Raw Power

Thursday, May 03 2012

I was checking out some of the new data released by MLB, hit f/x, which tracks the ball after it makes contact with the bat. I'm not going to be able to attend their conference in San Francisco, and I don't know how to do all the perl coding that downloads the games and parses the xml into databases, but on this thread at Inside the Book, Harry Pavlidis was kind enough to post the data in CSV format.

Anyway, I was looking at average speed off bat as an estimate of raw power, but that isn't clean enough. If a player has a low average speed off bat, it could be because he is swinging weakly, but it could also be that he is not making solid contact, making too many popups or weak grounders and not enough solid line drives.

It appears that the optimal angle of the ball off the bat for real solid contact is about 11 degrees, this represents a slight uppercut that will get you some extra bases. So for raw power, I looked at average speed off bat when the angle is...
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