Barrels vs. Average Exit Velocity in the 2019 Season

In this project I created three different graphs the first one below is Total Barrels (TB) vs Average Exit Velocity (EV) during the 2019 baseball season. The second graph is Barrel per Batted Ball Event (BBE) percentage vs Average EV during the 2019 season. The third graph is Barrel per Plate Appearance (PA) percentage vs Average EV during the 2019 season. I got all of this data from Baseball savant. Please excuse that the graphs are tough to read, they look a lot more legible when I had them zoomed in on RStudio. Anyways, a lot of you may be wondering what is considered a barrel like how I did when I first found out about the stat. In the picture below shows a visual of what a barrel would be considered as, but mlb.com writes, "A ball traveling 99 mph always earns 'Barreled' status when struck between 25-31 degrees. Add one more mph -- to reach 100 -- and the range grows another three degrees, to 24-33". My assumption for creating the first graph was to see if the players with the highest season EV would also have the most total barrels. Which is somewhat true, besides for Aaron Judge and Joey Gallo. Under each graph I will have more an in depth analysis. Enjoy!

While making this graph I had the assumption that the players with their name displayed would be the league's leaders for home runs. This assumption was somewhat correct besides a couple of outliers (home run wise) like Harper and Abreu. It was pretty interesting for me to see the home runs per barrel percentage by each player (assuming that each home run was considered a barrel). For example, the top players from the graph above percentages look like:

Home Runs/Barrel = Homer per Barrel % (2019 Season)

1. Alonso - 53 / 66 = 80.3%

3. Soler - 48 / 70 = 68.57%

4. Bellinger - 47 / 59 = 79.66%

5. Trout - 45 / 66 = 68.18%

6. Yelich - 44 / 59 = 76.27%

T7. Acuna Jr. - 41 / 66 = 62.12%

T7. Cruz - 41 / 65 = 63.07%

T12. Freeman - 38 / 59 = 64.41%

T15. Donaldson - 37 / 62 = 59.68%

T23. Harper - 35 / 59 = 59.32%

T36. Abreu - 33 / 63 = 52.38%

Looking at these percentages I am really feeling for poor Jose Abreu that hit 63 balls 98+ and only half were homers, but hey that's baseball for ya!

With this graph I was just seeing how often guys hit balls HARD so, I made a barrel percentage with batted balls vs average exit velocity. We can see when Joey Gallo hits balls HARD he gets a barrel 25+% of the time, but he does not hit hard consistent enough to have the highest average exit velocity on the season. Aaron Judge is close to 20% barrels on batted balls and hits balls hard consistent enough to be considered the avg. EV champ.

This last graph is little tougher to have higher percentages for barrels per plate appearances, but we can see that Nelson Cruz hits balls really HARD or considered a barrel about 12% of the time he steps up to the box. A little fun fact before finishing this post is of course Mike Trout is top 5 for every graphs y-axis, so the GOAT really knows how to hit balls on the barrel.