While the old adage goes that you shouldn’t look at the MLB standings until Memorial Day, we live in the Statcast era, and don’t have to wait nearly as long to confidently identify trends emerging early in the season for individual players.
MLB’s Statcast metrics were introduced in 2015 alongside the introduction of 12 Hawk-Eye cameras into each stadium, which use frame-by-frame tracking to give us a wealth of information on every player in the league. These advanced proprietary metrics—such as exit velocity, barrel rate, sprint speed, expected batting average (xBA), expected slugging percentage (xSLG), arm strength and outs above average—stabilize quicker than surface-level statistics and need about a month’s worth of data to balance out. It’s made it much easier to identify baseball’s best athletes and predict future success, even if the sport continues to surprise us every day.
In this exercise we’ll highlight one player at each position who stood out in the first month of the 2024 season via Statcast data, even if sometimes the on-field results aren’t yet matching the underlying metrics.
