Hey guys. Sorry for the long hiatus. There’s been a lot going on. Anyway, today we’re going to talk about contact rate for hitters. Contact rate is a very simply stat to calculate, but it is an enormously valuable tool. Its primary use is in evaluating a hitter’s batting average.

Contact rate, essentially, measures the percentage of balls that a hitter puts into play, or how often he doesn’t strike out. Logically, the more balls a hitter puts into play, the more have the opportunity to fall for a hit. If the ball isn’t put into play (i.e. if the hitter strikes out) it has zero chance of becoming a hit. Therefore, hitters who have high contact rates are better bets to have high batting averages. Here is the formula for contact rate:


Most sites don’t provide contact rate, but some do provide strikeout rate (K%). If you find a site that has this stat – FanGraphs, for example – you can simply use the following formula, which should be pretty easy to do in your head.

Contact Rate = 1 - Strikeout rate

Check out this table. It takes the aggregate stats for all hitters from 2004 to 2007, broken down by contact percentage, and the corresponding batting average.


That should give you a pretty good idea how important contact rate is when forecasting batting average. There are other components, which we’ll talk about in the coming weeks, but contact rate is a big one. Here is a list of the hitters from 2007 with at least a 90% contact rate and 200 at-bats, along with their corresponding batting averages.


Again, we see that the majority of hitters with good contact rates also have very good batting averages. As I said, there are other factors involved (one of which is luck, by the way), but the guys with excessively low batting averages are candidates for increases in 2008.

Let’s actually single these guys out. Here is a list of all hitters from 2007 with at least 300 at-bats, a contact rate above 85%, and a batting average lower than .280.


All of these guys are candidates for further analysis. The majority of them will see their batting averages rise in 2008.

In fact, from 2004 to 2007, there were 61 players who had at least 300 at-bats in Year 1 and Year 2, a contact rate above 85%, and a batting average lower than .280. Of those 61 players, 45 saw their batting averages rise the following year. That’s 74% –nearly three quarters – without taking any other factors into account! 22 of these players (36%) raised their averages by at least 20 points, and 5 more raised them by at least 18 points (44%). 18 players raised their averages by at least 10%.

One of the greatest things about contact rate that I’ve yet to mention is how stable it is. Some of the stats we’ll look at in the future fluctuate so much that it makes them difficult to predict. Contact rate isn’t like that.

Here are the results of a regressions analysis done on year-to-year contact rate using all hitters from 2004 to 2007 with at least 350 at-bats in both Year 1 and Year 2.

Correlation Coefficient: 0.85
R2: 0.73
Adjusted R2: 0.73
P-value: 1.2E-131
Level of Significance: 1%

Those are huge numbers! Unless a hitter dramatically changes his approach, his contact rate isn’t going to move much more than three or four percentage points from year-to-year.

Closing up, I think it’s pretty clear what a large impact contact rate has on batting average. When evaluating hitters, I would highly recommend taking it into consideration.