It’s time to take a break from writing about pitchers to check and see which hitters might be undervalued or in for breakout seasons based on last year’s quality of contact. While we sometimes use barrel rates to put together a list like that, today we’re going to use a Statcast stat called EV50.
For a batter, “EV50 is an average of the hardest 50% of his batted balls.” That means instead of looking at just their max exit velocity or their barrel rates, we want to see how hard they CONSISTENTLY hit the ball, regardless of launch angle. EV50 tells that half of a hitter’s outcomes will be at this exit velocity, which allows us to see not only who has power but who has power that will play because they can get to it regularly.
For the leaderboard below, even though I sorted by EV50, I also included average exit velocity for a comparison’s sake and exit velocity on fly balls and line drives because we do want to see who makes the most out of their hard contact when it’s in the air. I also wanted to show the percentage of batted balls each player has over 95 mph and their rate of barrels per plate appearance so we get a fuller picture of just how good their quality of contact is. After deleting anybody who was under the MLB average in any of those categories, we got the following list.
So let’s dive in.
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2024 Exit Velocity Leaders
The top 15 is filled with hitters that you know hit the ball consistently hard, so I’m not going to talk about most of these guys. However, I did want to highlight a few below that I think could still be values based on where they’re being drafted.