Exit Velo is for fans who know what a batting average is but have started to wonder if it's telling the whole story, and for fantasy players who want to draft better without needing a statistics degree.
The traditional numbers aren't enough anymore. Baseball has spent the last decade building a measurement system that captures things box scores never could: how hard the ball was hit, at what angle it left the bat, how fast the swing was, and the gap between the hit a player deserved and the hit he got.
Most coverage of these metrics assumes you already know what they mean. Exit Velo doesn't.
What you'll find here
Each piece starts with a player and a real question. Why does a hitter with a 92-mile-per-hour exit velocity still leave so many home runs on the field? What does a pop-up rate spike in spring training tell you before the team announces anything? When a player's numbers look off, is it bad luck or something the cameras already caught?
The statistics get explained as they come up. Every underlined term can be tapped or clicked for a plain-English definition. You shouldn't have to have a second tab open to follow along.
The name
Exit velocity is the speed of the ball off the bat, one of the first things Statcast taught us to pay attention to. A clean, physical number: how hard did he actually hit it? The name felt right.
Who writes it
Allan Branstiter writes Exit Velo. He's a baseball fan and fantasy player who went deep into Statcast and found that most of the writing about it was aimed at people who were already experts. These are the pieces he wished existed when he started.