In what always ends up being one of our favorite days of the year, Over-Slot has officially launched Statcast-inspired visual packages for high school hitters from the 2027 Draft. These visual graphics have been a part of our evaluation process for players going back to the 2023 Draft, and you can find them on historical players pages going back five years.
The Statcast-inspired visuals represent high school hitters' performance record from the summer thus far. Metrics are only included from tournaments, showcases, invitationals and all-American games. We intentionally withhold high school league play in order to level the playing field from a quality-of-opponent perspective. The goal is to compare every draft-eligible high school hitter exclusively when they're tasked with facing the best arms in the country. By the end of the summer, most high school hitters have a sample of 60+ plate appearances, while the guys that participate in almost every event will rack up close to 150 plate appearances.
As is tradition, our packages include a player's contact percentage, chase percentage, in-zone contact percentage, out-of-zone contact percentage, strikeout rate, ground ball rate, fly ball rate, Air PULL percentage, their sprint speed, bat speed, average rotational acceleration, hand speed and explosiveness. Bat speed, average rotational acceleration, and hand speed scores are provided by Blast Motion, collected at numerous events from within the last twelve months. "Explosiveness" is a composite score based on components used in athletic testing and force plate outputs. Sprint speed is calculated by hand.
"Twitch" is new this year. It is primarily a player's reactive strength index (RSI). Components used to measure Twitch measure how fast and efficiently a player can transition force up and down the kinetic chain, whereas components used to measure Explosivness measure how much force or power a player can produce compared to his weight. Think of one as the torque and one as the horsepower.
As has been the case over the last couple years, you can compare and contrast every high school hitter at once using our "Performance data" page under "Data" at the top of every page on the navigation bar. On that page, you will always find 2028 high school hitters, however those inputs have yet to get uploaded, but are coming soon.
This is only the beginning. These metrics will update at the end of each week, adjusting absolutely everything on a player card based on how he and his peers fared from the week prior. Everything, including sprint speed, bat speed and athletic testing metrics will also update as more information becomes available.
Enjoy.