I have written in the past about how certain batted ball types are more stable than another from one year to the next. For ease of use I will include the year to year correlations in a table below.
| Year to Year Correlations | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Years | DB | GB | LD | HD | FB | PU |
| 2015-2016 | .729 | .042 | .119 | .165 | .483 | .554 |
| 2015-2017 | .730 | .199 | .153 | .192 | .435 | .621 |
| 2016-2017 | .758 | .242 | .122 | .155 | .432 | .574 |
As you can see, Dribble balls are very consistent from one year to another. Pop ups are pretty solid, as are flyballs. The Groundball, Line Drive, and High Drive groups are not nearly as stable. Realistically, all three of these groups are very fungible, and batters may slide between each group pretty fluidly.
The purpose of these categories is not to predict what a batter may do in the future, but rather to describe what he has done in the past. If a batter is very successful due to a large number of High Drives, you should be very suspicious. You should generally expect to see random noise out of these three battle ball types, and analyze player changes over time from that perspective.
Below I have an attached spreadsheet showing the changes each player displayed between 2016 and 2017. Keep the above year to year correlations in mind when sifting through this data.