Using swing path metrics to find fantasy baseball power breakouts: Keep the faith in Nick Kurtz

On Wednesday, Statcast dropped a brand new set of metrics to measure a hitter’s bat path both on the way to contact and at the contact point. This is important data because bat path is one of the aspects of hitting that hitters not only think about the most, but also train the most. Hitters want to make sure they are making quality contact as often as possible, and that takes root in the path of their swing from load to contact.

There’s a great article from Mike Petriello that explains all four of the metrics, and I encourage you to read that to get a more in-depth sense of everything I’m going to discuss here. All of these metrics are going to be specific to the player, their skillset, and their approach, so the best use of these metrics is likely going to be choosing a specific player and looking at his swing path and attack angle and seeing if something has changed to lead to more power production or a higher pull rate or better contact, etc.

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However, we can just have some fun today and try to use these new metrics to find power hitters.

For this article, I’m operating under the basic principle that if a hitter has good bat speed and a slight upswing, they are more likely to produce good power numbers. The upswing will create loft on contact, and the bat speed will create exit velocity that will help the ball carry out of the park. To do that, the first stat we’re going to look at is swing tilt or swing path, which tells us “the shape of the swing on the way towards contact.” A higher angle is a steeper swing, and a lower angle is a flatter swing.

The Statcast folks looked at the production on swing paths and found, as the graphic below shows, that hitters who have a steeper swing, between 33 and 38 inches, tend to produce the best offensive results, even if they swing and miss slightly more than players with a flatter swing.

So let’s run with that premise and look for hitters who swing the bat fast but also have steep bat paths to see if we can identify some potential power breakouts. First, we can test the premise to see if many power hitters fall within this range.

Elite Fantasy Baseball Power Hitters