Exit Velocity
EVHow fast the ball leaves the bat, measured in miles per hour, used as a proxy for how hard a hitter actually strikes the ball.
Exit velocity is the speed of the ball immediately after contact. It is popular because it measures the swing rather than the outcome - a scorched line drive caught at short and a bloop single over second look identical in a box score and nothing alike on a radar reading.
That is genuinely useful at older ages, where the gap between hitters is real and results are noisy over small samples. It is much less useful at youth ages, where it mostly measures physical maturity. A thirteen-year-old who grew six inches over the winter posts a better number than a technically superior teammate who did not.
Treat it as one input on a swing, not a ranking. The most common misuse in youth baseball is to publish a leaderboard of it, which rewards the kids who were born in September and discourages the ones born in July.
What is exit velocity in baseball?
The speed of the ball as it leaves the bat, in miles per hour. It measures contact quality directly rather than inferring it from whether the ball found a fielder.
Is exit velocity useful for youth players?
Only as one input among several. At youth ages it largely reflects physical maturity, so using it as a ranking tends to reward older or earlier-developing players rather than better hitters.
Let the scorebook keep itself.
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