So, was curious if Heyward's launch angle had normalized or if it was still up which lead me to dig into his statcast data again. Interestingly they've added some handy stuff on baseball savant which is a lot nicer than it used to be. Anyways here's the interesting tidbits. Heyward's 2018 "barreled" rate is 5.7. 2017 was 4.1. 2016 was 2.7. 2015 was 2.8. His exit velo for those years goes 88.8, 86.4, 86.6 and 89.3 respectively. His launch angle is 17.1, 10.9, 10.6, and 4.7. Statcast has a different way of viewing hard hit than fangraphs. They have his hard hit at 45.7, 30.9, 30.9, 36.3.
I realize without some context that data is kinda gibberish. So, to give you some sort of idea here, Rizzo's exit velo average of the past 4 years is 88.5. His launch angle is 16.4. His hard hit is 38.3 and barreled rate is 8.6. My takeaway is there's a lot of improvement there but this seems to agree with my previous comments that Heyward is not squaring pitches up yet. Interestingly they also have a different batted ball data set than fangraphs which shows how he's hitting balls. In the past he was hitting the top of the ball too much(41.5 career rate) and not so much under the ball too much(21.1). That's flipped with his elevated launch angle to 27.1 and 32.9 respectively. Again to give that context, Rizzo's career rates the past 4 years are 26.9 and 28.9 respectively. Heyward's 2018 solid% and barreled add up to 12.8%. Rizzo's last 4 years is 14.7%.
Long story short, while I feel like I'm a broken record a bit saying this 2018 Heyward isn't that far off being pretty good. If he squares up a few more of those under hit balls he's close to rizzo territory. And in particular, that launch angle is basically right at the bottom of the band you want to be in.
