Rays on the HitFX Statcast leaderboard

Baseball Prospectus has brought together Statcast data into an easy-to-use format to measure hitting and pitching exit velocity data, and there are a few Rays standouts that immediately pop off the page.

Here is the glossary for the stats, which can be listed for hitters or against pitchers:

• Adj Exit Velo - A player's median exit velocity adjusted for opponent and park.
• xLWTS - Expected Linear Weights created by the exit velocity and launch angle of each batted ball measured by Statcast, adjusted for opponent and ballpark.
• xLWTS_RT - xLWTS per batted ball measured by Statcast.
• LWTS - A player's actual Linear Weights on batted ball measured by Statcast, adjusted for opponent and ballpark.
• LWTS_RT - Adjusted LWTS per batted ball measured by Statcast.
• LWTSvsExp - The difference between a player's total LWTS and xLWTS.
• BaBa - Number of batted balls measured by Statcast.

Because we are so early in the season, batted balls are a low number, with few hitters reaching above 100 in 2016. However, the rate stats (_RT) are helpful guides for who has performed best per batted ball.

Hitting HitFX

To kick it off, here are your Rays hitters, sorted by adjusted exit velocity. Unsurprisingly, Corey Dickerson tops the list, but Brad Miller is a surprise third. Overall numbers in MLB included:

Using the "vs" column, we can see that Morrison and Longoria have underperformed expectations based on their exit velocity, while Steve Pearce has significantly overperformed. I'm not sure how much this data speaks to sustainability thus far, but it's an interesting clue to why some players might be getting nods from the manager (Guyer, Miller, Pearce) over their counterparts (Jennings, Morrison) as of late.

As for expectations, here how the Rays rank overall in expected hitFX (velo, launch angle), sorted per batted ball:

And for actual performance thus far:

That's six Rays hitters in the top-100 in actual velo and launch angle per batted ball thus far! If we had filtered on LWTS, the stars for overall production are Forsythe (32 actual LWTS, 54 expected) and Longoria (99 actual, 84 expected).

Pitching HitFX

You may not be surprised to know that on the pitching side, Dana Eveland has allowed the weakest contact, while Archer has allowed the hardest contact thus far:

The only real underperformer in terms of this HitFX analysis is Odorizzi, with a -1.6 for his "vsEXP" score. Otherwise, you might think this data lines up pretty well.

However, when we isolate per batted ball data, expectations flip.

Expected performance from Archer ranks the third highest for per batted ball data, and Erasmo Ramirez ranks lowest on the Rays in xLWTS_RT:

And the same holds true in actual per batted ball data as well:

Erasmo is allowing some nicely hit baseballs, in terms of exit velocity and launch angle, while Archer is doing the opposite. Outside the HitFX, though, the narrative feels the opposite.

Using LWTS, all four Rays starters rank in the top-100 by these metrics thus far, and do particularly well for what might be expected performance, given these Linear Weights:

Those are some impressive rankings in overall performance, despite per batted ball rates. Using the same metric, Erasmo Ramirez is the highest ranking Rays reliever (4.1 Actual - 139 overall, 4.5 Expected - 133 overall).

What does all of this mean? The Rays pitchers are getting work done, even if the per batted ball stats aren't encouraging.