Spring Training Skill Searching: Max Exit Velocity Standouts - Brendan Rodgers, Sam Hilliard, Christian Walker, Miguel Andujar

March 29, 2022

Jon Anderson dives into the early Spring Training data to find hitters that have already bested their 2021 max exit velocity.

For most advanced baseball statistics, you need plenty of data to be available before you can start interpreting them. There is so much randomness and variance in baseball, that you really cannot glean any insights from a handful of games.

This doesn't turn out to be true when we're looking at maximum exit velocity. This is a metric that you can look at very early on and take away some useful insights.

Let's talk about the metric and then look at some names that are jumping out already in 2022 based on early spring training results that could be draft sleepers.

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Considerations

Maximum exit velocity is a measure of raw ability. It tells you how hard a hitter is capable of swinging the bat. What we cannot do is look at a hitter with 25 PA, see that they have a low max exit velocity, and decide that they cannot swing the bat hard. This is because exit velocity relies on a ball being squared up on the bat, and it's far from a sure thing that a hitter will square one up in a short sample size. Over the full course of a season (600 or so PA), you can be pretty certain that a hitter has put enough balls in play to show his true maximum swing speed, but over a shorter sample, you can't feel that way.

The one way we can use this metric very early on is to look at what hitters have already bested their previous maximum exit velocities. If a hitter went 500 PA last year and maxed out at 108 miles per hour, but he's already hit a ball at 112 this year, then that's a great sign that something has changed. Either the hitter has increased his swing speed over the offseason, or the radar gun did something wrong.

One more thing to note, there are only a dozen parks that are capturing exit velocity. Those home teams: ARI, COL, DET, MIA, MIN, NYM, NYY, PHI, PIT, STL, TOR. Because of this, this data sample is extremely biased toward hitters from those teams, as you'll see. Some players have not had any exit velocity data captured, which leaves them out of the running for this analysis.

Now let's get into some names that have already bested their 2021 max launch velocity.

Max Velocity Standouts

Christian Walker, Arizona Diamondbacks

On March 25th, Walker took a Raisel Iglesias sinker and stroked it 117 miles per hour for a double. That was after maxing out at just 111.1 last year in a very, very disappointing season for him. He added on a 110.3 mile per hour single in that same game.

Walker played 115 games last year and his just 10 homers two years after hitting 29 homers for the Snakes in 2019. It was a discouraging season for Walker, but things may be on the up-and-up here as it would seem that he's swinging the bat much harder right now.

Sam Hilliard, Colorado Rockies

We have known for a while that Hilliard has some serious pop. He hit 35 homers in 126 AAA games in 2019. His problem in the Majors has been an absurd strikeout rate at 34.6%. Because of this, we shouldn't really care that much about how hard Hilliard is hitting the ball this spring - his problem has never been how fast he can swing the bat.

It took Hilliard no time to post an eye-popping exit velo as he rocked a Vince Velasquez changeup 116.7 miles per hour for a single on March 20th. It would seem that his strikeout problem has not gotten better right now as he's struck out in 8 of his 17 plate appearances thus far. Hilliard will remain a bad fantasy player as long as he's striking out so much, but the homers will come if he finds playing time.

Brendan Rodgers, Colorado Rockies

Lots of Rockies on this list because they've had more data capture than other teams. Rodgers was already interesting for fantasy purposes in 2022 given his previous top-prospect status and his improved strikeout rate (20%!) last year. The one thing we didn't have from Rodgers was a ton of pop, as he hit just 15 homers in 102 games last year with a middling barrel rate of 6.2%.

At the age of 25, it's perfectly believable that he could have added swing speed over the offseason, and that would seem to be the case right now. That is big news for his fantasy stock as a guy who plays half of his games in Coors Field. Sign me up for the Rodgers breakout this year.

Miguel Andujar, New York Yankees

It's been a bumpy ride for Andujar in the big leagues after a very encouraging rookie year, and he does not look like a guy that is going to be in the Opening Day lineup right now. He will need some things to break his way to get enough playing time to warrant being rostered in fantasy, but for now, we know that he's swinging the bat hard in spring.

On March 24th, he turned around a Joe Jimenez four-seamer at 112.4 miles per hour for a single. That bested his 2021 max velocity by 2.2 miles per hour, and shows that he may be feeling healthy right now. If something happens that leaves him as a starter for the Yankees, he is definitely someone to take a look at.

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