They don’t make barrels like they used to anymore

Here’s a weird diagram:

If you’re like me, you’re having a hard time understanding it. The value of a barrel? But aren’t barrels themselves a measure of value? That’s like asking how many dollars a ten dollar bill is worth, or how you would rate it The Lion King on a scale of one to The Lion King. But that’s not actually how it works. Barrels are defined based on exit velocity and launch angle pairs that, according to the dataset MLB used in their creation, would most likely result in extra-base hits. Those cuts have remained the same. The results on barrels do not.

What gives? Well, part of it is the ball, of course. I’m not bringing any new news to the long-running debate about balaerodynamics; you can read some good recent articles on tracking drag coefficients and the like here here. If you measure barrels that way, you will indeed see a fairly clear decline. Here are home runs per barrel over the years:

Fewer balls leave the yard. That is certainly true. But that’s not what I’m chasing. Let’s rule out all the barrel home runs and focus on the balls left in the yard. Here are wOBA and xwOBA on non-homer barrels, 2015 to present:

Or how about this, summarizes BABIP:

Or how about this overly specific, BABIP on barrels hitting between 300 and 400 feet to center:

All these graphs point towards the same conclusion. And even without thinking too much about the aerodynamics of the ball, you can pretty much guess what’s going on here: Outfielders are catching too many tons these days.

In a common refrain for sabermetricians, Rob Arthur has already done that has looked into this. Especially in 2021, Rob delved into how balls in the outfield fell less often. Better defensive positioning? A downstream effect of universal DH? Who knows. But outfielders caught more baseballs than ever, and that trend has only increased in the years since. Russel Carleton confirmed the finding in 2024. Like Arthur, he didn’t come to a conclusion about that Why The infield defense improved, but the fact is that outfielders are more effective than they were ten years ago.

It’s worth noting that you can split this trend in two. Softer air contact turns into hits about as often as ever. Hard-hit balls, on the other hand? They are increasingly becoming outs. Well, at least the fly balls are. Line drives seem quite difficult to catch:

I think a major reason for this change is improved defensive positioning. The average center fielder starts 10 feet further back than in 2015. Left fielders and right fielders have also backed up. That all happened in 2019, but outfielders have probably become more accustomed to starting deep in the intervening years, relearning routes and refining jumps. The natural counterbalance for the offense when you realize that extra-base hits are where the runs are is to start guarding against extra-base hits more often.

Remember that chart of home runs per barrel from above? With all those well-hit balls not leaving the yard, you would expect the number of doubles per barrel to increase. But instead it is static: 17.8% in 2025 compared to 18.2% in 2015, and 18.2% for the Statcast era as a whole. We’ve also never had a lower number of triples per barrel, although batters only hit 197 triples in 2025 compared to 8,000 doubles and 5,000 homers, so triples are clearly less meaningful in this comparison. On the other hand, singles per barrel are generally increasing – presumably a result of the outfielders playing back.

What does this all mean for us stat-following nerds? In short, they don’t make barrels like they used to anymore. Here’s a mathematical example. Imagine a 2016 slugger. Our hypothetical hitter strikes out 23% of the time, walks 10% of the time, and collects 12.5% ​​of his batted balls, a top-20 mark in baseball. Give him exactly average results on contact for his barrels and his non-barrels, and that equates to a .363 wOBA, a number that ranked 33rd in baseball that year.

Then imagine a hitter with the exact same results in 2025. He strikes out 23% of the time, walks 10% of the time, and retrieves 12.5% ​​of his batted balls. Barrels becoming less valuable has made our hitter significantly worse; with league average results on his barrels and non-barrels, he now posts a .337 wOBA. That would have been 57th in baseball last year; not only is it worse in absolute terms, as offense was lower in 2025, but it is also worse in relative terms. In other words, a guy who hits a bunch of barrels isn’t as valuable as he used to be.

Are there any extenuating circumstances here? Of course there are. For starters, batters are now throwing the ball up more often. Hitters smashed nearly 3,000 more barrels in 2025 than in 2017, the year those colossal strikes were at their most valuable. That 12.5% ​​barrels per batted ball figure that was one of the best in the sport in 2016? It would have ranked 55th among qualifying hitters in 2025. Loud contact is much more common now than it was then, even though it is less valuable per event.

There is also the problem of Goodhart’s law. If you’ve never heard of it before, here it is in one sentence: “If a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a good measure.” In other words, if a group of people focuses on a specific variable associated with success, that variable’s association with success will decrease. Tell hitters that barrels get them paid, and they can start changing their behavior in ways that produce fewer valuable barrels, in center field or in other ways that are easier to produce but less likely to land safely.

Do hitters know to target barrels? Most definitely. Are they targeting a Statcast-defined barrel at the expense of just hitting the ball hard? I have absolutely no idea. But it’s certainly true that if you tell players to “go hit more barrels, and by the way, here’s a barrel leaderboard,” some of their barrel-raising behavior is likely to be counterproductive in unexpected ways.

Are defenders better? Are hitters worse? Are they fooling themselves? Is the ball just dead? It’s definitely some of those things. But regardless of what caused it, if you’ve been using Statcast data from the beginning and have developed a mental rule for how productive a hitter with a barrel speed of X is, you need to update your priors. The snail is still in the air. There’s just a little less of it than there used to be.