Thread: Exit Velocity?
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Old 03-22-2019, 05:25 PM   #105
stiffy
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Join Date: Jul 2013
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Curve Ball Dave View Post
Either way, knowing the actual EV or not, anyone who watches him play would know if he's a special talent if actually can hit a ball that hard. C'mon, use a little logic. Baseball people aren't that stupid, they know a talent like that when they see one. When Mickey Mantle was signed as a 17 year old of Oklahoma the Yankees didn't need to know his EV to know he was special.
And yet scouts are wrong about players all the time. Albert Pujols ended up in the 600 HR club and yet he went in the 13th round of the draft when he was 20 years old. You gonna tell me the scouts knew he could mash then? He got drafted, and immediately started crushing minor league pitching and mashed big league pitching the next year, so it's not like he took a long time to figure it out. I bet if there was exit velo data available from his college days he would've gone first round.

Mike Piazza is another example, maybe the greatest power hitting catcher of all time. He went 62nd round, so obviously scouts knew he'd have 400+ HR power, right?

If that's the case then how come the advent of Statcast has resulted in entirely new players becoming valuable and some that were highly valued in the past not being valued at all.

Almost as if the numbers give more insight than anything we've had before...

There's basically a minimum amount of exit velo you have to be able to reach to be a big leaguer. Sure, a scout's trained eye can tell you on the vast majority of players pretty immediately whether that's the case, but exit velo gives you more certainty to how close they are to ML level or how far they exceed it.
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