Breaking down players hit type rates

First off, I would like to say that Jeff Sackmann of www.minorleaguesplits.com is awesome for what he has done over there.

So I was over on www.projectprospect.com earlier and someone brought up a brought up a question about Cameron Maybin of the Detroit Tigers, and his line drive and fly ball rates being quite low. It is always something I had brought up when attempting to compare prospects and defending Jay Bruce against him.

So I decided to take a look at some Reds prospects line drive/ ground ball/ fly ball/ pop up rates. My theory is, the more line drives you are hitting, the better chance you have to get hits, keep your slugging up, produce more power etc. I think line drive rates are a good thing to look at as far as future production.

Player	Ground Ball %	Line Drive %	Fly Ball %	Pop Up %
Jay Bruce	41.9	15.5	36.4	6.1
Joey Votto	39.8	17.7	39.5	3
Javon Moran	56	13.8	24.3	6
Drew Stubbs	54.2	16.2	24.6	5
Chris Valaika	36.8	27.6	32.2	3.2
Paul Janish	47.1	10.5	34.5	7.8
Justin Turner	47.3	21	26.8	4.7
Drew Anderson	41.3	16.1	35	7.4
Chris Dickerson	45.5	11.7	36.7	6
Cody Strait	41.6	14.4	29.3	14.7

The fact that Chris Valaika hit a line drive 27.6 % of the time he hit the ball in play was absolutely mind blowing. Yeah, he was a college player playing in rookie ball, but that is absolutely impressive. Cody Straits pop up % is also pretty out there. He nearly hit twice as many pop ups as anyone else on the list, but still had a strong line drive percentage. Anyways, I just thought it would be something interesting to look at for some of the guys in the system.

Tomorrow, or maybe even later today I think I will break down the same rates for some of our top pitching prospects, starters only.