Slammers Youth Rapsodo Hitting 2025
Snowballs are back + a look at the beauty of year-over-year tracking.
Part 1 of 2. Next week, we’ll look at Slammers Youth Loden Evaluations.
All youth coaches have received all data on their teams, so if there are any immediate curiosities, they should be able to provide the data. All data from youth testing (Rapsodo and Loden) is in the Slammers Dashboard and all families should be able to access player profiles from the web. If you haven’t logged in before, you should be able to use the email address that received this blog to reset your password. We appreciate your continued patience as we work through some technical issues with the mobile app. If you are unable to log-in through the web, please shoot me an email: mpajak@slammersbaseball.com.
Below you will find a couple of hitting leaderboards. All hitting evals were standardized (pitch velocity and bat size) and all data was captured on the Rapsodo 3.0 unit - Rapsodo’s newest piece of tech that we’re excited to have in both facilities.
If you’ve read past blogs, this may be repetitive, but for all the new families catching up… We have a handful of in-house metrics (Swing Score, Junior Barrel Percentage, and Junior Snowball Count) that we use to track contact quality in our hitters during hitting evaluations. These metrics are available for all players to view in the Slammers Dashboard. Much like pitching, it’s natural for the eyes to gravitate towards the speed of the ball (velocity). I would encourage everyone who has made it this far to continue reading about why Swing Score is so much more valuable in dialing in on contact quality during our evaluations.
How Swing Score works in a nutshell: a 90 mph exit velocity topped off the plate may not make it to the shortstop. A 66 mph line drive to leftfield may be a double. The 66 mph line drive will have a higher Swing Score…
Before we get into leaderboards, I wanted to draw attention to some of the cool ways that players and coaches are able to see tangible, objective progress using the data we’re capturing during these evaluations.
Slammers Dashboard Graphs
Families can log into the Slammers Dashboard and view trend graphs for all of the metrics we share back with the player. Blue lines represent age-averages and red lines represent your player. Hover over points on the graph for age and metric information. Hover over the graph title for a description of what the metric means.
Slammers Dashboard Detailed Data
The Slammers Dashboard provides full detailed breakdowns of each eval session. As you can see in the example below, this player has seen steady improvement in his swing score from March 2023 to May 2024. Improvement is a common theme amongst our youth players as they get more competitive reps and they continue to physically mature.
Slammers Hit Eval Team Tracking
All data from the first round of youth evals was shared with coaches earlier this week. It’s cool to see the year-to-year improvements that teams are making as a whole. A few examples below, but this trend is consistent across every youth team at both North and South. Sometimes weekly training can feel monotonous - this is a good reminder that small gains are being compounded daily.
Swing Score
A quick overview on Swing Score: exit velocity, launch angle, spin direction (back spin is ideal to optimize carry), and spin rate (too much or too little spin can impact optimal ball flight) are the ingredients that go into this fine metric.
Every swing that records on the Rapsodo gets a Swing Score on a 0-10 scale using the above ingredients. The better the ingredients, the higher the Swing Score. This is the same scale that is used for ALL players at Slammers. Over time, players will be able to track improvements in their Swing Score as they get older.
Junior Barrel Percentage
A few questions to answer before we get to the leaderboard here…
What constitutes a Junior Barrel? Any swing that results in a Swing Score of 6 or greater. This metric was specifically created for our younger players (a Barrel is any Swing Score of 8 or higher).
To tally a Junior Barrel, you need to hit it hard, on a line, with the right amount of backspin…
And what is Junior Barrel Percentage? Pretty simple: if a player tallies (2) Junior Barrels during a (10) swing eval on Rapsodo, their Junior Barrel Percentage is (20%) for the session.
Now, who was barreling baseballs during youth hitting evals…
Junior Snowball Count
This section will pay homage to every Slammers youth player that recorded a Junior Snowball during their latest hitting evaluation. Whereas a Junior Barrel is any hit with a Swing Score of 6, a Junior Snowball is any hit with a Swing Score of 7 - a much rarer occurrence for a youth player. But again, this is the big prize we’re chasing when we get in the cage with the Rapsodo on.
Junior Snowball = you need to hit it hard(er), on a line, with the right amount of backspin.
110 youth players tallied at least 1 Junior Snowball during their hitting evaluation session (up from 99 last year), and the trio of Noah Newman (Slammers 303), Deklyn Schnitger (Austin 14U), and Nicholas Shiplett (Austin 14U) led the way with 5 each!
Team Hitting Leaderboard
See below for a full list of all Slammers Youth teams that participated in hitting evaluation sessions this winter - listed in order by team average Swing Score. Slammers Harper 14U’s team average of 5.3 is a new Slammers youth team record topping Slammers Bozied 14U’s 5.1 back in 2023.
