What you need to know about Statcast bat tracking

Technology to track the speed and path of bats is not exactly new; teams and swing coaches have been investing in bat sensors and other technology for years, primarily used in practice or laboratory or other non-game settings. It’s a near certainty that some teams have their own internal measures of bat speed; as we said, physicists have been working out optimal swing paths and ways to calculate swing speed for decades. In 2015, to pick one example of many, Dr. Alan Nathan went deep into the physics of it all. This is a new way to attack a very old question.

What’s different, then, is that this is in-game tracking, collected from real 2022 Major League Baseball action. It doesn’t require reverse engineering from exit velocity; it doesn’t require any gear on the bat. It just requires playing in a ballpark where the hardware is installed, just like any other metric you’re familiar with.

When Jazz Chisholm Jr., for example, mashed a Luis García four-seamer into right-center field for a two-run homer on June 10, you could have easily called up Baseball Savant and seen that the ball came off his bat at 100.6 mph and went a projected 399 feet. Now, you can also know that his swing was 94.1 mph (Sort of. We’ll get back to that.) You can know it was hit 4.5 inches from the end of the bat, that he squared it up 70% successfully, that it was hit 1.3 inches above the center line of the bat. There’s so much more to know than we already did. There always is.