Similar to wRC+, 100 is going to be league average. The lowest you will see is 0 since you can’t really have a negative ISO or hard hit rate.

The clever name from Chris is the Hard hit rate ISO Metric, or, HIM.

And here’s the equation being used:
(ISO / league ISO) * (Hard Hit Rate / league Hard Hit Rate) * 100

I’ve got this setup so that it can encompass the season or you can break it down by batted ball type, and it all reads the same.

Though I want to note, like with any sort of metric, this is still somewhat a work in progress. There could be changes along the way to adjust this rankings.

What is it supposed to tell you

It’s meant to show you how above or below average a player is at not only hitting the ball hard, but how productive they are when compared to the rest of the league. This inspiration came from Spencer Torkelson early in the year. So many conversations of how he’s hitting the ball hard, yet we were seeing no results. This should help to show that in one spot.

There is some testing that still needs to be done to see how it’s correlating through the farm system from level to level. As with anything, the larger sample size, the more accurate the results are going to be.

If a player has a 0, it means either their ISO or hard hit rate (sometimes it could be both) is at 0. This was done by design because they usually go hand-in-hand. It’s not very often we see someone with any sort of ISO who isn’t also hitting the ball hard. It’s also not very often we see a player hitting the ball hard and not getting rewarded.

How do Detroit Tigers guys look?

This is the real fun part, right? Right now we have the metric calculated out for Toledo and Lakeland via the data we have been able to gather from baseball savant. So let’s take a look!
Note: this is through games played on 8/28

First let’s look at Toledo:

And next Lakeland:

Some things stand out to me right away.

• Lots of examples in here why I mention sample size. Riley Greene in Toledo is a prime example.
• Every player is below average in at least category… except for Parker Meadows.
• Max Anderson is confusing. Overall, he seems to be really good. Individually he’s… not. But this is because he excels in either ISO or hard hit rate for each and is below the average for the other in all three categories. Overall, he’s above average for both. He is 1.2% higher for groundball hard hit rate, which is nearly 50% of his batted ball type. That’s going to help him out a bit in his overall score. This can be applied to several players listed here as well. And it is also why it’s broken down this way.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you enjoy this! I have never done anything like this. As changes and updates are made, there will certainly be more posts on it explaining those changes and why it was decided to go that way. There will also be a big league’s version of it as well. Some of those numbers are interesting! And if you have any questions, comments, criticisms, you can find me at OPSenheimer on basically all social media platforms at this point. Feel free to ask away!