Some of you will be interested in this, and many won’t, I know…but I thought it was worth a few minutes of my time. Take a look at the charts here at the Fan Graphs blog. Some notes:
In the top ten of “best groundball batters,” I see Ryan Freel’s name among Ichiro Suzuki, Carl Crawford, and other names that shouldn’t surprise you. With Freel’s speed, that seems like exactly what he should be doing.
Among “worst groundball batters,” Adam Dunn was second only to Barry Bonds. Those two are followed by a bunch of crappy catchers and Adam Kennedy.
In the category of “best line-drive batters,” our old buddy Wily Mo Pena is third, and another old friend, Austin Kearns, is sixth. Brandon Phillips and Scott Hatteberg made the list of “worst line-drive batters.”
You can go over there to check out the methodology; it’s based on 2006 stats. It’s all pretty meaningless, and I’m not sure you can draw any conclusions from the data. If you’re like me, though, it’s fun to look at the numbers.