Sometime this summer, Major League Baseball’s website plans on unveiling the treasure trove of information its new Statcast system has collected. For anyone interested in the game, from geeks to casual fans, the data dump represents a watershed moment: Baseball is reigniting the ability to better understand things thought long understood.
Already, thanks to MLB’s At-Bat app and the enterprising Daren Willman of BaseballSavant.com, we’ve seen a smattering of information on the speed of batted balls. The data has been illuminating in a vacuum – the idea that Giancarlo Stanton has hit two balls 120 mph this year and they’ve gone for a single and double is just fun to know – but there’s not enough there to establish patterns and understand what, exactly, we can glean from exit velocity.