ESPN Home Run Tracker: Measuring the speed of the ball off the bat

Hit Tracker is now ESPN Home Run Tracker! Hit Tracker founder Greg Rybarczyk is now collaborating with the ESPN Stats & information Group to continue tracking all MLB home runs, and helping baseball fans know "How Far It Really Went!™" Please credit any information on this site to ESPN Stats & Information Group. For more information and analysis on home runs, please contact founder Greg Rybarczyk.

So I stumble onto this site surfing the 'net and it tracks HR's hit in MLB and the speed of the ball off the bat on said hits.  This is a very neat statistical toy.

2013 Top Home Runs, Speed Off Bat - Full List
http://www.hittrackeronline.com/top_sob.php

Here is the developer's bio so you can see the data is likely very reliable and and I won't hear from either his or ESPN's lawyers for my use of the data.

Bio

Greg Rybarczyk was born in Lowell, MA and raised in Ayer, MA, graduating from Lawrence Academy in Groton in 1986 and Union College in 1990, where he earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. He was awarded an officer's commission in the U.S. Navy in 1990, and served in that capacity for seven years, fulfilling assignments aboard ship as a nuclear engineer and his ship's navigator, and later ashore as a physics instructor at an ROTC prep school.

Since leaving the Navy in 1997 Greg has worked as a reliability engineer, design engineer and as a Six Sigma "Black Belt" and "Master Black Belt" for two major U.S. & global corporations. In these roles he has made extensive use of data gathering and statistical analysis to solve business problems, making numerous quality improvements to his company's products and saving the company many millions of dollars during his career.

In early 2005, Greg began designing Hit Tracker, which combines several of his interests and talents: baseball, physics, statistics and automated spreadsheet design.

Greg lives in the Portland, OR area with his wife and two children.

So I scan the names and notice the Giants appear to be under-represented at the top of the list, which is littered with the premier HR hitters in  the game.  No surprise there.

It turns out you can copy/paste the list into Excel and sort by team.

So I did that. With interesting (IMO) results.

Here are the stats for the entire bucket of HR's up until August 7th.

Average	103.37
Median	103.20
High	120.10
Low	88.50

The Giants came in at about 103.1 and the rays at 103.5. The Blue Jays were the top team at 105, not surprising, their guys are all over the top of the list and near the high posted by Trumbo of 120.10. The Marlins, Braves and Angels were around 104.5. Philly and Seattle were among the worst at around 102.25.

The data for the top readings for each hitter by team was even more illuminating, but again not very surprising.

For the Giants, Hunter Pence launched one at (115.6) followed by Posey (112.4) Sandoval (111.3) Tony Abreu, maybe he should play more (107.1) Crawford (106.0) Quiroz (105.6) Torres (105.2) Blanco (103.4) Belt (102.1) Scutaro (101.5) Pill (101.4) Pagan (97.6). 

Now, Brandon Belt is too big a kid to be swinging it 102 tops. Maybe they were onto something with this whole lining up the knuckles bit. He just hit a HR off the Brewers, so it will be interesting if the mechanical change translated into a higher bat speed reading. My guess would be yes. Belt is five for ten AB's since the change coming into today, so it has had an immediate impact. I just wonder why it took so long, his hard  headed-ness or their organizational air headed-ness.   

For the Rays, Evan Longoria (112.8) Luke Scott (112.8) Joyce (112.0) Myers (110.7) K. Johnson (110.0) S. Rodriguez (109.7) Loney (109.6) Escobar (109.3) Lobaton (108.7) D. Jennings (108.6) Zobrist (108.1) Roberts (104.5) S. Duncan (102.0) Fuld (101.8) Molina (100.1) 

Aside from the fact that the Rays have 11 guys with readings > 108.1 and the Giants had only 3 a couple of other embarrassing observations. The Rays have guys coming off their bench that would be in our top three or four. They have middle infielders that would be in our top four!!! 

What the heck are they doing to identify and develop hitters that we aren't? If you look at the top-end speed, their guys beat our guys across the board by about 5 MPH. Now that may not seem like much, but it translates into about 25-35 more feet on a line drive or a fly ball. Heck, more speed on grounders = more singles through the IF. More bat speed on line drives and fly balls = more doubles and triples, to say nothing about more HR's versus warning track fly outs.   

No wonder the Giants haven't hit a HR at home in about a month. They don't have decent bat speed. 

And they're quitters. 

I'd like to play around with the data more and see how much the bat speed correlates to some of the FanGraphs hitting data, especially the RunsCreated and some of the slugging / extra-base hit data. 

Maybe if the Giants keep bringing boring back into baseball, I can free up some time.