Dewan: Infield hits by speed score
From SABR member John Dewan at ACTA Sports on July 7, 2015:
We often assume a player’s ability to get hits is a function of luck and his ability to make solid contact, but speed can be a hit tool as well, particularly when it can help result in an infield hit. Bill James first created his Speed Score statistic nearly 30 years ago, but it still does a nice job of organizing players by their speed based on publicly available data like stolen bases, triples, grounded into double plays, and runs scored per times on base. Speed Score works on a general scale of 1 to 10 where 4.5 is about average, 2.0 is very poor, and 7.0 is outstanding.
When you group hitters based on their Speed Scores, it quickly becomes clear just how much speed drives infield hit rate.
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Originally published: July 9, 2015. Last Updated: July 9, 2015.