As coaches, our job is to understand how our hitters' paths create their various ball flights. We don't need to have all the answers right away, but we do need to be capable of understanding what goes into creating their path so that we can solve problems as they arrive.
In the spirit of creating more informed coaches, here's the swing laid out in three dimensions, with the numbers and the explanations attached.
Swinging up is good. Swinging down? Not so much.
The barrel works in an arc. Our path begins in the downswing and climbs as we enter the zone.
This is the vertical piece of the path. Is the barrel working up or down through contact? Positive attack angles between 4 and 16 are good. Anything negative is bad. Scrub the swing and watch it change frame to frame. Only the value at contact is the attack angle.
Savant measures this as the angle of the swing plane relative to the ground. Flat and level is 0°, straight up and down is 90°, and the big league average sits near 32°. While attack angle is where the barrel is traveling at contact, tilt shows us how flat or upright the swing plane is.
One thing to keep straight: swing tilt is measured about 40 milliseconds before contact, not at it. Vertical bat angle is the angle of the barrel at the moment of contact. They describe the same idea at two different instants, so they will not always agree, and they are not interchangeable.
How far out in front of the plate the ball is met. Because the bat is swinging on an arc, the point in time that you make contact can directly impact your attack angle. Deeper and the barrel is still working down. Further out front and the attack angle is generally higher. This relationship between attack angle and point of contact is a big reason why we should encourage our hitters to make contact in front of the plate. If you're using HitTrax, a good rule of thumb is 6 to 12 inches out front.
Attack angle can provide insight into a couple of different areas of the swing. First, it tells you where in the arc you caught the ball. Catch it deep and the barrel is still working down, so the number is low. Catch it further out front and the barrel has turned the corner and is climbing, so the number is high.
It also flags the glaring stuff. Some hitters genuinely swing up and some swing down, and that shows up here too.
Also of note, a season average can fool you. A hitter who catches one ball at 20° and the next at 0° averages 10°, and so does the hitter who sits near 10° on every swing. Those are not the same hitter. What matters is how often they live in the ideal range, which Savant tracks directly as an attack angle sweet-spot rate: the share of competitive swings landing between 5 and 20°. The range this page lands on from the same season is a little tighter, 4 to 16°. Swing up, and give yourself the largest margin for error you can.
Remember, tilt and attack angle are not the same thing, but mixing them up can be a common mistake. Tilt is a feature of the plane, while attack angle measures a period of time in that plane. Raise tilt and change nothing else on the visualizer and you can see the arc get more vertical while the number at contact doesn't move.
So why carry both numbers? Savant defines attack angle as the vertical direction the barrel is moving at contact, and swing tilt as the angle of the swing plane relative to the ground. You can gather information from each metric on its own, but combining them allows for a more put-together idea of how your barrel is working through space.
First and foremost, invest in a Blast Motion. The impact a single sensor can make on a program is immense. For attack angle, it's the best and easiest way to make sure all of your hitters' barrels are working in a positive direction vertically. HitTrax is going to be the best tool to quantifiably track point of contact data, and it provides an extremely tight feedback loop in training. If you have both of these resources, wear the Blast while hitting on the HitTrax and boom, you have a pretty sweet training setup that gives your athletes the feedback necessary for learning to occur.
Don't have these resources? That's where we have to get creative. One way to track point of contact is slowed-down side-angle video. Make sure the plate is in view and watch where your hitters are making contact in relation to it. This angle can also provide some insight into whether they are swinging up or down. Pair video review with tracking batted balls and you should be able to piece together what your hitters are doing with the bat in the box. When resources are lacking, creativity is necessary, and if we value providing resources to our hitters as coaches, we will do what it takes to get them this information.
Similar to how the path is moving vertically, it is also moving horizontally.
Two metrics describe direction. Horizontal attack angle is where the barrel is traveling. Horizontal bat angle is where the bat is aimed.
This is the direction the barrel is traveling, side to side, at the moment it meets the ball. It plays a large role in why the ball ends up where it does. Negative is toward the pull side, positive toward the opposite field, zero is straight back at the pitcher.
Generally we want to see the barrel working slightly to the pull side, which means slightly negative. A positive horizontal attack angle means the barrel is traveling toward the opposite field. Obviously, this would make it difficult to efficiently pull the ball in the air.
HBA is telling us where the bat is aimed at contact. The difference can be seen well in the visualizer.
Think of a car sliding on ice. It has a direction that it is pointed, but it can also have a different direction that it is sliding. The same can be said for the barrel. There is a good chance that they line up consistently, but they can come apart. A great example of a hitter who would show a mismatched HAA and HBA is Derek Jeter. He did it all of the time.
Keeping an eye on the gap is important. A mismatch in HBA and HAA can lead to some less than ideal spin and flight off the barrel.
Point of contact and direction are not the same thing, but they can be tied together. Generally speaking, if a righty is making contact out in front of the plate with an efficient turn behind the ball, there's a good chance their barrel face is oriented to the pull side. Alternatively, if that same hitter is consistently catching pitches deep, there's a good chance their barrel is oriented to the opposite field. This isn't a hard and fast rule, and there are outliers, but point of contact does need to be considered alongside horizontal attack angle.
Check out the graphic. The lines running out from the barrel give you a good visual of where the ball would go based on where the barrel is facing.
Horizontal attack angle or horizontal bat angle can be simple solves for some ball flight issues. If a righty can only get the ball to right field, go look at their horizontal attack angle. If the barrel is facing that way at contact, the ball flight makes complete sense, and you have your answer instead of a guess.
The fix isn't always the obvious one. It could mean making more contact out front. It could also mean the hitter needs to release the barrel to the pull side more efficiently. Either way, a metric like horizontal attack angle hands you a starting point, and that's most of what these numbers are for. They tell you why the ball flight looks the way it does.
Point of contact and direction as described in this explainer are two areas that I never really considered, or knew I should consider, before my time at Driveline. In my experience, once you start considering the role they play in how your hitters generate ball flight, it gets much easier to piece together what their issues may be. Pay attention to variables like these and you will start noticing things you haven't before.
Treat the spray cone as a teaching device. Where a batted ball really goes also depends on pitch location, how square the collision was, and the ball's own sideways movement. The cone shows the barrel's contribution alone, which is the part horizontal attack angle actually measures.
Point of contact remains the same. If you have a HitTrax, you're all set. If you don't, get creative with that side-angle video I talked about previously. Not much changes there.
Direction is a weird one, and there isn't necessarily a device you can buy to give hitters immediate feedback on a screen. Video is our friend here once again. This time we're taking it from the front-facing view and looking at how the barrel is moving through space. This won't be perfect, but it should let us glean some information on glaring issues in a hitter's direction. If you have a hitter with a super pushy path who doesn't release the barrel to the pull side, that's something that will show up on video, and you should be able to get the proper constraints in place to make them stop doing that dumb thing. If you're really feeling like getting weird, overhead video also has the potential to provide a ton of insight into how a hitter's barrel is moving from a direction standpoint. You may have to get creative but it could work. If you need a better visual of something like this, move the scene to a positive 8 direction with a 12-inch point of contact. If the barrel looks like that at contact, there's some work to do.
Speed doesn't just mean your barrels are electric. It also means your mishits are more productive.
A faster bat doesn't need as high of a smash factor to be productive. The best way I can explain it is this. Take two hitters, one with a max exit velo of 110 mph and the other at 95. That 110 mph hitter has the capacity to mishit a ball at hitter number two's max. Hitter number two's mishits will be nowhere near as effective as hitter number one's.
| Hitter | Bat speed | Swing length | Avg EV | xwOBAcon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Giancarlo Stanton | 80.6 | 8.79 | 95.4 | 0.516 |
| Oneil Cruz | 78.8 | 7.76 | 96.7 | 0.433 |
| Junior Caminero | 78.5 | 8.42 | 93.2 | 0.404 |
| Riley Adams | 78.3 | 7.84 | 92.0 | 0.410 |
| Ketel Marte | 78.1 | 8.05 | 92.1 | 0.427 |
How fast the barrel is moving at contact, and the metric that correlates highest with exit velocity. It takes work to change, but it can be trained, and it gets trained all the time. Driveline's rule of thumb is that 1 mph of bat speed is worth about 1.2 mph of exit velocity. Driveline also puts that same 1 mph at roughly 7 feet of distance on batted balls.
Long story short, if there's anything to take from this tool, train hitters to swing the bat fast as often as possible. It will make your offense better.
How far the barrel travels, in feet, from the start of the swing to contact. Longer swings tend to produce higher bat speeds: a longer path gives the barrel more runway to get up to speed. Hitter to hitter, it also doesn't carry the swing-and-miss cost it usually gets blamed for.
Savant calls any swing of 75 mph or more a fast swing. That's where per-swing production crosses league average.
Look at solid contact. Under 75 mph bat speed, the exit velo average is 83 mph. At 75 and up? The average is 91 mph. This trend continues in the good and squared up areas of contact. The catalyst here? Swinging the bat faster.
On good contact, that's the difference between clearing 95 mph 37% of the time and clearing it 96% of the time.
Speed can't rescue extremely poor bat-to-ball skills. You do need some capacity to find the baseball before you can mishit one at a high level. A bad batted ball is a bad batted ball. But if a hitter has the baseline ability to get bat to ball with any sort of efficient smash factor, they can be very successful swinging fast and mishitting baseballs productively.
Swing length is also tied directly to body size. A taller hitter with longer arms produces a longer path at the same intent. An 8-foot swing is probably a red flag on a 5'9" hitter and completely normal on a 6'9" one. Everything here is context dependent.
It's entirely possible that adding bat speed lengthens your hitters' swings. That isn't inherently a bad thing. More often than not it's necessary to see the speed increase at all.
Finally, contact quality here is referring to Driveline's smash factor formula. The typical range is 0.9 to 1.2 for batted balls. In the figure, smash factor is showing the collision quality for that particular swing only.
Blast Motion is again going to be the answer here for bat speed. If you as a coach have the capability to invest in a single sensor, I highly recommend doing so. The ability to swing the bat faster in game is only going to make your hitters better. Training bat speed two to three times a week is a great way to start working your hitters in the right direction. If you don't have a bat speed sensor, track exit velo. If it goes up consistently, there's a pretty good chance your hitters are swinging the bat faster. We could get into smash factor and how that plays a role, but this isn't that kind of tool. If you don't have a HitTrax you can use a radar gun to track exit velo. Again, it all comes down to what you're willing to do to help your hitters improve. Last resort without any resources? Go out on the field and have hitters try to leave the yard. Tell them to swing fast and make sure things are dialed in the weight room. Eventually those guys will start swinging the bat faster.
I also just want to touch on the margin for error piece. I want to make it very clear that bat speed will not immediately take a hitter with negative bat-to-ball skills and make them an All-American. Bat speed takes hitters who already have a relatively decent set of skills and makes them better. It isn't a guarantee of success. Nothing in this game is. Bat speed with bat-to-ball skill is a recipe for success. Bat speed without bat-to-ball skill is a recipe for disaster and a lot of strikeouts.
As previously mentioned, attack angle is measured at contact. That said, we do want our hitters working uphill to that attack angle sooner rather than later.
Roughly 4 to 16 degrees of attack angle. Across the season 91% of hitters average somewhere inside it. Below 4 degrees you still make contact but the damage goes away: the productive rate drops from 11.7% inside the range to 6.2% underneath it. Above 16 degrees you stop making contact at all, with whiffs jumping from 14% to 38%.
Savant's own sweet-spot range uses 5 to 20°, slightly different, but the story remains the same. Swing up and live in a range that allows you to cover as many pitches as possible.
Living in an attack angle range provides a different kind of margin for error than bat speed. Driveline puts it plainly: getting on plane with the pitch gives a hitter a wider window of time and space to make quality contact, so they can still hit it hard while slightly early or late. A swing that isn't on plane needs near-perfect timing.
A range is necessary because of what's known as the descent angle of pitches. That's the angle the baseball is coming at a hitter from the pitcher. The descent angle range is generally somewhere between −4 and −12 degrees, but outliers are certainly possible. Since pitches are working down at an angle, it's a hitter's job to try and get on plane with that angle.
The goal isn't necessarily to match the descent angle exactly. Ideally their attack angle is a bit higher than the descent angle so they can hit the ball in the air. Generally speaking, if hitters are living in a good attack angle range, they are giving themselves the ability to adjust to anything coming at them in that range.
If a hitter has a −5 attack angle and a curveball is moving down toward them at a −11 descent angle, they have no shot to adjust and make contact. If they're facing that same pitch swinging at a 9 degree attack angle, they give themselves a chance to make the adjustment.
If you want a better visual of what matching plane and not matching plane looks like, check out the real tracked swings visual. In the dropdown box there are examples of both.
Guess what? Blast Motion is going to be the answer here again. In case I haven't made it clear enough, I highly recommend investing in at least one if you are a college baseball coach. But let's pretend that one isn't available. Tracking the range as a whole won't really be possible without a sensor, but we should be able to use video to decipher whether a hitter has a deep turn and starts working uphill sooner rather than later.
What we don't want to see is a hitter who has what I refer to as a check-mark bat path. In this scenario you would see the hands work down and then crank the barrel up through the zone. We also want to avoid the pushy knob-to-the-ball approach that keeps the barrel facing right field until the last minute. Ultimately, without being able to track attack angle consistently this may be a little bit tougher, but if you can decipher what you do and don't want to see, video can be effective.
The other piece of hitting development where attack angle range comes into play is approach. In a leverage count, hitters are able to look to do damage and elevate their swings. They are potentially trading a little bit of margin for error for power potential. On the flip side, in two-strike situations, especially in college baseball, hitters are looking to be in play. This means they should be looking for flatter paths and longer time on plane. As coaches, it is important that we are able to communicate this and put our athletes into an environment that allows them to explore both ends of the spectrum.
So, why take the time to try and put something like this together? Ultimately, none of the information in this article is too hard to find. The data came from a simple pull of information from Baseball Savant utilizing Claude Code, and the definitions are all informed by my time at Driveline, though you can find them anywhere.
In reality the answer is pretty simple. I know what it is like to be a college coach and not really know where to look or how to find information that could help you get better at your job. The goal here was to put all of this information into one spot and then provide some direction as to how to potentially go about using it in your day-to-day life as a coach.
Something I am supremely passionate about is trying to contribute to the development of coaches in the profession. Information is out there if you go look for it, and hopefully this can provide a starting point that sparks some curiosity. It is important to note that this article does not come close to covering everything there is to know about bat path and how the different variables of the path interact with each other. Again, it is simply a starting point. Hopefully it is useful to some.