The Hit or Not app is designed to contribute to coach and player evaluations of Quality At Bats (QABs) during batting practice or scrimmages. The app can also be fun to use during games to check on expected outcomes for hits.
To make this app work, I take all available data from the 2023 NCAA Division 1 baseball season. For all (n = 201,397) of the measured Exit Velocities (EV, in increments of 1 mph) and Launch Angles (LA, in increments of 1°), I compute the mean batting average (AVG) and slugging percentage (SLG). While these are Ball in Play (BIP) metrics, AVG is not the same as BABIP (BABIP = (H – HR)/(AB – K – HR + SF); AVG = H/BIP). For reference, the 2023 Division 1 mean AVG is .355, and the mean SLG is .571.
Whether you are a group of players having a friendly batting practice competition, a coach running a scrimmage, or a fan watching a game...after a batter makes contact, you can use the sliders or text boxes to input the EV and LA values you observe, and Hit or Not will tell you the expected AVG and SLG. Hit or Not also will roll two random numbers: The first random number is compared to the expected AVG to determine if the contact is a hit or not. The second random number is compared to the expected SLG to determine how many bases that batter gets.
Thank you to Joe Haumacher, Kyle Bonicki, and the Princetion University Baseball Team. n n Created by Adam C Maloof on 10/03/23