Explaining Pirates' offensive woes with new Statcast metric

There's a new stat available at Baseball Savant for the analytically-inclined folks out there: Statcast now tracks bat speed, a trait long touted by hitting coaches and scouts as a useful skill, now tracked and publicly available. More specifically, the speed at which the sweet spot of the bat moves through the zone is recorded, and the average of a player's top 90 percent of swings constitutes his average bat speed.

Leaderboards were made public over the weekend, and therein lies some good news for the Pirates. Pittsburgh's average bat speed (72.8 MPH) is the second-highest in the entire sport, trailing only the 24-13 Braves. Oneil Cruz's average bat speed (77.7 MPH) also ranks second, but out of 220 qualified hitters (nobody is even on the same planet as Giancarlo Stanton).

The league-wide average bat speed is 72 MPH, and (if rounding up from 71.5 MPH) nearly every Pirate hitter swings the bat at an average or better speed. Here are the numbers for every Pirate with at least 50 competitive swings so far in 2024:

That's all but two hitters swinging the bat at a league-average speed, and five doing so at a rate among the top quarter of the league. And yet, the Pirates rank 28th out of the 30 MLB clubs in runs per game. What else is going on that can be explained by these new metrics?

The Pirates' offensive performance and philosophy has faced much scrutiny throughout Andy Haines' tenure as hitting coach, and especially over the last few weeks. The club just endured a 22-game stretch where it scored no more than two runs 16 times and never scored more than five runs. Pirates hitters have been so passive with their pitch selection to the point that Haines specifically had to deny that being part of his teaching.

As it turns out, not only do the Pirates make poor swing decisions, but they also make very inconsistent contact. Another new metric connected to Statcast Bat Tracking is called Squared-up Rate, which measures how much of the possible exit velocity (based on pitch and bat speed) is achieved on a given swing.

This is where the problems lie for the Pirates. Despite ranking second in baseball in average bat speed, the Bucs are "squaring up" the ball (achieving at least 80 percent of the possible exit velocity) on only 23.2 percent of their swings, a rate worse than every MLB club except for the lowly Colorado Rockies. For a handful of these guys, the fact that they swing the bat fast is moot:

Swinging the bat quickly is great, but doesn't guarantee success and is only part of the equation. But timing and bat path also matter, and mastering those helps prevent pop-ups, choppers, and other less-than-ideal types of contact. This, in addition to the hitters' passiveness and pitch selection, seems to be a team-wide issue. And it's hard to believe it's just a coincidence when that's the case.

We already knew the Pirates were too conservative in regards to not swinging the bat, but as it turns out, the same issue still applies even when they do swing.

The offensive approach and philosophy is flawed, and seemingly has been during the entirety of Andy Haines' tenure as hitting coach. The Pirates have the ceiling of an offense that hits for power and scores runs at a high level. And yet they can't seem to make it happen.