Yankees Slugger is the King of Bat Speed with MLB’s Latest Metric

Statcast unveiled an all-new bat-tracking leaderboard on Baseball Savant. It can measure hitter’s bat speed, swing length, fast-swing rate, squared-up rate, blasts, and swords. While there are new stats available on Statcast, the key metric is bat speed, which measures how fast the sweet spot of the bat is moving at the point of contact with the baseball. Bat speed is epsecially important for power.

“Bat speed afeects exit velocity,” physicist Alan Nathan said to Eno Sarris of The Atheltic. “For a squared-up impact at the sweet spot, each mph additional of bat speed increases exit velocity by about 1.2 mph. For a ball hit at the optimum launch angle of 25-30 degrees and around 100 mph, the corresponding increase in fly-ball distance is about six feet.”

Six feet is the difference betweent he warning track fly ball to a home run.

Statcast’s Newest Metric: Bat-Tracking

Of all the players who lead in average bat speed this season, among is a former National League MVP turned slugger for the New York Yankees, Giancarlo Stanton. Not only is Stanton baseball’s leader in average swing speed, but he’s the only hitter with an average swing speed over 80 mph at 80.6 mph. The MLB average swing speed is 72 mph and what’s considered a “fast swing” is 75-plus mph. 98 percent of Stanton’s competitive swings qualify as fast swings. In fact, not one hitter is even close to that percentile. Stanton has a bat speed of 80 mph or higher in 121 of his 199 competitive swings this season. It’s nearly double to Oneil Cruz, who is next with 66 swings at 80-mph.