Grand Canyon Baseball

Hitting Methodology

How Lopes+ and its pillars are built · ← Back to the leaderboard

North star

Own the Zone. Do your damage.

Lopes+ is the single north-star grade. It stands on three pillars — Decisions, Damage, and Contact — and those pillars stand on holistic development. Damage carries the most weight on purpose: swing with intent and let the homers happen, earn your shots with elite defense, and treat contact as a skill you sharpen, not an identity you protect.

Do Your Damage
  • Swing with INTENT.
  • Let the homers happen.
Earn Your Shots
  • Do what the game calls for offensively.
  • No days off defensively.
  • Become an ELITE defender.
L+ OWN THE ZONE $mash. $trikes. In the Air. DECISIONS 15% OF LOPES+ Decisions+ Chase% · 65 Zone−Chase Sw% · 35 DAMAGE 60% OF LOPES+ CQ+ p90 EV · 50 LA 10–30° · 25 Avg EV · 15 HH LA · 10 CONTACT 25% OF LOPES+ Bat-to-Ball+ Contact% · 50 Zone Contact% · 35 Chase Contact% · 15 HOLISTIC DEVELOPMENT MINDSET PHYSICAL TECHNICAL TACTICAL
Contact Is a Skill
  • CONTACT is a skill for you.
  • NOT your identity.
One North Star
  • Lopes+ = 60% Damage + 25% Contact + 15% Decisions.
  • 100 is the comparison-group average.

The grades

What each number means

Lopes+ is the overall measure of a hitter’s current performance, combining Contact Quality+, Bat-to-Ball+, and Swing Decisions+. A score of 100 represents the comparison-group average; every component is a percentile against qualified Division I hitters.

Contact Quality+ (Damage pillar)p90 EV 50 · LA 10–30% 25 · Avg EV 15 · HH LA 10

Measures how much damage a hitter produces on contact: 90th-percentile exit velocity, share of batted balls launched in the 10–30° window, average exit velocity, and hard-hit launch angle (average launch angle on 95+ mph contact, capped at 21°, where added loft stops adding damage).

Bat-to-Ball+ (Contact pillar)Contact% 50 · Zone Contact% 35 · Chase Contact% 15

Measures the hitter’s ability to make contact, emphasizing contact on pitches inside the strike zone.

Swing Decisions+ (Decisions pillar)Chase% 65 · Zone−Chase Swing% 35

Measures strike-zone discipline by rewarding swings at strikes and avoiding chase swings outside the zone.

LopesForge+p90 EV 60 · HH LA 20 · Avg EV 15 · Chase% 3 · xSLGCon 2

A forward-looking model that projects future contact quality using the traits that stabilize earliest in a season — led by top-end exit velocity and hard-hit launch angle.

Opponent Stuff+Schedule difficulty

Measures the quality of pitching a hitter has faced, from a model that grades each contact opportunity by pitch velocity, movement, and location.

Stuff-Adjusted xSLGConDamage vs. difficulty

Adjusts expected slugging on contact for the difficulty of the opposing pitchers; Raw xSLGCon is the unadjusted result.

Validation

How the weights were chosen

Nothing here is hand-picked. Contact Quality+ component weights come from a non-negative least-squares fit of the four damage traits against same-season expected slugging on contact. The Lopes+ pillar split (60/25/15) was fit against actual run production (wOBA) across 3,400+ qualified Division I hitters, improving the correlation with run production from .59 under the old 45/30/25 split to .63. LopesForge+ was trained on 2025 hitter windows — each hitter’s first 70% of pitches predicting the final 30% — and validated on a fully unseen 2026 season, where it ranks future contact quality substantially better than either raw xSLGCon or the previous weighting and matches a gradient-boosted model’s ceiling while staying a transparent weighted blend.