Exit Velo is for new baseball fans who are still learning the game, and for first-time fantasy managers who keep hearing terms like exit velocity, barrel rate, and xFIP and want to know what they actually mean before draft day.
Baseball now has a measurement system that captures things the traditional box score 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. These numbers exist on public websites, free to anyone. Most writing about them assumes you've been reading them for years.
Exit Velo starts from the beginning.
What you'll find here
Every piece is built around a player and a real question a new fan or fantasy manager might actually ask. Why does one of the hardest hitters in baseball keep leaving home runs on the field? What does a pop-up rate spike in spring training tell you before the team announces anything? What is that circular chart on a pitcher's Baseball Savant page, and how do you read it?
Every underlined term can be tapped or clicked for a plain-English definition. Articles are labeled Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced so you know what you're walking into. You don't need to read them in any order, and you don't need to know anything going in.
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 an Army veteran who coached youth baseball on weekends and spent his career figuring out how to explain complicated things to people who are new to them — for the Army, in history classrooms, and now as an instructional designer at a tech company. He's been a baseball fan and card collector his whole life, and a fantasy player long enough to have too many opinions about ADP. He went deep into Statcast a few years ago and found that most of the writing about it assumed you were already an expert. These are the pieces he wished existed.