Speedcast Nuggets

Phil Gurnee ♦ March 11, 2018 ♦ Leave a comment

Statcast has a stat called sprint speed which is defined below.

Sprint Speed is Statcast’s foot speed metric, defined as “feet per second in a player’s fastest one-second window.” The Major League average on a “max effort” play is 27 ft/sec, and the max effort range is roughly from 23 ft/sec (poor) to 30 ft/sec (elite). A player must have at least 10 max effort runs to qualify for this leaderboard. Read more about how Sprint Speed works here.

Some fascinating things turn up.

Corey Seager is as fast as Kiké Hernandez at 27.2.

Old man Chase Utley is faster than both of them at 27.5.

Austin Barnes is faster than our shortstop 27.3 and is the 3rd fastest catcher in baseball. He is well behind Realmuto who clocks in at 28.6.

The fastest Dodger is Chris Taylor at 28.6. Cody Bellinger is right behind him at 28.4.

The slowest Dodger is of course Grandal. The difference is huge between the second slowest Justin Turner at 26.2 and Grandal at 24.4

Matt Kemp has seen his speed cast drop from 26.6 in 2015 to 25.6 in 2017. He was rank 296 in 2015 and is ranked 402 in 2017.  As a Dodger fan, I’m hoping that speed gets back to at least the 26.5 level with the weight loss.

Last year Adrian Gonzalez was ranked 443 out of 451 runners. Grandal was 445. The Tortuga was aptly named.

The fastest runner right now in baseball is Byron Buxton just nudging out Billy Hamilton at 30.1. Dee Gordon is 4th at 29.7.

The slowest runner in baseball is sadly Albert Pujols.

Raja Davis at the age of 37 is still the 11th fastest runner in baseball.

The only full-time player over 30 in the top 25 is Lorenzo Cain who clocks in at 16.