I Would Like to Misappropriate the Blue Jays’ Spring Training Scoreboard for Use in Shenanigans

On Tuesday morning, legendary baseball writer Jayson Stark was at Blue Jays camp in Dunedin, Florida, where he found something he liked.

Here’s another Dunedin feature I’m a fan of. Exit velocity data on the scoreboard during batting practice. Including the bunts!

— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst.bsky.social) 2025-02-25T15:36:16.065Z

The Blue Jays were posting live batted ball data during batting practice, and this is indeed cool. At the absolute worst, this is an interesting bit of information for anyone who happens to be hanging around. We all have varying appetites for data while consuming sports, but I don’t know anyone who sees a hitter put a ball in the seats and doesn’t immediately think, “I wonder exactly how far he hit that.”

I’m sure the players and coaches have access to this information at their convenience, should they want it. But sharing it on the scoreboard in real time offers a unique opportunity: To use this advanced technology to do shenanigans.

My first inclination upon having that thought was, “Well, I guess that’s one more thing I don’t have in common with professional athletes,” but, wait, ballplayers love doing bits. Some professional athletes are always on the move, always hopping from activity to activity, but most of the life of a baseball player is spent doing hurry-up-and-wait. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent time around a group of young men with time on their hands, but truly the spark of human genius resides within any group of bored dudes.

Last year I was killing time in the press box before a game at Citizens Bank Park when the Phillies emerged onto the field en masse. They set up a marker in center field, then one by one they took turns chipping golf balls at it. Closest to the pin, I learned later, got the first pick in the team’s fantasy football draft.

Every baseball team is like this, to a greater or lesser extent. That’s how we got the hot foot, the rally cap, and some truly innovative physical comedy routines from the world of college baseball.

Obviously, it’s occurred to these guys that you could gamify the Statcast output at batting practice. Practically, that’d mean shooting for the highest exit velocity, but that’s boring. Not only would the same guy win every day, trying to hit the ball as hard as possible is just… work.

But what if you were looking for specific targets? Like, seeing who could get closest to a completely flat launch angle.

Only it turns out that’s not very much fun. Over the course of the Statcast era, there have been more than 16,000 batted balls with a launch angle of 0 degrees. You’d think that’d mean a line drive, but in practice these are ground balls. The hardest-hit example came off the bat of… would anyone like to guess?

Oh, you all said Giancarlo Stanton. That was anticlimactic. So was that flat 122.2-mph screamer, it turns out. Here, take a look at the most boring double play you’ll ever see.

OK, then. What lies at the other end of the spectrum? After all, the original post not only marveled at the utility of having live batted ball data on the scoreboard, it was tinged with a soupçon of “ha ha, isn’t it silly that bunts have an exit velocity and launch angle?” (Which, to be clear, it is.)

So let’s have it. What’s the softest you can hit a ball? Even in a batting practice environment, there’s a lot of transfer of momentum involved in hitting a ball into fair territory. Force equals mass times acceleration, coefficient of restitution, things of that nature. I don’t know, I’m not a physicist. In order to perfectly deaden a pitch that’s thrown even at 80 mph, you’d have to be Tony Gwynn multiplied by The Flash.

But you can get close. Counting spring training and the playoffs, the softest batted ball in the Statcast era came off the bat at 5.2 mph. There are two instances of a ball hitting this mark. One is, to be frank, a data error. First, Lucas Duda was the hitter. I was about to say that he’s never bunted in his life, but Baseball Savant does have him down for three bunts in his big league career, including a successful sacrifice.

But also, early in the Statcast days, the system had problems reading balls that came off the bat at extremely high or low launch angles, and that’s very obviously what happened here.

It’s showing a quadruple failure. That can’t happen; it’s got to be instrumentation.

Not so for the actual softest contact of the past decade. I give you Christian Bethancourt, who on May 14, 2022 laid down a sacrifice bunt that came off the bat at 5.2 mph and -17 degrees and traveled two feet in the air.

Talk about soft hands. This guy shouldn’t be playing baseball, he should be baking wedding cakes or sculpting statues.

The hardest thing to do in sports is to hit a round ball with a round bat, and so on. But to do it at 5 mph simply beggars belief. Stanton’s white-hot double play ball came off the bat nearly 25 times as fast. Stanton’s grounder would’ve outrun most World War I fighter planes. Bethancourt’s? Barely faster than walking pace. Bethancourt’s bunt would run the mile in 11 and a half minutes.

Bunts under 10 mph aren’t unheard of; there were four in the majors last year, which is more than I would’ve guessed. But how softly can you hit a ball when you’re trying to hit it hard?

The softest non-bunt ball in play in the Statcast era came off the bat of Willi Castro (albeit only barely) in 2019: 7.6 mph. But that was on a checked swing; Castro didn’t follow through, which as you know is essential to any legitimate swing.

In fact… did this pitch bounce before Castro hit it? That seems to be the case. Sachin Tendulkar (he’s one of three cricket players I can name, don’t be pedantic in the comments) would’ve been proud.

Still, we want a full swing on a pitch that is still in the air.

Ty France followed through here, and it got him only an extra tenth of a mile an hour of exit velo. Basically all of the softest hit groundballs look like this: Chasing at a breaking ball in the dirt and ticking it off the end of the bat and straight into the ground. It’s the least amount of contact a hitter can make with a baseball, so it makes sense that these batted balls would have the lowest exit velocity.

You know what else these batted balls have in common? They all resulted in outs. Iglesias actually ran into his own weak grounder in fair territory and got called out.

The softest grounder that resulted in the batter reaching came in 2021, off the bat of Adam Eaton at 13.7 mph. It was a perfect deadened swinging bunt in front of Salvador Perez, who got out of his crouch like a reluctant grandpa who’s been summoned from his recliner.

I am not 100% sure that Eaton beat this throw, but the call on the field stands, I guess. Still, the result is different but the path there is the same: another pitch with downward break that glanced off the end of the bat.

One last question, having dispensed with the initial premise of using the Blue Jays’ fancy new toy for silliness. How softly can you hit a ball in the air?

In previous searches, I’d set the filter for exit velocity at 20 mph. Baseball Savant has one batted ball since 2015 with a type of fly ball, line drive, or popup and an exit velo that low. I’m inclined to discard it for a few reasons: First, it came in spring training, with a truly puzzling combination of data: 14.3 mph EV, -77 degree launch angle, but a line drive single. Also, it came off the bat of someone named Wagner Lagrange, who is definitely a ballplayer I’d heard of before and not Ben Foster’s gunslinger from 3:10 to Yuma.

Finally, there’s no visual evidence. The video that comes up in the search is six seconds of a picture-in-picture interview with Dylan Carlson. Poppycock, says I.

The next contender was a 2017 single by Jason Castro off Josh Tomlin at 23.9 mph. Also a data glitch, I think. Not only was this still Statcast’s teething period, there is a video for this play, and it shows Castro lining the ball off the right-center field wall.

The winner, then, takes us back to the original setting: A Blue Jays spring training game in Dunedin. Toronto lefty Brendon Little comes in to face Akil Baddoo with two on and one out in the top of the eighth — these games don’t count, but it’s good to practice winning habits in high-pressure situations.

Little’s first pitch is a wicked sinker in on Baddoo’s hands, and it absolutely saws him off. You can hear the delightful crack of Baddoo’s bat handle exploding — it sounds like a straw broom smacking against a concrete sidewalk — as the ball blorps toward the second baseman at 26.9 mph.

Given the absurdly low exit velocity, Little is tasked with making the play himself, and he doesn’t. It’s a tough play; the lefty is falling off the mound toward third base, and Baddoo is booking it down the line. Rather than fielding the ball cleanly, Little trips and goes to his knees in the general vicinity of the ball. (He looks like Matt Martell trying to catch a punt.) Honestly, Little does well to even make it close from that position.

Yeah, I told you it was going to be ugly pic.twitter.com/A8KucSqa6x

— ByMattMartell (@ByMattMartell) April 22, 2017

But the result is the softest-hit ball in the air ever tracked by Statcast in a major league game. So that’s the benchmark: 5.2 mph for a bunt, 7.6 mph for a full swing, 26.9 mph for a ball in the air. Everyone ante up $20, and whoever beats those benchmarks in batting practice takes home the pot. What do you say?