Digging Into New Swing Path & Attack Angle Leaderboards

Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball

The Athletic

Baseball, Sports

4.9 • 746 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eno, DVR, and Jed discuss the new tools and leaderboards at Baseball Savant offering more public-facing data than ever for bat paths and attack angles. Plus, they talk about the eventual arrival of ABS for regular season games, and their 2025 predictions they want to use a mulligan on.

Rundown

1:02 New Toys at Baseball Savant -- Swing Path & Attack Angle Leaderboards

9:12 Looking for Ideal & Unusual Combinations

16:00 Is Swing Path Tilt the Most Difficult Thing to Change?

25:09 Do Flatter Swing Path Hitters Have Higher Floors?

34:40 ABS Getting Closer to Become a Reality in MLB Games Beyond Spring?

52:03 Which 2025 Prediction(s) Do You Want a Mulligan On?

Baseball Savant's Swing Path & Attack Angle Leaderboards: https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/bat-tracking/swing-path-attack-angle

Follow Eno on Bluesky: @enosarris.bsky.social

Follow DVR on Bluesky: @dvr.bsky.social

e-mail: [email protected]

Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe

Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels

Hosts: Derek VanRiper & Eno Sarris

With: Jed Lowrie

Executive Producer: Derek VanRiper

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Rates and barrels. It is Wednesday, May 21st, Derek Van Riper,
0:19.4	Inoceris, Jed Lowry here recording this on the early
0:22.7	part of Tuesday, May 20th. We have some new toys from baseball savant we're going to dig into
0:27.3	today, so we're really excited about that. Had a story from Ken Rosenthal and Jason Stark about
0:33.0	automated balls and strikes being closer to the big leagues. We'll talk about what needs to be sorted out before that becomes a reality, perhaps as soon as 2026.
0:43.0	And time permitting, we are going to have our Mulligans for 2025.
0:48.0	The calls we made before the season that we want back here in the final 10 days of May.
0:54.6	How about that?
0:55.8	If you haven't done it already, please join our Discord.
0:58.2	You can do that with the link in the show description.
1:01.4	And I love when the baseball news you should know is extremely nerdy, data-driven stuff.
1:08.7	I feel like that's the world just handing us a beautiful rundown to work with.
1:14.9	So baseball savant this morning launched swing path and attack angle leaderboards.
1:20.6	There are visuals.
1:21.8	There are all sorts of things you can dig into.
1:24.2	We're just a few hours into it.
1:25.9	So this is day one of many, much like when
1:28.5	the bat speed leaderboards dropped last year, the biggest thing that I think I want to put in
1:34.7	front of both of you is a simple question of like, what do you want to see on these leaderboards?
1:40.3	What do you think matters the most or is going to be most functionally helpful
1:45.4	for people trying to analyze the game? Many of our listeners for fantasy purposes. What are we
1:50.4	trying to do with this flood of interesting new data? Yeah, I mean, I think bat speed and swing
	...

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