Evaluating bat-to-ball skills isn’t anything new to baseball; scouts have been doing it for decades. While their way of evaluating bat-to-ball skills isn’t necessarily bad, it desperately needs improvement. Enter smash factor. We use smash factor as a way to quantify a hitter’s bat-to-ball skills. Smash factor measures two things:  1. Quality of contact – How well do you square the ball up when you swing? 2. How good are you at making contact? Essentially, how often do you put the ball in play, whiff, or hit a foul ball?  Quality of contact measures how well you square the ball up. It answers the questions, can you hit it on the sweet spot, and can you do that often? In technical terms, we are measuring your collision efficiency, or how well you transferred bat speed into exit velocity. To measure how good you are at actually making contact, smash factor assigns a value of 0 to any swing that results in a whiff or foul ball. By penalizing whiffs and foul balls, smash is able to dete...