This topic is an iffy area, and I want to say that up front. It is complicated and controversial. I don’t have all of the facts, and I don’t have access to the best available data. I’m just going to share, as best I can, the situation as I currently understand it. All of the numbers taken here are from Baseball Savant. I’ve done nothing to manipulate the numbers in any way. I say this because, as some of you may know, I generally run an algorithm to clean up and manipulate numbers from Baseball Savant prior to using them for analysis. Today is not one of those days, I’m just going with the raw information.
Trackman Radar, as I understand it, specializes in measuring velocity. That is its bread and butter, and other metrics measured by Trackman are added on top of, or derived from, this most basic starting point. By all accounts, Trackman is very good radar, and these velocity measurements are very reliable.
Velocity Fluctuations
That said, there are a number of pretty large home/road exit velocity fluctuations worth pointing out. I’m not exactly sure what may cause these differences. It could be quality of pitching or batting. If your team has great pitchers, you’d expect them to give up fewer hard hit balls, so maybe your home park exit velocity numbers would be suppressed.
Your batters could provide a similar input. A good offensive team may have overall higher exit velocity contributions, or a bad offense may have below average. I stress *may*. A good offense isn’t necessarily defined by high exit velocity. Look at guys like Mike Trout and Joey Votto. Neither of these guys produce particularly high exit velocities, but both are great hitters. Likewise, Manny Machado has had elite exit velocity this season, but with pedestrian numbers.
These things are complicated, there are a lot of moving parts. A great pitching staff and a great offense may cancel each other out, for example. However, we need to talk about these home/away exit velocity numbers. Read the rest of this entry »
