What’s Your (Launch) Angle, and Exit Velocity?
Today statistics are becoming more and more important throughout the world. For baseball, stats have always been an important part of the sport. Whether it is using analytics for deciding who to bat when, or just the simple statistics on the back of a baseball card, statistics have always been, and will continue to be integral in the sport. The specific statistics of interest in this study are launch angle and exit velocity. These calculations are directly linked to the outcome of an at-bat. The goal of this research is to explore the importance of both variables to see what the best combination of launch angle and exit velocity are for a batter. In order to judge the success of an at-bat, another variable must be explored too. Although not included from the original data, slugging percentage is an easily calculable value which can tell a lot about the outcome of an at-bat. Slugging percentage is calculated as the following: Slug = (1B + (2B2) + (3B3) + (HR*4))/AB. A perfect slugging percentage is a 4.0, where a batter hits a home run for every at-bat. This value was calculated for each of the unique launch angles and exit velocities to help determine the best combination. On top of determining the optimal launch angle and exit velocity, the effectiveness of machine learning models on predicting the slugging percentage was completed. The models being explored are a linear regression, a decision tree regressor, and a neural network. With these models and comparisons, which method is the most effective at predicting the actual slugging percentage of an at-bat can be explored. In the end I come to a conclusion on the best launch angle and exit velocity and see which of the models has the best predictive power based on launch angle and exit velocity.