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Speed Score, often simply abbreviated to Spd, is a statistic used in Sabermetric studies to evaluate a baseball player's speed. It was invented by Bill James, and first appeared in the 1987 edition of the Bill James Baseball Abstract. [1] Speed score is on a scale of 0 to 10, with zero being the slowest and ten being the fastest.
In Major League Baseball (MLB), .300 is considered an average BABIP. [2] Various factors can impact BABIP, such as a player's home ballpark; [ 3 ] for batters, being speedy enough to reach base on infield hits ; [ 3 ] or, for pitchers, the quality of their team's defense.
Traditionally, statistics such as batting average (the number of hits divided by the number of at bats) and earned run average (the average number of runs allowed by a pitcher per nine innings, less errors and other events out of the pitcher's control) have dominated attention in the statistical world of baseball.
In modern times, a season batting average of .300 or higher is considered to be excellent, and an average higher than .400 is a nearly unachievable goal. The last Major League Baseball (MLB) player to do so, with enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting championship, was Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, who hit .406 in 1941. [4]
For most of baseball's history, there were no commonplace methods to quantify how hard-hit a batted ball was — the only aspect of the ball's speed being tracked was how fast the pitcher threw it, measured using various evolutions of radar guns. In 2015, MLB introduced Statcast technology to all 30 of its ballparks, in part to track exit velocity.
The MLB's bat-tracking data shows that Shohei Ohtani's swing generates the most bat speed for the Dodgers, while Mookie Betts' swing squares up the most and Freddie Freeman's swing is the shortest.
Bill James, who coined the term "sabermetrics". Sabermetrics (originally SABRmetrics) is the original or blanket term for sports analytics in the US, the empirical analysis of baseball, especially the development of advanced metrics based on baseball statistics that measure in-game activity.
In cricket, a player's batting average is the total number of runs they have scored divided by the number of times they have been out.Since the number of runs a player scores and how often they get out are primarily measures of their own playing ability, and largely independent of their teammates, batting average is a good metric for an individual player's skill as a batter.