Vigderman: The hardest-hitting minor-leaguers by Synthetic Statcast
From Alex Vigderman at ACTA Sports on May 11, 2018:
Statcast is a really exciting product to have at our fingertips when analyzing players. It has given the public a whole new vocabulary with which we can talk about baseball. How many times did you hear the terms “spin rate,” “exit velocity,” or “launch angle” before a couple years ago? Now these terms are everywhere.
The trouble with Statcast is that analysis is limited to recent major league seasons, so we don’t have the ability to build context around these numbers like we do for on-base percentage or swinging strike rate, for example.
Enter Synthetic Statcast. This is a product Baseball Info Solutions (BIS) unveiled at the SABR Analytics Conference this past March (audio here, slides here) that estimates exit velocity, launch angle, and spray (i.e. horizontal) angle from the hit location and timing of batted balls. This data gets really interesting when we start applying it to time periods and leagues where Statcast doesn’t exist, because we can now talk about these new statistics in those contexts as well.
Read the full article here: http://www.statoftheweek.com
Originally published: May 11, 2018. Last Updated: May 11, 2018.