While a lot of things in baseball have changed in recent years, some have stayed exactly the same. Baseball scouts have used the 20-80 scale to evaluate players tools for decades. The idea behind the scale is that a score of 50 indicates league average. These grades apply to both tools and an overall scouting grade for each player. Furthermore, player evaluators will typically assign a player a current value and a future value, hence the name of the recent book on the subject by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, our lives have been turned upside down in 2020. Professional sports will look different in 2020, but in the last few weeks we have been given some clarity on what the MLB season will look like. There will be a total of 60 regular season games down from an originally scheduled 162. The length of the season has been one of the strengths of the MLB in the eyes of many baseball purists, as it provides a large sample size which ensures that the best teams rise to the top at the end of the season and the best players are awarded the game’s top honors at season’s end.

Let’s take the fun out of baseball for a second. Well, I suppose for some of us the topics of launch angle and Exit Velo and these new-fangled hitting terms fun. Baseball today is not as simple as picking up a bat and swinging hard. The science of hitting has leveled up in recent years, with players focused on elevating the ball being rewarding with a multitude of home runs and big pay days. As detailed in Swing Kings, independent hitting coaches have leveraged the use of video and intensive study of home run giants such as Barry Bonds to create the perfect swing. Which, by today’s metrics, means the perfect home run swing. Let’s take a look at some real MLB data to see what this looks like in practice.

Pitchers are often cited for their elite ability to command their pitches and miss bats. This requires a combination of pitch execution (both location and quality) as well as the pitch’s velocity and movement. From a scouting perspective, each pitch in a pitcher’s arsenal is graded on the 20-80 scale where anything between 50 and 65 is typically graded as a plus pitch and anything over 65 is a plus-plus. Since the slider is the most often used breaking pitch by today’s professional pitchers, we wanted to investigate the best sliders from the MLB using Statcast data and award the “Best Slider of 2019”. To do this, we’re going to look at hitters performance against sliders thrown from each pitcher in the MLB from 2019 using swing-and-miss rate, strike rate, and weighted on base average (wOBA) as key metrics.

The effect that age has on one’s ability to perform as a professional baseball hitter is well documented, which is why high dollar contracts for aging players come under so much criticism. The Rockies’ most recent challenge to this is the 2019 signing of Daniel Murphy in lieu of retaining clubhouse favorite and perennial Gold Glove contending DJ LeMahieu. Year 1 of this experiment did not work out, but let’s take a look at what the historical age curve tells us.