Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees; CC’ under license 2.0
This year, Statcast released publicly available bat tracking data for the first time. It’s been a lot of fun to play with, and some interesting research and insights are already being published in the public domain. If you want to check out the bat tracking data in full for yourself, you can follow the link here which will take you to Baseball Savant and the leaderboards they publish. For the purposes of this article, I will explain some of the metrics that are available, as well as analyze which of these metrics are most important. Along with this, I’ll look at which players do the important things really well.
If you’d like a more in-depth explanation of what’s currently publicly available, it can all be found here this article By Mike Petriello on the league’s official website. For the basics, essentially, we can now see how hard a player is swinging the bat and how long the player’s swing was. A notable stat to keep in mind is that the league average swing speed is 72 mph. Why do we care how hard a player swings? Well, according to the laws of physics, all things being equal, and one bat moving faster than the other, the one moving faster will hit the ball harder and harder. We know that hitting the ball harder and farther is generally a good thing that produces positive results, so it makes sense why we would want to know this information. However, bat speed is not a measure of ultimate hitting. If that were the case, Cubs legend Javier Baez wouldn’t be 17th on the bat speed leaderboard with an average of 75.3 mph. The length of the swing is also important. If you can swing extremely hard, but the barrel takes a long time to get into the strike zone, you will struggle to recognize breaking balls and velocity, and your plate discipline as a whole will struggle. I hate that Jayvee catches so many bunts in this piece, but he has the longest swing in the league, which is why we see so many ridiculous swings from him at times. Now, sometimes external factors, such as simply having a large frame, can lead to longer swings. See the example of Aaron Judge who has the 5th longest swing. It’s a pretty good hitter who also has a longer swing. The league’s shortest swing is arguably the league’s best pure hitter, Luis Aares. There are different ways to be a good hitter in MLB, and swing length and bat speed don’t tell the whole story. Where you communicate matters. Hitting the ball into the barrel is important. The bat speed and swing length numbers give us a little more insight into why some guys might struggle and how some guys can improve.
The release of this data also came with some new statistics developed by Statcast. My personal favorite is Blast. Basically, blast is a hit that is square (in the sweet spot of the barrel) while the bat is moving at minimum bat speed. They rank bats based on sweet-sport average percentage, where they measure how close it is to being in the perfect sweet spot, and bat speed. Anything above an average of 82 is considered a blast. When analyzing the data, the stat creators found that in the first month of play, Blasts produced +32 run value/100, while non-blasts provided -6 run value/100. Hitting the ball on the barrel while swinging hard usually produces good results. I know it’s counterintuitive, but it’s still a very interesting statistic that can provide a lot of information about a hitter. The Brewers’ William Contreras currently leads the league in Blasts this year with 80. Aaron Judge, however, leads the league in Blasts per possession, hitting 28.2% of the Blast when he makes contact, which is very impressive. His teammates Juan Soto and Giancarlo Stanton, along with Contreras, closely follow him, hitting them at a 27.4% clip. In my mind, Blasts offer a lot of information about a hitter and are probably my favorite new stat that Statcast has introduced. If you’re more of a Pitching Ninja fan and prefer to watch hitters look silly, look no further than Swords’ stats, where Zach Neto leads the way with 18 on the year. It doesn’t really have predictive value, but it’s nice to know.
There seems to be a misconception or misunderstanding between some members of the older generation and the younger generation when it comes to hitting philosophy, and the new bat-tracking data hasn’t done much to ease this tension. Some members of the older generation despise the swing-and-miss and strikeout rates that dominate the league today and see the new bat-tracking data as encouraging players to swing harder and thus swing and miss more. You can point to a player like Luis Aares for some confirmation behind these thoughts, as he has the slowest swing speed and lowest pitch in the league. It’s easy to point to a pattern and find evidence to support it. However, if you take a more holistic view, you will see that these claims are more or less unfounded. There is no statistically significant correlation between bat speed and breath rate as the R squared when plotted on the graph is .231. This shows us that bat speed is not some bogeyman chasing us with more and more strikes. Bat speed is an important piece of the much larger hitting puzzle. Another interesting thing to note is that bat speed had a weak correlation with the percentage of swings that resulted in the ball being square or on the barrel. This shows, to me, that barrel accuracy and bat speed work almost independently of each other. There was also a very weak correlation between bat speed and run value, which makes sense since most swings don’t produce positive results over the course of the season. The strongest correlation I found was between bat speed and explosions on swings, which made a connection that was one of the stats discussed earlier. This is quite intuitive, but may indicate that adding more speed is beneficial in terms of operating value generation and improved contact quality.
Overall, there are some great new metrics that Statcast has made available to the public to view. However, they must be considered and seen in the context of the bigger picture. There is no one right way to succeed in the big leagues, and today’s players are proof of that, and the new data has done nothing but back up that claim. If you’re a struggling player in need of development, should you be training bat speed in an effort to improve contact quality? Absolutely! But everything is not the end. These statistics are here to try to help provide a more complete picture. They were never meant to be foregrounded to cover the entire canvas.
