For years, Statcast cameras (and before that, radar systems) have captured vast amounts of data about every play in every major league game. We know not only the speed of the pitch, but its release point in three dimensions, where it crosses the plate, and the spin given to the ball. When a batter makes contact, we know how fast the ball is traveling off the bat, as well as the angle and position at which it lands (or leaves) in play. But there’s one thing we haven’t seen publicly – until now. Baseball Savant has released bat tracking data to the public, and it’s a fun time analyzing hitters as a result.
The Statcast team was kind enough to give us an early look at things. So while you’re playing around with the new leaderboards and reading this excellent article by Mike Petriello that explains how this new data works, I wanted to give you some early observations of my own, to start a conversation and hopefully make you like. I am happy with this new wealth as I am.
First things first: You’ll love the double size. You can think of this as a mathematical way to describe Luis Arraez. For a given swing speed and a given pitch speed, there is a maximum exit speed possible. That’s what you get when you hit the ball in the sweet spot on the plane. If you’ve ever swung an iron bat, you know what this feels like. Statcast considers a ball square up if its actual exit velocity is 80% of the maximum assumed exit velocity. In other words, it measures whether you have caught the ball.
Arraez is the best in baseball at this point. He hits about 44% of the pitches he swings at. Not 44% of those he makes contact with – those he swings at, period. No weak tappers here, no bad balls or whiffs. To a degree that most players in baseball can only dream of, Arraez is an expert at finding the barrel of his bat in baseball.
Why, then, does the Arraez not have gaudy power numbers? Remember that average square measures how often players come close to their maximum power hitting speed based on their pitch speed (out of their control) and their swing speed. Their swing provides a lot of momentum here; the harder you swing, the more damage you can do if you think you are square to the top of the ball. And Arraez’s swing speed is last in baseball by a mile. His average swing is two miles per hour slower than runner-up Steven Kwan.
Those two words should suggest to you what’s going on here: Arraez and Kwan are swinging a little lower on average, and they’re also crossing the ball high more often. There is an obvious correlation here. These two are better able to adjust their swing to the barrel because they don’t leave their shoes. Both have top-tier line drive levels and bottom-tier power. Again, this is not an accident. It’s a plan.
I lied to you a little above, at least by not doing it. I said the square measure is a mathematical way of explaining Luis Arraez. Of course. However, it is not the most impressive observation. That would be this: Juan Soto is absolutely insane. Check out this plot of swing speed and square footage, courtesy of Savant:
Soto is third in doubles in the majors. The guys ahead of him are Arraez (214th out of 214 in swing speed) and Nolan Schanuel (209). Those guys do so much better than their swing speed because they get every ball with incredible frequency. Then there’s Soto, who hits the ball as high as Schanuel (or Mookie Betts, fifth in square footage) while boasting the 10th fastest swing speed in baseball.
That’s weird. Soto swings with the same power as Julio Rodríguez, Jorge Soler, or Willson Contreras. He gets his bat on the ball like the best line drive hitters in the game. Arraezian with his connections but Ruthian with his powers. Want to know why he’s batting .541, hitting the lowest rate of his career, and the hit line is driving more often than ever? It’s because he hits the ball in the nose while swinging more than anyone else. Soto has hit 40.3% of his swings this year. The next best mark among the top 25 hitters in average velocity is Shohei Ohtani, who has hit 29.6% of his swings.
That brings us to another metric now available: swing rate. That’s how a player usually swings at 75 mph or more. You can think of it, almost, as a hard-hitting level of change. To hit the ball harder, you have to swing harder. A full 66.2% of Soto’s swings are hard, while 11% of batters are hard. Giancarlo Stanton is the league leader here, at 98.4%. That is the mathematical meaning of the words “he is not deceived.” Stanton has the most raw power in the league, and he shows it on almost every swing. As David Adler noted, Stanton is the hardest hitter in baseball, and he leaves the entire field in the dust.
Yes, you can swing hard but don’t hit the ball too hard. You can miss it completely, lift it up, or go under it for a weak pop up. That brings us to the point of explosion. “Explosion” is a simple construction. If you swing hard and square the ball up (according to the above definitions of swinging hard and square up), that is a blast. If you miss one or both, that’s not a blast. End of story.
Soto doesn’t want to indeed he has the highest strikeout rate in baseball – second only to Wilson Contreras. If that doesn’t sound right to you – Soto swings more than Contreras and raises the ball more often – you’re not alone. But think of it this way: Sometimes Soto cuts his swing on a relative basis when he pursues clean contact. He calculated that he would like to swing less in some situations to increase the chances of hitting the ball. Yet when you look at it, these are spectacular numbers, for both Soto and Contreras.
The fun doesn’t stop there. Baseball Savant also reports swing length — the total distance traveled in three measurements between the start of the throw and contact — and swords, which they define as a whiff when the swing was incomplete and when your velocity is less than 10% of all throwers. . In fact, you can imagine – if the batsman is misled so badly that he ends up pointing his bat towards the jug, that is a sword.
You can find good news there. Arraez has a short baseball game, as you might guess. The longest? Javier Báez, who also follows. Zach Neto has the most swords in baseball this year; he swings hard, and when he is tricked, he usually tries to stop his swing and fails. On the other hand, Stanton doesn’t have a single sword. That is linked to his strong swing rate. Even when he gets cheated – and his 34.5% strikeout rate would indicate that he gets cheated a lot – he doesn’t stop swinging. You won’t have a sword if you cut completely, and everything comes out.
By using the toggles on these leaderboards, you can find interesting data about switch-hitters. Want to know who the “real left” pretends to be? Just measure the difference in swing speed. Elly De La Cruz, Cal Raleigh, Abraham Toro, and Josh Bell all swung at least two tighter lefties than righties. On the flip side, six players swing at least two more colds when hitting right. There’s Anthony Santander, Luis Rengifo, Blake Perkins, and Jeimer Candelario, all of whom look more like lefties, with swing speeds 2-3 mph faster off their front side.
Then there’s José Ramírez, who swings 4.5 mph as fast as a righty. It’s no accident that his average exit velocity is 89.6 mph with righties and 88.2 mph with lefties. But even he pales in comparison to Ketel Marte. Marte swings 6.3 mph fast when hitting from the right side. He is second only to Stanton in swing speed from that side of the plate – wow! His left-handed swing speed, meanwhile, is below average. His average exit velocity dropped from 90.8 mph to 88 mph when he crossed the plate.
In case you need a reminder that swing speed isn’t the all-encompassing metric, Ramírez and Marte are prime examples. Despite his bad swing speed, Ramírez has better career numbers when hitting left-handed. Marte, on the other hand, is much better as a good person. There is more to baseball than just swinging hard, and more than just making solid contact when swinging.
There is much more to be found on these pages. I’ve only scratched the surface so far, and we’ll continue to get more data, too. I’m curious to see how swing speed changes as players get older and if other hitters can change their profile by swinging more or aiming for harder contact. And I haven’t even begun to look at the pot side of things, which I think will be hard to wrap our heads around collectively; obviously, pitchers have much less to say about how hard hitters swing than hitters. But either way, it’s an exciting time to dig into baseball data, because a whole new avenue of inquiry has just opened up.
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