Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports
Well, it’s Friday, and over the past couple weeks, I have crunched so, so many bat tracking numbers. I wrote about them last week and then again on Wednesday, and the effort required to write those two articles has worn me down into a smaller, duller baseball writer than I was back in May. Today, I’d like to look at the lighter side of bat tracking. In particular, I’m interested in the lower limits of squared-up rate. Before we get into it, though, I need to make a detour and speak directly to the industrious baseball savants over at Baseball Savant who made all of this pitch-, ball-, player-, and bat-tracking possible.
Dear Baseball Savant baseball savants, I love you. You are doing God’s work. You are making known the unknown, shining the light of truth into the dark corners of the world, and I would gladly bake brownies for you any day of the week. However, after a month of bat tracking data, it’s time that we acknowledge a solemn truth: You probably need to shuffle around a few names.
Here’s the big one: Squared-Up Rate should actually be called Barrel Rate. I imagine you would have called it that had you not already given the name away. After all, it’s right in the definition: A squared-up swing “can only happen on the sweet spot of the bat.” That’s the barrel of the bat, though Sweet Spot Rate is taken too. You currently classify a Sweet Spot as any ball hit at an optimal launch angle, whereas a Barrel is a hard-hit ball hit at an optimal combination of velocity and launch angle. But neither of those terms implies a particular trajectory. Sweet Spot Rate should be shifted to Lift Rate and Barrel Rate should be shifted to Launch Rate. That makes them more accurate and allows Squared-Up Rate to shift over to Barrel Rate where it belongs. Everybody wins.
I understand that this would be confusing at first, but that’s ok, baseball savants. We’ll get used to it. We got used to xwOBACON. You just changed Best Speed to EV50 and nobody so much as batted an eye. Besides, it’s not as if you did anything wrong. It was totally reasonable for you to call those balls Barrels a few years ago. How could you have even imagined you’d get to this point, measuring bat speed with cameras that capture 500 frames per second? But now you know better.
Hugs and kisses, Davy
PS: Please start tracking the sprint speed of turtles (and any other animals) that wander onto the field.
PPS: I was serious about the brownies.
Ok, end of detour. For each batted ball, the respective speeds of the pitch and the bat make for a maximum possible exit velocity. Statcast calculates the squared-up percentage by dividing the actual exit velocity by that maximum possible exit velocity. Ben Clemens published a rough version of the formula on Tuesday:
Squared-Up Percentage = EV / ((Bat Speed x 1.23) + (0.2116 x Pitch Speed))
Because it’s just a percentage, there’s no minimum bat speed or exit velocity required to square up a ball. You can square up a ball even if your bat is barely moving. In theory, you could square up a ball if your bat were moving backward. You can square up a bunt. Here’s Masyn Winn doing just that against the Brewers.
Not only did he produce the slowest squared-up ball in recorded history, he also singled and loaded the bases for the Cardinals on the play. The 94.6-mph pitch contacted Winn’s bat, which was moving at 4.8 mph, resulting in a 20.9-mph batted ball that was 81% squared up. More importantly, after Winn squared up the ball so beautifully, multiple people fell down.
First, pitcher Freddy Peralta started to make a diving play, then thought better of it and awkwardly spiked his knee into the turf. He next attempted to snare the ball on a short hop, but with its strange combination of spin and velocity, the seemingly sentient sphere took a perpendicular bounce away from him. Next, Peralta unleashed an off-target throw to first, which understandably frightened first base umpire Alan Porter enough that he toppled backward, only to pop up and make the correct call like a champion.
I watched every squared-up ball that was hit below 70 mph. The best part of that exercise by far was admiring the swings. They are a truly gorgeous collection of excuse-me swings, and as it turns out, they can all be sorted out according to a spectrum.
On the left is The Swing That Never Really Got Started. In the middle is The Swing That Got Interrupted Before It Was Finished. And on the right is The Swing That Wasn’t Supposed To Happen in the First Place. Those poles are roughly correlated to spray angle, and in the supercut below, I’ve tried to put them in order as they go from one end of the spectrum to the other.
To be sure, I saw plenty more silly squared-up balls. I’ve seen more players fall down or fire the ball wildly into the stands. I’ve seen a ball bounce off Jonathan India’s bat, then the gloves of two different fielders. I’ve seen Nick Madrigal get credit for squaring the ball up on a 63.6-mph groundout that looked for all the world like every other Nick Madrigal batted ball.
All the same, after watching all these squared-up squibbers and squared-up swinging bunts, I hope you can begin to see the beauty of the statistic that should be called barrels. There’s something moving about the idea that there’s no limit to pure contact. It’s possible to square up the ball perfectly while touching it as lightly as a feather. It’s possible to square up the ball perfectly even if that’s the last thing on earth you want to happen. No matter how mangled your swing, perfection is always attainable.
Sure, squaring up a baseball means Oneil Cruz stress testing a center-cut fastball’s 108 stitches in the most brutal fashion imaginable, and it means Steven Kwan reaching out and slapping a changeup into shallow left field. Why shouldn’t it also mean Patrick Wisdom trying and failing to lay off a high inside pitch from a position player in a 17-0 game, chipping the ball toward the first baseman at 41.7 mph, throwing his head back in frustration, and then trudging off toward first base like a 5-year-old who just got told that if he didn’t march upstairs and take a bath this very instant, then there would be no dessert tonight, mister?
Bunts aside, that is the weakest squared-up ball ever recorded and I love it. Wisdom squared it up at 92% and so, so wished he hadn’t, which just makes it all the more perfect. In this age of seemingly infinite velocity and Edgertronic pitch design, shouldn’t we celebrate anyone who manages to square up the baseball, even if they did so accidentally?
