For a hitter, there are few feelings in baseball quite like a no-doubt home run—a swing where the contact is so clean that the batter seemingly knows the ball is gone almost immediately. That feeling comes from essentially maximizing the collision between the bat and ball. MLB’s Statcast system measures this through things like bat speed, exit velocity, launch angle and how efficiently a hitter “squares up” the baseball. Statcast even has a metric called a “Blast,” which describes a swing that combines high bat speed with extremely efficient, squared-up contact; during the 2024 season, those swings produced an average exit velocity of 103.5 mph and a massive 1.182 slugging percentage. When a hitter catches the ball perfectly on the sweet spot with the right trajectory, there is often very little uncertainty left—the ball explodes off the bat and immediately carries toward the seats. Statcast considers launch angles between 8 and 32 degrees its general “sweet-spot” range, while a barrel...