Garrett Jones HR’s. Lucky, Just Enough, Plenty, or No Doubt? HitTracker Provides Answers

Pirate fans, do you love when your favorite Pirate hits a homerun?  We sure do.  HitTrackerOnline does too.  There is NO DOUBT ABOUT IT.   HitTracker is a great site that loves the homerun ball.  I mean, really loves it.  I barely got this post online because it’s overwhemingly addicting.  Go ahead click over to it, hell, I can’t blame you.

Do you want to know how far Garrett Jones’ homeruns really went last year?  Are you curious how many were  ‘JUST ENOUGH or JE?’    How many  were ‘NO DOUBT?’   Those no doubt HR’s are the ones that cleared the fence by 20 vertical feet and landed at least 50 feet  past the fence.  

How many were ‘PLENTY?’  How many were LUCKY which is defined as it wouldn’t have been a HR if the ball was hit on a 70 degree calm day.  Sure you think you might remember, but until you understand the details, you are just guessing.   Let’s not guess.

A quick look at past league averages of homeruns hit shows 27% were JE, 55% were NO DOUBT and 18% were PLENTY.  Curious about how Garrett Jones homeruns compare?  We were. 

Jones hit 21 homers in 2009 earning HitTracker’s Golden Sledgehammer.  Here is how they broke down:

10 were JUST ENOUGH with two of those considered JE/LUCKY

6 were NO DOUBT

5 were PLENTY

GFJ’s 2009 page which details each HR along with some of these cool features such as a link to the video from MLB, the pitcher that gave up the gopher bowl, what inning it was hit (look close and see if you notice anything), true distance, speed off the bat, wind temperature and much more cool stuff. 

Jones has a very high average of JUST ENOUGH homeruns.   This could be bad as it explains on HitTracker….”Hitters who amassed a significantly larger than average percentage of JE homers may have benefited from good fortune, and thus may be ripe for a regression towards the league average this season. ”

The link to the GFJ video of his HR at Citizen Bank Park that earned him what  HitTracker  calls…. the Owner of Citizens Bank Park.  Which means he hit the longest HR in 2009 at Citizens.  Yeh, that was a bomb.  Here is the link to the plot of the 457′ blast off Joe Blanton.    Heh, isn’t Citizen’s where Ryan Howard plays?   GFJ owns you. 

Andrew McCutchen had 12 homers.  Eight were PLENTY.  Three JUST ENOUGH and one JE/LUCKY. 

Ryan Doumit hit 10 homers.  Six of them were PLENTY, 2 NO DOUBT and 2 JUST ENOUGH.

Enjoy the site.  You will love it. [HitTrackerOnline.com] 

We are working on an interview with Greg Rybarczyk.  He’s the inventor of HitTracker.  He is a very smart man.  He’s also a black belt, so don’t be pissin him off. 

This article in Baseball Analystsis a must read that Greg put together.  Here is a tidbit, but be sure to click over and check it out. 

"Starting from last year’s total assigns an equal value to what may in reality be very different events. For example, Jeremy Hermida hit two radically dissimilar fly balls last year, each of which cleared the home run fence: first, a windblown 321 foot homer in San Francisco on Aug. 20th, and second, a 443 foot rocket in Miami on July 19th. In a game context, they count the same, but when we are trying to measure the likelihood of future home runs, we should acknowledge that the outcome of one of those fly balls (the short one) was entirely dependent on its ballpark and weather context, while for the other fly ball, the ballpark and weather were irrelevant to the outcome. The short fly ball could only have become a home run in a park with a very shallow RF fence like AT&T Park, and only with the help of a tail wind. The long one would have been a homer in every park major league baseball has ever been played in, in any wind short of a hurricane blowing towards home plate.Any system that cannot recognize the difference between two events such as these Hermida home runs cannot hope to consistently generate highly accurate predictions. I don’t mean this as a criticism of anyone who has created a projection system, don’t get me wrong. But I do believe that those systems have reached the limit of their capabilities, with average errors of around 60-70 points of OPS, and any further refinement of these models will probably just chase the statistical noise around in circles."

So how many will Jones and Cutch hit in 2010?  We are working on the interview, so we might find out what it looks like in Greg’s eyes.  Until then, we will be traveling.  We will do our best to get it posted, until then check out the Daryle Ward homer off Kip Wells that went into the Allegheny….  Hit Tracker   Enjoy Pirate fans.