An adrenaline rush | Baseball prospectus

Translated by Pepe Latorre

The homer that Jorge Polanco connected him with Pull Skubal In the fourth inning of Sunday’s game, he blew up the retractable roof of Seattle’s T-Mobile Park. It left everyone speechless. It’s not normal in Polanco. He’s good enough to hit about four home runs a year when he hits right-handed. This season he hit 26 home runs, but 21 of them came from the left side of the plate. Only in 2019 (6) and 2021 (9, in the season of his life and when he had a total of 33 full-round hits) did Polanco hit more than five home runs against lefties. His swing is very contact-oriented from that side, and even after increasing his swing speed slightly from that side this year, he only reached 75 miles per hour (the threshold set by Statistics to label swings as fast) on 5.3% of his swings to the right

Yet something like this could be expected. Polanco had forced Skubal to turn to his slider by abandoning his changeup, leaving Skubal right in the middle of the plate. When you give a slider to someone who is preparing for your fastball but is in the target zone, it is normal for him/her to recognize it early and on the right foot. And Polanco did it. The pitch reached just under 90 mph and his 70 mph swing sent him over the left-center field fence. It wasn’t an average effort, but Polanco did what good hitters do when they put themselves in a favorable situation and pitchers make a mistake.

The truth is that Polanco upped the ante in the sixth and left us even more amazed. He hit another home run off Skubal when East attacked him with a 99 mph dunker. Yes, the launch didn’t have the best locations. Yes, Polanco had already hit a home run. Yet it is not normal. He used a 75mph swing to react to the pitch and knock it out of the park. He had already hit a home run from the right side this year with a similar swing, but it came on a breaking pitch traveling at 80 miles per hour. Getting the barrel up to the fastest speed you can reach at 99 mph is a minor miracle. Polanco didn’t swing over 75 mph against left-handed pitches during the regular season, not even 90 mph.

That’s the key: we’re not in the regular season. One of the advantages of data Statisticsthat continue to appear and reveal the game to us in a more intimate way is that we can now see where players are pushing themselves further than is normally possible. We can document your changes in focus and performance in increasing detail. It is true that some of these changes throughout the season will be trends, the result of intensive training aimed at specific objectives. Others, however, will be the direct product of something else: pressure, euphoria and terror. In short, we can see the adrenaline in the numbers now.

I went back to 2023 and looked at all the players who had at least 100 competitive swings for playoff teams during the second half and at least 10 competitive swings in October. The following graph compares his bat speeds in the regular season to those in the postseason. The blue dots represent each player’s bat speeds, plotted with regular season on the x-axis and postseason on the y-axis. The red line shows what it would look like if all players on second and first had exactly the same swing speed. The black line is the trend line describing the actual data.

Hmmm… It’s interesting, but the way the boundaries are crossed tells us that it is difficult to prove a stable relationship. For most hitters, it appears that swing speed is higher in October, but at the top of the distribution the trend weakens somewhat. However, I can also tell you this: the weighted average (which compares only these players’ regular-season swing speeds to their postseason swing speeds) increased from 75.0 to 77.4 mph in October. Of the 105 hitters in my sample, 52 increased their swing speed by at least 0.5 mph, while only 22 lost at least that amount.

I repeated the survey for 2024 and here are the results in graph form.

The lines are nowhere far apart, but it is even clearer: the black is higher. The weighted average swing speed in my sample of 115 players was 70 mph in the regular season and 78.2 mph in the postseason. Last fall, 51 players gained at least 0.5 mph in bat speed and only 30 lost it. In both seasons, the maximums on the high side were higher than on the low side.

This year, things look pretty similar so far (this is due to the matches being played on Saturdays, as I lowered the required competitive swing limit to 5 to find a comparable sample size).

We know that pitchers throw harder in October than at the end of the regular season. It’s not that they discover a new ability to throw hard, but that they get closer to their maximum speed. Additionally, teams typically only select pitchers they believe still have postseason potential. We can say the same about hitters with a fair amount of confidence. It is true that hitting is a reactive art and that a single swing cannot say as much as a single throw about a player’s skills. Bat speed stabilizes incredibly quickly. It is similar to pitch speed or the ability to frame pitches. You don’t have to wait too long to see if something is real.

This is of course not surprising. It’s not surprising that there are hitters whose bats are lagging behind (it could be the end of their first long professional season or due to a nagging injury they’re valiantly battling), but overall we’d expect faster swings in October Madness. There are harder pitches, but there is also a loud and dedicated crowd that gives everything on every pitch. There is electricity in the area. Also with the baseball players. Some hitters will struggle to take advantage of that for the reasons mentioned. Others will choose to stay extremely focused and hit the same way they did in April; it is the only process they trust. Keep a cool head and low heart rate. For others, however, letting in a little of the energy of the moment can uplift them and take them to places they normally can’t reach. That’s what makes postseason baseball so extraordinary: the impossible is possible. We saw a little of it in Seattle on Sunday night and we’ll see a lot more before this month is out.