Baseball Savant has updated their public data to include a lot more information on StatCast’s bat tracking capabilities, so I thought it’d be interesting to have a look and see what info there might be in there for the Blue Jays. The data goes back to the middle of 2023. First, a few notes on what the metrics are:
- Average bat speed: pretty self explanatory.
- Fast swing rate: exactly what it sounds like. In this case, ‘fast’ is defined as the bat head moving over 75mph. That’s chosen because 75mph is the point at which balls hit into play begin to have better than average outcomes. About a quarter of swings are ‘fast’, and generally the ability to swing fast more often means both more raw power and that the batter is getting good cuts in more often.
- Squared up rate: this one’s a little more complicated. When bat hits ball, there’s a maximum possible exit velocity determined by physics (how fast is the ball moving, how fast is the bat moving, and how much does each weigh). A swing that reaches the maximum exit velocity possible is 100% squared up, while a foul tip is close to 0% squared up. Squared up rate counts the percentage of balls that are at least 80% squared up. In practice that means you hit the ball on the sweet spot and produced a hard line drive or fly ball that’s got a good chance to do damage. Note that you don’t have to swing hard to square a ball up. A little emergency hack that still makes solid contact for a soft liner might be considered squared up because you hit it as hard as possible with that swing even if it wasn’t hit hard in absolute terms.
- Blasts: StatCast calls balls in play ‘blasts’ when the batter swings fast and squares it up. A blast means the hitter got his A swing off and made good contact with it. Batters his .563 and slug 1.182 on blasts, but his .231 and slug .295 on balls in play that aren’t blasts. If you’re producing a lot of blasts, you’re almost certainly a very good hitter, if you don’t you probably aren’t.
- Swing length: this measures how far the barrel of the bat travels between when StatCast starts tracking it (about 150ms after the pitch is released) until the point of impact. Shorter swings are good for contact, with hitters whiffing on 30% of pitches with longer than average swings and just 19% with shorter than average swings. Longer swings allow more time to build up speed, though, so are more likely to be fast. It’s the prototypical trade-off between a slap and dash approach with lots of balls in play and an all-or-nothing slugging style aiming for home runs at the cost of strikeouts. 7.3 feet is average, 6.6 is extremely short and anything above 8 is extremely long.
With those preliminaries, what do the bat tracking leader boards tell us about the Blue Jays hitters?
- Vlad is good. He produced a blast on 19.4% of his swings last year, behind only Juan Soto on the leaderboard. Vlad swings pretty hard (his 75.9mph average was 12th), but his real strength is how much good contact he makes while still swinging hard, squaring it up with 27.7% of his swings. That’s solid overall, but elite among players who swing nearly as hard as he does. Of 26 players who got hard swings off more than half the time, only Soto squares it up more often and only Yordan Alvarez and Shohei Ohtani are within 2 percentage points.
- Ernie Clement is an elite contact hitter, but at the cost of impact. Only Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan squared it up more often than Clement’s 36.9% of his swings. He does that thanks to the 16th shortest swing in the majors, but pays the price with the tenth softest average bat speed. As we saw last year, that’s not a bad trade off for him, but it does cap his impact at a pretty low level.
- Surprisingly, Daulton Varsho is the Blue Jays’ second hardest swinger. He lets it rip at 73.7mph, which is the 54th hardest of 268 hitters with at least 500 tracked swings. He struggles with contact quality, though, squaring it up less often than all but four other hitters. That has a lot to do with his maximalist lift and pull approach at the plate. Daulton’s 24.4 degree launch angle was the highest in the majors by a significant margin last year, and he was one of just a dozen qualified hitters who pulled the ball more than half the time. That approach leads to some bad contact, but it also sets him up for lots of home runs and doubles off the wall when he does connect.
- If Varsho were able to moderate his contact a bit and square the ball up a little more, he’d look a lot like the newest Blue Jay, Anthony Santander. Santander swings just slightly less hard, at 73.1mph, and has nearly as extreme of a launch angle at 22.7 degrees (second among all qualifiers in 2024), but he squares the ball up at a much closer to average 22.3% rate. Santander is like Varsho in being a pull hitter who lifts the ball very aggressively, but he’s just a little more moderate in his approach and the result is better quality contact.
- The other new Blue Jay, Andres Gimenez, doesn’t fare particularly well in the tracking metrics. He uses a short swing, 7.0 feet long, and has a 10th percentile average swing speed as a result. That short swing doesn’t result in great contact, though, as he squares it up just 23.7% of the time (in the 36th percentile). The good news is that in 2023, when he was roughly a league average hitter, he had almost exactly the same swing measurements but recorded blasts about 30% more often. He’ll probably never be a plus at the plate, but a little more luck connecting on his best swings should bring him back in line with 2023 when he was a 4 WAR player anyway.
- There was some interesting movement from 2023 to 2024 in George Springer’s swing metrics. His swing was a little shorter and significantly less hard in 2024, but he raises his squared up rate by almost 20% and his blast rate by more than 25%. It didn’t translate into better results, and it’ll be worth keeping an eye on what he does in 2025. A focus on better quality of contact at the expense of a little raw power might be to his benefit as his natural athelticism wanes.
- What’s interesting about Bo Bichette’s stats is that there really isn’t a trend. He swung just as hard in 2024 as 2023, and did about equally well squaring the ball up (in fact 2024 was marginally better). Looking at his batted ball metrics, his hard hit rate dipped just slightly, from 46.4% for his career to 43%, but his barrel rate (the hard line drives and low flies that account for almost all extra base hits) fell by more than half, from 9.1% to 4.4%. If his swing looked the same and he hit the ball as hard, there’s good reason to hope that a lot of his struggles last year were a blip more than something more seriously wrong.
- Finally, Alejandro Kirk is another guy who doesn’t swing it especially hard (70.1mph, in the 21st percentile), but with a short stroke (7.0 feet) that results in an excellent 31.7% squared up rate (93rd percentile). He’s able to produce blasts at a well above average rate because he makes the most of the power his swing does have, which explains how he produces consistently high average exit velocities at his size.
This is all a curio as much as anything with only 18 months of data available. We don’t know much yet about how hitters’ swings change as they age, or what the tradeoff between length and speed looks like within an individual batter (as opposed to between guys with different levels of strength). It’s interesting stuff to watch, though, and over time we’ll get a better feel for what changes mean for predicting guys’ performance over time.