This week began with a banner day for baseball nerdery (this writer included) when MLB’s website Baseball Savant released metrics on bat speed and other new hitting metrics.
Now, instead of wondering if a veteran player’s bat is slowing, we can look at the numbers and find out for sure.
Sources with both the Yankees and Mets said that, while they hadn’t yet had time to dig fully into the new data dump, they doubted that the information would be significantly more advanced than what they already have on a proprietary basis.
Mets star Franciso Lindor, a member of the Major League Baseball Players Association’s Executive Subcommittee, framed the news in economic terms.
“I saw the top five on Instagram,” said Lindor, whose 71.8mph bat speed ranks sixth on the Mets this season, behind Pete Alonso, Starling Marte, Brett Baty and Brandon Nimmo. “I have never paid attention to it, so I don’t know how it can translate.
“I’m sure now that it’s a new stat, all the hitting gurus are going to be all over it. I think it’s going to be a new moneymaker for hitting gurus, and I think it’s going to be a way for some players maybe losing money because front offices might use it.
“Or some players might make money off it. I just think it’s going to be a moneymaker and a money loser. We’ll see how it goes.”
Lindor’s point was well taken: Organizations have long used advanced metrics to suppress player salaries during their arbitration years, and now might have another tool to do that.
I asked Alonso (75 mph) if knowing his bat speed was useful to his work as a hitter.
“No,” Alonso said. “Absolutely not. The biggest thing that matters is sweet spot accuracy. I think the barrel metric — they’re trying, but I think that there are some ones that don’t fall in that category that fall into sweet spot accuracy. Hard-hit rate is a good indicator. With barrel percentage, I think they’re trying to get there.
“Honestly, swing speed is great for guys who are making mechanical adjustments, I think that’s really important. But ultimately I think sweet spot accuracy — how you get from starting your load, being on time and meeting the baseball in the hitting zone, that’s the most important part.”
Does bat speed correlate to that?
“It could, but it also could not,” Alonso said. “It could correlate to it, where if guys have a tendency to be later, then working on swing speed in certain ways can help. But at the same time, if you have a very fast swing then you could be in and out of the zone too quick. That’s why finding a timing and keeping a timing is such an art form.
So you could have a quick bat, but if your timing is off, then your whole swing is off?
“Right,” Alonso said.
For several years, teams including the Yankees and Mets have long used a tool in the minor leagues called Blast Motion Bat Sensors, which attach to the head of the bat and measure bat speed and other skills. Alonso did not like them because they affected his feel for the bat, but plenty of player development officials see them as valuable teaching tools.
The new stats on Baseball Savant are derived from the Hawk-Eye Cameras that hang in every ballpark.
As one player development executive explained, “Bat speed is calculated differently by Hawk-Eye and Blast. Blast makes assumptions about the object in space, whereas Hawk-Eye actually tracks the velocity of the object with cameras.”
The past two decades have brought game-changing technology, revolutionizing our understanding of what happens on a baseball field. In the late 2000s, teams began mining PITCHf/x data to innovate everything from pitch velocity to catcher framing (which Yankees officials Billy Eppler and Michael Fishman essentially invented in 2009).
The 2015 season kicked off the Statcast era, in which everything from spin rate to outfield routes could be tracked and used for coaching and evaluations.
The Hawk-Eye cameras that produce these new hitting metrics came to every MLB ballpark in 2020, and the sport is still reckoning with their impact and utility.
