How do the Royals look using bat tracking data?

Baseball Savant has bat tracking data now, so I took a look at how the boys in blue’s bats are relative to the rest of the league.

There is bat tracking data available on Baseball Savant now! I headed over there to see what data they are tracking and how the Royals look on some new metrics. Before we jump into the Royals however, I just want to note that Giancarlo Stanton is #1 in average bat speed and that he swings fast (above 75mph) 98% of the time, so I believe this data. That is exactly who you would guess is in the top spot. Second in fast-swing percentage is Kyle Schwarber at 73.9%. That is an unbelievably large gap between first and second.

Onto the Royals:

I isolated all Royals with at least 100 swings on the season. This is the resulting chart of average bat speed and the rate at which a ball is squared up. Bobby swings the hardest on average and has the highest rate of fast swings at 52.9%. The new stat that I would guess people start keying on here is called blasts. How many fast swings, again those above 75 mph, are also squared up. Bobby has the third most blasts in baseball this season and Salvy is fifth.

I need to learn more things before I jump to conclusions about this new data, but that seems pretty good. You can think of the above chart in terms of quadrants, with the red lines being league average. Upper right is fast swing and frequent good contact. Bottom right is fast swing but below league average in quality contact. Upper left is good contact, but slower than average swings. Finally, the quadrant to avoid, slow swing and low percentage of quality contact.

They also have swing rate distributions, so I can see that Bobby has a taller narrower distribution than the league as a whole.

By the way, Salvador Perez is anomalous in basically everything he does, and this reinforced that. He is a giant catcher, but he has not moved off of the position and is getting better defensively as he ages. I have talked to people who think he is a first-ballot HOFer and people who don’t think he is all that good a player. And so on. Now we can add another strange thing to the mix. His swing is loooong. He has the 10th longest bat path of qualified hitters at 8ft. They just track the head of the bat from start to finish three-dimensionally to calculate this. And yet, Salvy is a high-contact-rate hitter. I might need to dig more into swing length and how it relates to other metrics.

MJ Melendez also has a long swing, which is unsurprising. The average swing length is a little over 7.3 ft and Melendez is at 7.7. Adam Frazier has the shortest bat path on the team at 6.7. This also came out as I would expect at a league-wide level. Luis Arraez has the shortest at just 5.9 and swings very slow relative to the league. He squares pitches up at an insane rate though, so that is how you become a bat-control and average-hitting champ. Frazier similarly has the lowest average swing rate and lowest rate of fast swings on the Royals.

This is new data, and it will take some time to figure out what we can and can’t learn from the different variables as they relate to performance both specifically and generally. Just thought it would be fun to take a first glance at it and let people know it is there for perusal.