THIS ARTICLE IS WRITTEN BY TED SCHUSTER.
Which guys are good against lefties? Which batters struggle against soft tossers? Conversely, which arms struggle at home or dominate hitters with swing and miss tendencies? In what can be a maddening game of chasing numbers down a rabbit hole, it’s nice to have someone hold your hand and guide you through the maze, or better yet, morass of data that is available to break down player performance. No longer will you have to check three websites, and click on link after link to find the data you desire for each player to get individual data that you can use to your advantage. Into that void steps Ted Schuster. Ted spent hours, days, weeks even, mining the data to provide to you, our loyal followers, the data that you need to know in order to navigate the minefield that is the splits game.
In this four-part series, Ted Schuster will do all the heavy lifting for you breaking things down into: (1) AL Hitter Splits, (2) NL Hitter Splits, (3) AL Pitcher Splits and (4) NL Pitcher Splits.
We’ve provided Ted’s actual spreadsheets so that you can download the data and massage it any way that you would like to. Just click on the DOWNLOAD tab at the top of the page right under the picture to get started on your splits journey.
*NOTE: All the teams are broken down in each league. Simply click on the team abbreviation at the bottom of the spreadsheet to start your journey.
Here’s an example of what to expect.
This current article is a look into all the splits for every AL hitter that is expected to be on the opening day roster. We provided all the significant split differences for just about every situation. If it is not listed then there wasn’t a substantial enough difference to matter. You will see players that have major splits in their Home/Road, RHP vs. LHP, Groundball vs. Flyball pitchers, Ballparks, Day/Night, Power vs. Finesse Pitchers, 1st half / 2nd half and anything else we could find. You will find some players that lack much information due to the lack of major league experience. Please keep In mind that these are based on career numbers and we tried to avoid small sample sizes. There some great players that show remarkable consistency no matter the situation which you will see less line items for.
Most of the categories are self-explanatory but a few of them might need a litte more detail. Groundball pitchers are those that ranked in the top 1/3 of groundball rate while flyball pitchers are those that rank in the top 1/3 of flyball rates. In general hitters produce better numbers vs. flyball pitchers so that is why those with great numbers vs. groundball pitchers are notable. For power pitchers, it is for pitchers who rank in the top 1/3 of K:BB rate. For finesse pitchers, it is for pitchers who rank in bottom 1/3 of K:BB. You will see most players have respectable numbers versus finesse pitchers but the best ones will have a good numbers versus power pitchers as well.
