Red Reposter - New bat speed metrics & updated Top 100 prospect rankings

Monday links!

The Cincinnati Reds selected Cam Collier with their 1st round pick back in 2022, the then 17 year old coming off the board as the #18 overall selection. The word at the time was that he was an incredibly advanced hitter from the left side of the plate, a guy who had finished high school early and jumped into the JUCO ranks to expedite his ability to face advanced pitching and raise his draft stock.

He landed at #69 on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 overall prospect rankings back in 2023, but a mostly punchless .706 OPS during his 2023 season with the Daytona Tortugas of the pitcher-friendly Florida State League saw him drop off those rankings altogether when that crew put out their initial 2024 list.

Now in the more pitcher/hitter neutral Midwest League with the Dayton Dragons, Collier has started mashing once again. Through his first 25 games this year, he hit a stellar .314/.360/.588 with 7 homers and 7 doubles, and that was good enough to see him climb back into MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 at #95 in this weekend’s re-ranking.

Righties Chase Petty and Connor Phillips fell off the list entirely this time around, as both the highly-touted righties have struggled to throw strikes and keep runs off the board in the early going. Rhett Lowder, whom they rank as the top prospect in the Reds system, rose up to #25 from #34, while Edwin Arroyo - who hasn’t played at all this year (and won’t) due to a busted shoulder - somehow rose 12 spots to be ranked #55 overall. Noelvi Marte (#30, down from #21), suspended as he is, makes it four Reds prospects on the list at this juncture.

In other news, Baseball Savant released a cache of new bat speed tracking data, and it’s a thoroughly entertaining horde of data through which you can sort. While it’s not exactly predictive data, it is quite interesting to see where players who you know have been posting elite exit velocities rank on this leaderboard, and it’s not hard to notice a correlation. Giancarlo Stanton, for instance, has an average bat speed that’s nearly 3 full mph faster than the next-closest MLB player (at 80.6 mph), and that certainly tracks with his all-time great exit velocity numbers.

Unsurprisingly, Elly De La Cruz (from the left side) leads the Reds in average bat speed (76.1 mph), and that puts him tied with Juan Soto among the game’s 10 fastest swings. His numbers from the right-hand side are lower (73.4 mph), but that still ranks as the second fastest swing on the club. Meanwhile, Jeimer Candelario’s left-handed swing (67.4 mph) ranks as the slowest on the Reds (and well below the 72 mph league average), something that stood out as a concern to RedsInFour on Twitter:

Yeah, that’s not exactly what you’d like to see from your already-over-age-30 big free agent bat.

Taking these numbers and digging a bit deeper was Eno Sarris at The Athletic, and it’s an absolutely excellent read. In essence, these are numbers that can begin to tell us about how taxing it can be on the bodies of hitters in ways we’ve been able to track with pitchers for quite some time now. As hitters begin to chase these particular swing speeds the way that pitchers have been chasing velocity and spin, it will be easier to pinpoint which guys see spikes and, almost inevitably, the injuries that come with those newfound exertions taking their toll on core muscles, shoulders, etc. There’s a particular passage towards the end where Sarris talks to injured Boston slugger Triston Casas, and it’s hard not to read that segment and not think immediately of Matt McLain, whose oblique and lead-shoulder injuries came directly in the wake of him tapping into more power in 2023 than he’d ever shown at the collegiate or minor league levels.

Really makes you wonder if that kind of production will be at all sustainable for him going forward. I hope I’m wrong, but that has all the makings of the age-old worry about pitchers who are ‘max effort’ guys and their bodies simply can’t take it.

Finally, Charlie Goldsmith at The Enquirer detailed the frustrations felt by the Reds during this spiral of awful play, awful luck, and awful health. There’s not a lot of groundbreaking data here, but it sure does spell out all the things that have just repeatedly gone wrong for this club of late. It really does feel like it’s been forever since there were some consistently good vibes around this club.