I love baseball. I love the crack of the bat when someone makes perfect contact - it's a one-note sound that only lasts a second, but plays like a beautiful symphony for so much longer. As the ball continues to travel through the air, the symphony lingers. Gravity pulls the flipped bat towards the dirt. The crowd erupts. And it's beautiful.
Then there's the stats and analytics, which make baseball a fun brainteaser. Performance can almost be entirely measured through numbers, even accounting for luck (BABIP). But there was always something missing. Sometimes Barrel %, Hard Hit %, and Average Exit Velocity didn't account for everything. And I was always perplexed by this. How could someone displaying well-above average power and contact be seemingly lacking in these areas? Was there another factor that the math couldn't perceive? It turns out there is, and it's math behind that beautiful crack of the bat.
Sweet Spot % was the missing link. Kind of like when Anthropologists theorize the existence of a missing species in the chain that has to account for evolution but the physical evidence remains elusive, Sweet Spot % is the stat that could fill in the gaps for why some guys over-perform and some guys underperform. Check this out.
Matt McLain has displayed incredible hitting ability, but it seemed a bit strange to me. I knew this guy was an amazing hitter constantly producing results, but his Barrel % wasn't astronomically high, and his Average Exit Velocity and Hard Hit % were closer to middling than phenomenal. So how was this guy producing a near .300 BA with plus power? Well, it turns out his Sweet Spot % is near the best in the league. And before this week, it was not included on the Statcast page, or if it was, it was not featured prominently. But there it is, now included with the other major statistical categories. The definition of Sweet Spot Percentage: A player's sweet spot percentage -- or how often he produces a batted-ball event in the launch angle sweet-spot zone of 8-32 degrees -- is presented on Statcast leaderboards under SwSp%. All Barrelled balls are struck in the sweet spot, but not all balls hit in the sweet spot are barrelled. It's much like the rectangle and the square - a square is always a rectangle, but a rectangle is not always a square. A barreled ball requires a launch angle of 25-35 degrees, whereas sweet-spot contact requires a launch angle of 8-32 degrees. And it turns out, you can still hit lots of home runs with just that sweet spot.
So we've looked at one guy that relies on sweet spot hitting to excel. Let's look at the other side of the coin.
When previously looking at players with the hitting profile of someone like Spencer Torkelson, we've kind of been perplexed at the lack of production in relation to phenomenal power indicators. How can a guy constantly hitting the ball so hard not produce tons of XBHs? It turns out they aren't hitting that sweet spot % often enough, despite barreling the ball often. And there's a lot of guys like this. Jesus Sanchez. Jake Burger. Adolis Garcia. Randy Arozerena. Guys who are so close to being dominant, but just lack that consistent sweet spot contact. Barrel % and Hard Hit % have been used almost used almost exclusively when evaluating future performance in recent years. It wasn't immediately obvious why some guys excelled in these areas but didn't have the production to show for it. And when guys perform well but don't have extreme numbers in these areas, many fans often point at BABIP or something else to explain how they're just over performing and getting lucky. But it turns out they were just excelling in an area we weren't monitoring very closely and luck has nothing to do with it. Even prospects are ranked based on these numbers. Which is why Matt McLain and Zack Gelof were ranked towards the bottom end of the top 100, but are dominating baseball. And why Elly is struggling (12th percentile sweet spot). Prospect rankings aren't focusing on sweet spot. When these guys reach the majors, they struggle. A prospect with a higher sweet spot % is more MLB ready.
It's a huge reason why certain clubs targeting clubs targeting guys with high Exit Velos and Barrel percentages are failing to get the production they expected. Teams like the Yankees, for example.
I love this stat being prominently featured on the Statcast Graph because it really fills in a gap that made a lot of hitting profiles perplexing. It's also a great tool for fantasy baseball. Look for the guys hitting that sweet spot before anything else because the odds are high they'll produce. Or target the extreme outliers like Acuna who don't need it. The variety of hitting profiles is what makes baseball so fun.
ADDITIONS: We now know why Vlad Jr. is struggling this year despite the numbers looking extremely similar to his 2021 campaign. His Sweet Spot % has dipped from 50th percentile to 34th percentile. This along with his Barrel % decrease has resulted in significantly less production.
It also explains Bellinger's resurgence. Most of us thought he was getting lucky. With a 27th percentile Barrel% and 9th percentile Hard-Hit%, how has he been so productive? Turns out he's hitting that sweet spot at an 86th percentile clip.
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