PITTSBURGH – The Pirates have some speed to burn.
MLB’s Statcast data now includes a metric for player speed and the Pirates seem to have a leg up on the competition.
The new metric is called spring speed and it measures the feet per second of a player running at max effort.
Billy Hamilton is the fastest player in the majors at 30.1 feet per second and league average is 27 feet per second. The system requires a large sample size to work correctly, so only regular players have their speeds calculated. But of the Pirates that have been tracked, they stack up pretty well.