Vanderbilt baseball mailbag: How much scoring has been via home run?

Vanderbilt baseball has struggled of late, dealing with injuries to key pitchers, and a two-week long offensive slump.

The Commodores (35-16, 17-10 SEC) have lost back-to-back series, including a sweep by Florida that has put Vanderbilt's national seed hopes in question. The offense has scored fewer than five runs in seven straight SEC games, and fill-in starters have struggled as pitchers Carter Holton and Hunter Owen have dealt with injury concerns.

This weekend, the Commodores face Arkansas (38-13, 19-8) at Hawkins Field for a Thursday through Saturday series before the SEC Tournament begins next week.

The Tennessean answers reader questions about advanced metrics for Vanderbilt baseball:

WEEKEND RECAP Unpacking Vanderbilt's sweep by Florida as pitching injuries, offensive woes pile up

INJURY WOES Vanderbilt baseball scratches Hunter Owen for series finale, Florida announces

"Do you have any stats on (1) percentage of runs coming from HRs in SEC play, and (2) percentage of runs given up via HRs in SEC play?" -Auric Goldfinger

During SEC play, 33% of Vanderbilt's runs scored have come via home runs, and 46% of Vanderbilt's home runs allowed have come via home runs.

That stat doesn't necessarily mean anything on its own, though. It's more a measure of style. Two teams that allow the same number of runs, but one team allows almost all its runs via home runs and the other allows almost none of its runs that way, still allow the same number of runs.

Pitching-wise, Vanderbilt is tied for third in the league in runs allowed during SEC play, indicating a pitching strategy that has largely been successful. The Commodores are good at preventing hits, walks and hit batters, so it makes sense that it is hard to score on them unless the ball leaves the ballpark. Vanderbilt is seventh in the league in home runs allowed.

The Commodores tend to favor a pitching strategy that includes fastballs high in the strike zone and generating fly balls. This tends to lead to more strikeouts and fewer hits, but also more home runs. Seven Vanderbilt pitchers generate fly balls at least 45% of the time, and Devin Futrell and Sam Hliboki are over 50%. The Commodores' strategy is to be OK with giving up home runs so long as they are solo home runs, and the strategy has generally worked well for several years.

The offensive numbers also make sense, as the Commodores are not a big home-run hitting team, ranking 11th in league play in home runs. The way runs are scored matters less than whether or not runs are scored, but Vanderbilt's offense has struggled the past few weeks amid a lack of power production. Against the talent level of pitching in the league, home runs are often the easiest way to score.

"I wonder if our offense is worse when our pitching is worse." -Trey Harrell

It's hard to truly quantify this, but situational numbers can give some idea.

When scoring first, Vanderbilt is 18-4. The Commodores are 17-12 when not scoring first. But it's hard for any team to win when it gives up runs early, and a bigger issue here is that Vanderbilt has scored first in less than half its games.

In games where Vanderbilt has allowed eight or more runs, the Commodores have scored less than five runs four times and five or more runs five times. That doesn't indicate an extreme tendency for the offense to play worse when the pitching is worse, and in the times it does, the trend may actually be the other way around: if a team faces a large deficit early, it often will put worse pitchers in the game, leading the deficit to balloon even more.

"I saw this sweet MLB graphic on Facebook. I was wondering if you might create a similar chart for SEC baseball." -Ray Higgs

I won't create the full chart, but I can list which SEC baseball teams fall into which buckets. Because the SEC has just 14 teams, I'll use top five in OPS and ERA as the cutoff, looking at conference games only.

Top 5 in ERA and OPS (good pitching, good hitting):

Tennessee

Top 5 in ERA, bottom 5 in OPS (good pitching, bad hitting):

Alabama, Arkansas

Top 5 in OPS, bottom 5 in ERA (good hitting, bad pitching):

Texas A&M

Bottom 5 in ERA and OPS (bad pitching, bad hitting):

Ole Miss, Missouri

Here's the full table of numbers for each team:

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Vanderbilt baseball mailbag: Digging into stats on offensive struggles