The Cardinals used to be the premier team in the league when it came to pulling the ball in the air. That has changed in a big way this year.
In December I wrote a piece titled “Pulled Fly Balls: An Area for Growth”. Now I want to return to the same subject but this time I’ll be a little more direct. The Cardinals have a pulled fly ball problem. And it’s a big problem.
The Cardinals inability to consistently pull their fly balls is serving as a massive limiting factor on offense and is severely limiting the team’s ability to score runs. I’ll dive into plenty of numbers as we continue but that’s the point of this article and it’s important to start with that before we get more granular.
Last week I took a look at some of the numbers that define the Cardinals struggles and came away with the view that while the Cardinals offense has been bad, there is plenty of hope for positive regression, even if that regression is only to the middle of the pack.
One of the statistics I cited in that piece was xwOBA. And, as we know, while xwOBA considers exit velocity and launch angle, it doesn’t factor in launch direction. And, as we know, hitters with a tendency to pull their fly balls tend to overperform their xwOBAs and hitters with a tendency to heavily use the opposite field on balls in the air tend to underperform their xwOBAs. In fact, I wrote an article about that last year (I promise I’m done citing my old articles now).
But someone in the comments of my article last week pointed out the fact that the Cardinals rank near the bottom of the league in pulled fly ball rate (for the purpose of this article, I am defining pulled fly ball rate as pulled fly balls divided by total fly balls). At the time of the comment, the Cardinals ranked 29th. Now they rank 30th. Dead last. That’s not very good and it likely plays a role in the Cardinals significant xwOBA underperformance.
So, with that in mind, I want to do a deeper dive into the Cardinals pulled fly ball rate problem and identify some key players who personify this issue.
Let’s dive in.
The Cardinals are good at hitting the ball in the air…
Before I get into the pulled fly ball issue, I want to take a step back and get some context. Step one of pulling fly balls is hitting fly balls. You can’t pull a ball in the air if you don’t hit it in the air in the first place.
So just how good are the Cardinals at elevating the ball?
It turns out they’re quite good at it.
The Cardinals actually have the 8th lowest ground ball rate in baseball (41.6%), and that’s despite players like Lars Nootbaar and Jordan Walker regularly beating the ball into the ground. This is a team that does a great job of hitting the ball in the air and on the line.
That’s a good sign. But now we need to look into batted ball direction. Before that, though, I want to briefly mention why pulled fly balls are an important stat and why teams should be trying to pull the ball in the air.
It’s a simple principle. Pulled fly balls perform better than fly balls hit to center field or the opposite field. It’s not particularly close either. In 2023 pulled fly balls had a wRC+ of 395. Fly balls hit to center field (85) and fly balls hit to the opposite field lagged far behind (11).
Hitters find their power at the pull side. It’s a pretty universal principle. That doesn’t mean hitters shouldn’t use the opposite field at all; it just means that hitters should be trying to pull the ball in the air to maximize their power.
Fly balls hit to the non-pull side simply aren’t that productive.
So now that we’ve established that the Cardinals are good at putting the ball in the air and that pulled fly balls are extremely valuable, we can dive deeper into the Cardinals, and, more specifically, the Cardinals’ pulled fly ball problem.
…but not at pulling the ball in the air
I gave this away earlier but the Cardinals rank dead last in the league in terms of pulled fly ball rate this year. Not only that but at 18.6% the team is the only major league team below 20% and it’s 2 percentage points below the next worst team (NYY) and it’s over 11 percentage points worse than the best team in the league.
That’s clearly not great and it helps explain why the Cardinals have the second lowest wRC+ on fly balls of any team in the league. Sitting right at 70, the Cardinals are 46 points below the league average wRC+ on fly balls (116) and nearly 100 points below the league leader in fly ball wRC+.
This is clearly a problem. Should we expect some positive regression? Absolutely. But should we expect enough to make this offense to look like a juggernaut? Absolutely not.
Last year, the lowest team wRC+ on fly balls came from the Washington Nationals at 82 while only them and the Guardians finished the year below 100. Similarly in 2022, only 3 teams finished the year below 100 with the Guardians bringing up the rear at 82. In 2021 the Pirates had the lowest wRC+ on fly balls at 92. So my point here is that while the Cardinals absolutely aren’t helping themselves by not pulling their fly balls, we should expect them to be this unproductive on balls hit in the air this season.
So, assuming nothing changes, I would expect to see some positive regression from 70 to maybe somewhere in the 82-92 range. But you can see the problem. That’s not good enough. Something needs to change if this offense is going to be productive.
The unfortunate thing is that things have changed and not for the better.
The Cardinals used to be among the league leaders in pulled fly ball rate under their last hitting coach – Jeff Albert. Just take a look at how this stat has trended over the past 3 hitting coaches:
By the end of Jeff Albert’s tenure as hitting coach he had turned the Cardinals into a pulled fly ball hitting machine. Since then, though, there has been a steep decline. More of a precipitous dropoff, actually.
And it’s this drop off that is really limiting the Cardinals ability to do damage. Extra base hits tend to come on balls hit in the air and home runs come exclusively on balls hit in the air. But if the Cardinals can’t pull the ball in the air then they’re limiting their ability to slug the ball. And an offense that can’t slug is an offense that struggles to score runs. The Cardinals have shown us that this year.
Some notable players pulling the ball less
Let’s start with a general principle here. Is a Cardinals hitter struggling this year? If yes, then he’s probably pulling the ball in the air less. Take Nolan Arenado for example. Or how about Paul Goldschmidt? Maybe Alec Burleson, Jordan Walker, and Nolan Gorman too?
The answer is all of the above.
The real problem with this table is that 4 of the 5 biggest individual drops in puled fly ball rate have come from players who were expected to be key contributors to this Cardinals lineup – Nolan Gorman, Jordan Walker, Paul Goldschmidt, and Nolan Arenado.
When 4 of the team’s biggest power hitters stop pulling the ball in the air with the same kind of frequency all at the same time, there is likely going to be a downturn in power production. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen.
For Nolan Arenado specifically this is a concerning trend. The slugger simply isn’t great at a lot of things when it comes to hitting but he’s always been one of the best at pulling the ball in the air; it’s what has made him such a great hitter.
But this is where his production comes from. He doesn’t hit the ball excessively hard and he doesn’t make great swing decisions but he does make a lot of contact and typically does a great job of turning that contact into extra base hits with his propensity to pull the ball in the air. If that stops, then Arenado simply isn’t the same hitter.
For Paul Goldschmidt there are a number of issues keeping him from being a productive hitter. One such issue is an inability to collect extra base hits and his 15.4% pulled fly ball rate, which would be the second lowest of his career, is certainly playing a role in that.
For Jordan Walker, the problem is twofold. The first problem is that he has really struggled to hit the ball in the air as exactly half of his batted balls have remained on the ground but, when he does hit the ball in the air, he rarely hits it to the pull side.
That’s how someone with Jordan Walker’s power (91.7 mph avg EV) puts up a .103 ISO and ends up back in Triple-A. Hopefully he can figure things out in Memphis and get back to mashing.
Nolan Gorman is having similar issues to Jordan Walker, just not at the same scale. Gorman is still clearly a fly ball hitter but his ground ball rate has risen 9 percentage points and his pulled fly ball rate has dropped 16 percentage points at the same time. As a result, his ISO has dropped from .241 last year to just .155 this season.
These 4 hitters will need to get back to slugging if the Cardinals offense is going to become the force that we were expecting it to be and a large part of that will come down to whether or not they can start pulling the ball in the air again.
Final Thoughts
I just spent about 1700 words digging into one of the main problems impacting the Cardinals lack of production at the plate but I want to be clear that this isn’t the only problem.
The Cardinals could probably use some swing decision improvements and they are also inexplicably terrible against pitches thrown middle-middle (.245 wOBA). Mix in some poor batted ball luck too and it’s clear that there isn’t just one issue affecting the offense.
So my point here is that there isn’t just one thing the Cardinals need to fix. I focused on pulled fly balls today because it’s a clear weakness of the team and it’s an area that used to be a clear strength. That tells me that the team can improve. Hopefully they will.
Thanks for reading.