2023 Fantasy Baseball Preview: Making Batted Ball Data More Predictive

Batted ball data has a major flaw. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. For this article, we’ll focus on Statcast’s barrel rate and hard hit rate. These stats measure the quality of contact, not the result of contact.

As analysts, when we turn to Statcast data, we’re trying to find signal that’s missing from more traditional advanced stats like wOBA or wRC+, which solely measure results. These more traditional stats are prone to luck-based variance, where a player may not be properly rewarded for creating dangerous contact at the plate. Since batted ball luck tends to even out in the long run, we’re more likely to find signal from Statcast data that’s missing from wOBA and wRC+ in small samples. Herein lies the flaw — did...