Vectors of Victory

Looking Back at the Launch Metrics During the 2024 Dodgers-Padres Playoff Series
A Closeread project by Axel Kent

The Los Angeles Dodgers won their 8th World Series title on October 28th, defeating the New York Yankees 4 games to 1 in a Best-of-7 Series.

But the Dodgers’ manager called the San Diego Padres, their first playoff opponent, their toughest challenge.

“I felt, from my perspective, that was the World Series…
when we started the postseason, they were one through 26, the best team…”
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts on the On Base With Mookie Betts podcast

The Dodgers won the NLDS 3-2 in a Best-of-5 series. Aside from Game 2 and Game 4, all games were decided by 3 runs or fewer.

The Padres were held scoreless in the final two games.

To deeper analyze the series, let’s look at the quality of balls in play. This visualization is inspired by a project by Jim Albert.

  • Blue dots represent hits.
  • Orange dots represent all other ball in play events.
  • Large blue dots represent home runs.

Ground balls typically occur in this range, with low launch angles.

Pop-ups typically occur in this range, with high launch angles.

Line drives and fly balls fall somewhere in between.

Hovering over the plot allows readers to click hyperlinks that show videos of the plot’s observations, hosted on Baseball Savant. Users can click and drag their cursor to zoom in on an area of interest.

Try for yourself.

Given the close score margins in most of the games, looking at the window of where home runs fell may be insightful. Let’s zoom in on the area where home runs, and near-home runs occurred.

The 17 home runs hit in the series had launch angles ranging from 22 to 37 degrees and launch speeds from 94 to 112 mph. As seen in the plot, a ball falling in the home run window does not necessarily mean a home run occurred.

Shohei Ohtani, the 2024 National League Most Valuable Player and Dodgers’ designated hitter, hit 2 balls in the home run window.

His lone home run in the series took place in Game 1, which provided 3 runs in a 7-5 win.

Manny Machado, the Padres’ third baseman, hit 3 balls in the home run window.

Expanding the home run window to a launch angle of 41 degrees shows some near-miss home runs from Machado.

Two near-home runs came in Game 5, a 2-0 loss for the Padres. Both balls fell just short of clearing the wall for home runs, suggesting how subtle shifts in launch metrics can influence baseball history.

Shiny App

The Launch Plot for the 2024 Dodgers-Padres Playoff series is available in a Shiny app.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Jim Albert, for his visualizations created on his blog post titled “Zack Wheeler’s Pitching in the 2023 NLCS” encouraged me to do a deep dive on the 2024 Dodgers-Padres playoff series. Albert’s code used to generate that blog post’s visualizations is found here.

I would also like to acknowledge Robert Frey, for his YouTube tutorial titled “Combine Video with a Savant Dataset!” and code demonstrated how to retrieve videos for each observation. Frey’s code is available here.