Players send me their exit velocity numbers all the time. Ninety-four off the tee, three exclamation points after it. I tell them congratulations, because it is a good number and they worked for it. Then I ask what the ball did.
Usually they do not know. Nobody has asked them that before.
That is most of what I want to say about exit velocity. It is a real number. It is worth having. And on its own it tells you almost nothing about whether a hitter is going to produce on Friday night.
Why this one number took over
Exit velocity won because it is easy. It is a single figure, it appears on a screen a second after contact, and it goes up when you get stronger. You can post it. A recruiter can read it in a line of text without watching you hit. Showcases put it on a leaderboard. Everybody involved has a reason to like it.
I want to be fair to it. Bat speed and the ball speed that comes off it are genuinely predictive at the top of the game. If a hitter cannot produce force, there is a ceiling on him and no amount of plan is going to lift it. I am not telling anybody that strength does not matter, and I am not interested in being contrarian for the sake of it.
What I am telling you is that it is one of several things that have to be true at the same time, and it is the only one most players are tracking.
A hard ground ball is still an out
Here is the version every coach has watched happen. A hitter squares one up, the number on the machine is the best he has ever seen, and the ball is at the second baseman on the second hop. He is thrilled. The scorebook says nothing happened.
Direction and spin are not details. They decide whether the number means anything. The same force applied a quarter inch lower on the ball is a line drive that carries, and applied a quarter inch higher it is a roller that dies before it reaches the dirt. The hitter did not do anything differently in his own body. The outcome is completely different.
So when a player tells me how hard he hits it, my next question is always about the shape of the ball. If he cannot answer, we have found the thing to work on, and it is not the weight room.
The part that worries me more
If chasing the number only wasted time, I would not write about it. The real problem is that chasing it changes the swing.
Try to produce your highest reading and watch what your body does. You will load bigger than you need to. You will start a little earlier so you can get more into it. Your front side will fly open because that is where the extra speed feels like it comes from. The barrel will travel on a longer path, and a longer path is a slower decision.
Every one of those is a trade. You bought three miles an hour and you paid for it with timing and with contact quality. In a cage with a known pitch at a known speed, you never see the bill. In a game against someone changing speeds on you, the bill arrives in the first at-bat.
I have had hitters come to me with a career-best number and a batting average going the wrong direction, and they could not understand how both were true at once. They are not in conflict. One caused the other.
The question I would rather a hitter ask
In the cage, instead of asking how hard that was, ask whether that ball would have played.
It is a harder question because it has no readout. You have to look at where the ball went and what it did on the way. Did it leave on a line. Did it carry or did it fall. Was it a ball you could have handled in a game, or did you have to reach out and get cheated to touch it at all.
That last one gets overlooked constantly. A hitter can produce a beautiful number on a pitch he had no business swinging at. The swing was good and the decision was bad, and the number only graded the swing. This is where it connects back to approach, which is the thing I believe separates players more than anything else. A plan tells you which pitches are yours. Force tells you what happens when you get one. You need the plan first, because force applied to the wrong pitch is just a loud out.
What to do about it this week
Keep measuring. I mean that. Write the number down, because over a season it tells you whether your training is working.
Then write a second thing next to it. One word for what the ball did. Line, roller, fly, whatever you saw. By the end of a week you will have something far more useful than a personal best, which is a picture of what your swing actually produces when it is working.
If your rounds are on a tee, move the tee around. A hitter who only ever sets it middle and belt high is training one swing and finding out nothing about the ones he will need. Put it inside, put it on the outer third, put it down, and keep asking the same question about shape.
And if someone is throwing to you, give up on the readout for a round. Mix the pitches so you have to recognize what is coming, then judge the round on how many balls you hit on a line off pitches you chose to swing at. That number will be lower than you like. It is also the one that predicts Friday.
Where this goes
The reason I keep pushing on this is the same reason I push on everything else. I want a hitter to be able to coach himself.
A player who only knows his exit velocity has to be handed an answer by somebody every time production dips, because a single figure cannot tell him why. A player who knows what his good ball looks like, and knows which pitches he is hunting, can walk back to the dugout in the third inning and work out what to change on his own. That is worth more over a career than any number I could help him add.
So post the number if you want. It is yours and you earned it. Just make sure you can also answer the quieter question, because that is the one the game is asking.
That is the kind of work performance coaching is built around, since it looks at your games rather than only your cage sessions. If you are in the Phoenix area and want to work on this in person, that is what lessons are for.