According to Statcast, a hard-hit ball is any batted ball event with an exit velocity above 95 miles per hour. The reason why it’s important to classify these types of hits is because we know that harder hit baseballs are more difficult to defend and have a higher likelihood to land for hits. This is what leads us to our next metric called, Hard-Hit%.
More specifically, 95 MPH is when exit velocity on batted balls begins to have a significant impact on increasing hit probability. In other words, a batted ball hit below that amount has a very low likelihood of becoming a base hit.
Hard Hit% Explained
HardHit% is a metric that measures the rate of hard-hit balls against the total number of batted balls. The league average HardHit% in MLB is around 35%, while some of the best hitters in the game surpass 45% and above. This metric works for both hitters and pitchers, as hitters want to maximize their hard-hit balls, while pitchers want to minimize them.
For hitters, hitting the ball hard isn’t just a more desirable outcome, it’s actually a repeatable skill that we can measure. When we’re talking about pitchers, the ones who accumulate a lot of strikeouts, are less prone to being impacted by hard hit balls. For pitchers who do give up a lot of balls in play, however their goal is for them to be as weakly hit as possible so that the defense can make plays behind them.
HardHit% can be a useful tool to use for both hitters and pitchers to determine whether the results they are getting match the skills they are showing. For example, a proven All-Star hitter going through a cold streak, who is consistently hitting the ball hard, might be showing that while the in-game results are not going for hits, he is still generating the same batted ball outcomes that are desirable, which is a sign not to panic.
Thus, these types of outcomes are mostly due to the result of the game and factors outside his control, and not always an indicator that the player is “struggling.”
Summary
Oftentimes when a player is struggling, they may look to make swing or mechanical changes, but stats like Hard Hit% can helps us track if the outcomes are the result of the player’s approach or due to random events that he can’t control. HardHit% can be found on player pages on BaseballSavant.com.
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