By Tim Benz
https://triblive.com/sports/tim-benz-josh-bells-breakout-season-can-be-traced-to-1-stat/
May 29, 2019
Josh Bell homers against the Rangers on May 8th in Pittsburgh (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
One of the advanced analytics regularly in the dunking booth for baseball old-schoolers is exit velocity. You know, Major League Baseball’s Statcast tracking of how fast a player hits the ball off the bat. The older the baseball fan, the more likely you are to hear: “Do I really need a stat to show me a ball pounded 400 feet over the fence was hit hard?”
Enter Pirates first baseman Josh Bell, he of a breakout 2019 season. Heading into Wednesday’s games, Bell finds himself in the National League’s top five in batting average, RBIs, home runs, slugging, and OPS.
Those are basic stats most of us can grasp.
Meanwhile, Bell also leads the NL in average exit velocity at 95.5 mph. His 86 balls hit at over 95 mph also lead the NL, as does his hard-hit rate, which is the percentage of balls put in play at 95 mph or more, at 57.7%.
Has that helped the 26-year-old’s lofty total of 17 home runs? Of course.
But the baseball stat geeks will insist the exit velocity is important beyond adding a fun nugget on a graphic for a Bell home-run highlight package.
And they would be right.
On balls that don’t jump out of the stadium, Bell is hitting the ball so hard this year that he’s beating the defense even when it’s positioned well to stop him.
That’s helped boost his batting average 79 points from where it was at the end of last year.
Perhaps too often, you’ll hear exit velocity worked into a conversation as a “yeah, but” excuse to defend “Player X,” who might typically be a .300 hitter but whose stats are off a bit. It usually goes something like, “So far this year, he is hitting only .250, but his exit velocity is good, so he’s just getting unlucky.”
In Bell’s case, though, the exit velocity stats are underscoring his effectiveness at the plate beyond the “wow” factor of launching balls into the Allegheny River with increasing regularity.
On Saturday, manager Clint Hurdle spoke of Bell’s ability to regularly transfer raw power into practical application even on batted balls that do stay within the field of play.
“The lower-trajectory-launch-angle balls, there’s a correlation now,” Hurdle said of Bell’s swing.
Take a look at Bell’s double over Yasil Puig in right field last night against the Reds as an example. That one jumped of the bat at 101 mph.
Hurdle also pointed to two examples from Thursday’s 14-6 Pirates win over the Rockies as evidence. Bell went 3 for 4, including a blast over the center-field fence.
But his two other hits that afternoon were perhaps more impressive because they were smoked hard enough to beat defenders in good position to make plays.
Those swings included a fourth-inning double into right-center field off a 90 mph fastball that David Dahl simply couldn’t reach before it lasered into the gap. The other was a single that eluded Brendan Rodgers on a dive between first and second base.
“The second baseman (Rodgers) flat out got beat,” Hurdle said. “And he’s a pretty good defender with good first-step quickness. And you saw (Bell) drill that ball through the right side. If that ball isn’t hit that hard, the kid gets a glove on it and makes a play.”
The numbers support Hurdle’s anecdotal evidence. Bell’s average exit velocity is up 5.5 mph from last year. His hard-hit percentage of 57.7% is up from 39% in 2018. He’s hitting the ball on the barrel of the bat 17.6% of the time. That’s up from 7.0% throughout last year’s campaign.
“It’s just being ready to hit balls in zones that I’m looking for, and not missing them,” Bell said Saturday.
Hurdle partially credits Bell’s relaxed approach to batting practice, claiming that, in the past, Bell needed a good “rehearsal” to carry over into the game. Now in Year 3 of his career, Bell has learned to be more laid back at first pitch, even if his pregame preparation wasn’t perfect.
“I don’t really care about results in BP,” Bell said. “Just getting loose and preparing for starters with a game plan and a mentality. (I don’t) really worry about anything in regards to my swing.”
Based on how 2019 is going, why should he?
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@tribweb.com or viaTwitter. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.
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