I was doing some guided meditation this morning (scrolling slowly down through Baseball Savant’s “Pitcher Visualization Report” for Joe Kelly—try it, it’s quite soothing), when—as is always the case when one meditates—something divine was revealed to me.
Joe Kelly didn’t allow any barrels this year.
What’s a barrel, you might ask? Well, in some contexts, it’s what Wisconsin professional (and occasionally amateur) teams play to celebrate good things happening, like the Bucks winning or the Packers having a home game or the Brewers reaching the seventh inning stretch without getting caught stealing signs.
But in this case, we’re talking about the Statcast term for the “most high-value batted balls.” These are the contact with an Expected Batting Average of at least .500 and an Expected Slugging Percentage of at least 1.500, which means that when a ball is hit at this exit velocity and launch angle, you can expect it to be at least a double more often than not.
This season, roughly 7.620% of balls in play were barrels. A number dragged down considerably (from 7.624%) by Joe Kelly.
Of every ball put into play against Joe Kelly, not a single one was a barrel. Not one! The man went an entire (shortened) season (in which he was suspended for a chunk and hurt for another chunk) and didn’t allow a single ball to be hit hard enough to be an expected double or better.
And no, this isn’t common. Among pitchers with as many “batted ball events” as Kelly, only nine others pulled off the feat—and of those, balls in play against our hero had the lowest average exit velocity of those against any of the ten.
Historic.
