MLB Players Who Can Handle the Heat This Season

Pitching staffs in baseball are throwing harder than ever. Here are the MLB players who can handle the heat, the best by Exit Velocity, and production.

In the current 2019 MLB environment, everyone knows that pitching velocity is king.  Pitchers are throwing harder than ever. Flame throwers back then were guys who threw 95 at the backend of bullpens.  Now, teams are rolling out armies of MLB players that throw 98+ across all levels of the majors and minors.

With the abundance of heat throughout MLB, I thought it would be fun to use Statcast to look at what hitters are responding well to the proliferation of velocity through opposing pitching staffs and who would rather be hitting in 2005.

To get a proper sample size, this exercise is for hitters with at least 50 plate appearances from 2018 to the present day.  The first look is who has had the (dis)pleasure of facing the most pitches over 95 MPH.  The second is who is hitting the ball the hardest against 95+.  The last is who has done the most damage by weighted on-base average (wOBA) and expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) which uses a variety of Statcast metrics determine expected outcomes of batted balls.

Now, some of this has a bit of randomness to it, as a batter can’t determine who he faces throughout the course of a season but after enough plate appearances there starts to be some signal with all of the noise.  Onward to the lists!