America’s favorite pastime is back!
We are barely 20 games into the 2025–2026 MLB season, yet we have already been bombarded with all kinds of headlines and stories that have begun shaping the future of baseball. In particular, the emergence of the “torpedo” bat has become a contentious topic among baseball circles. However, this innovation is simply another step forward in the analytical revolution that we have seen take over the game of baseball.
Look no further than the popular movie, “Moneyball,” to understand the ways analytics and statistics have revolutionized teams’ construction and players’ roles in the modern era. However, thanks to databases such as Fangraphs and Baseball Savant, we no longer need Jonah Hill to tell us exactly what we should be looking for in players. With that being said though, what exactly should we be keeping our eyes out for?
How many different ways can you swing a bat?
To the layman’s eyes, hitting a baseball may seem pretty straightforward: see ball, swing bat at ball.
Obviously, these are the basic fundamentals of the game. A hitter’s best bet to succeed is to hit a ball as hard as possible, but how do they accomplish that?
You might first ask, can we just swing the bat faster? As I am sure we all learnt in a physics class at some point, Force = Mass x Acceleration — swinging a bat faster should result in more force exerted upon the ball. With this greater force, the ball should travel faster (and hopefully further). Thanks to bat tracking data that has just been released by the MLB, we can accurately measure how fast a player swings his bat.
By taking a look at the players with the fastest bat speeds last season, we can see a strong causal link to some of the best sluggers in the league: Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani (each of these players sports a bat speed in the 96th percentile or above). This approach has clearly worked for them all, as the three have combined to win six MVP awards. With this considered, it would be fair to generalize and say that swinging the bat fast is an effective approach to becoming a better hitter.
However, if we look at the player with the lowest bat speed in the entire majors, we come across Luis Arraez. For those of you unfamiliar with Arraez, he is coming off his third consecutive batting title, a remarkable achievement that only eight have managed before him. So how is this possible when he has the such a different approach from the likes of Ohtani?
To be fair to Arraez, his analytical profile is a bit of a unicorn. However, he represents a different kind of approach, compared to the prototypical slugger that has taken over the modern-day league. Since his debut in 2019, Luis has maintained a 100th percentile strikeout and whiff %. In other words, he only gets out after he has made contact with the ball. Arraez prioritizes making contact more than anything else and is consistent at maximizing this.
A key statistic at measuring the ability of a hitter to maximize the exit velocity of balls coming off their bat is “squared-up rate.” In simplest terms, the statistic calculates the exit velocity produced from a swing as compared to the highest possible exit velocity, derived from the physics of the pitch and swing. Arraez comfortably led the league in the total number of squared-up swings, as well as in percentage of swings that produced a squared-up swing. Given the fact that Arraez combines both league-leading low strikeout rates and high squared-up rates, he is able to hit on average at levels that no one else can match.
Translating swings to results
Perhaps the most diametrically opposed player to Luis Arraez is Kyle Schwarber. Instead of prioritizing contact over power, Schwarber has opted to go all-in on his pursuit of slugging. In this, Schwarber has become the poster child for what is known as “three true outcomes” baseball: a philosophical approach towards baseball that every at-bat ends in a home run, walk or strikeout.
Despite their opposed approaches, the two do not seem all too dissimilar from a barebones statistical viewpoint. Across their last three full seasons, both have an On Base Plus Slugging (OPS) around .800 and a Fangraphs Wins Above Replacement (fWAR) of 7.1 for Arraez and 6.5 for Schwarber.
If we look closer at the stats under the hood for Schwarber though, we see that he has the complete opposite profile. Instead of high squared-up rates and low whiff and strikeout rates, he has a 99th percentile walk rate and a 99th percentile bat speed. In effect, while Arraez prioritizes contact, Schwarber has gone for a power-dominant approach.
Both are valuable players in their own right. It is difficult, however, to find two players that have fewer similarities from a baseball standpoint.
The value of having good “stuff”
Shifting to the other side of the game, when talking about how good a pitcher is, a term that is often referenced is “stuff.” For a term with such a descriptive and informative name, it’s easy to understand how having good “stuff” would make a pitcher effective.
I kid, of course... a pitchers “stuff” refers to how difficult a single pitch is to hit. Statisticians quantify the difficulty based on several factors such as spin rate, extension and induced vertical break. The data comes together to establish grades for every individual pitch type (four-seam fastball, slider, sweeper, etc.) and create an overall quality rating.
Jacob deGrom, arguably the greatest pitcher of this generation, is the best example of a guy finding immense success with crazy “stuff.” While some players such as Yu Darvish are difficult to hit because of their varied “arsenal” of pitches, deGrom has ascended to an elite level with a completely different tactic: throwing only a four-seam fastball and slider.
DeGrom is unique in that he throws both of these pitches an almost equal percentage of the time (both around 45%), effectively reducing the batter to a coin-flip decision of what he may throw. We sometimes see relief pitchers use this approach due to the fact that they can exert more effort on each pitch, producing pitches with better “stuff,” but rarely do we see this with starting pitchers. DeGrom is the outlier.
Part of what makes deGrom so special is his combination of velocity and extension. Not only does he flash a fastball that has topped out at over 101 mph, but deGrom releases the ball 6.7 feet closer than distance from the mound to home plate. When combining these two things, the perceived velocity of the pitch feels even faster than it already is, making the job of the hitter all the more difficult.
It is these types of factors that contribute to the “stuff” metric, which deGrom excels at. When looking at a standardized statistic to compare deGrom to the rest of the MLB, he boasts a Stuff+ of 121 across his career, meaning his pitches are 21% more difficult to hit than the average MLB pitcher. This is what allows deGrom to circumvent the usual requirement of a three or four pitch arsenal, because the pitches he does throw are just so devastating that hitters can’t hit them.
Of course “stuff” is far from the only metric that gives insight into which pitchers will be successful: without good command, a pitcher will also find it incredibly difficult to be effective at the major league level. However, it is certainly a valuable insight into what makes hitting such a difficult task.
Takeaways
So what have we learned?
First of all, baseball is a very complicated sport, and there are a million different statistics that can seemingly tell us anything we might want to know about a hitter or pitcher. There are even more measures that have recently come out that tell us in-depth information about batter’s stances and how deep within the hitting box they stand. Crazy!
In theory, all of this information should allow us to accurately predict who will succeed and who will fail for any given season. Unfortunately, though, baseball is not that simple, nor that kind to us.
Above all, baseball is a game of chance. No matter how many metrics we devise, it’s unlikely we will ever be able to nail it down to a point, but isn’t that part of what makes it so much fun? Analytics are great to inform us on what we think is likely to happen, but we will never truly know what will unfold until it happens right in front of us.
So in the meantime, dive into all of the statistics and numbers until your heart is content... just don’t forget to tune into the baseball on the field every now and then!
