MLB Savant Statcast Search (2025)

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Feb 18, 2017

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I wrote about free MLB DFS research tools the other day and MLB Savant was one of the main focal points. More specifically, the Statcast Search tool. It’s an extremely powerful tool that has many different purposes. In this article, I will talk about some ways to use it specifically for identifying nice batter matchups.

One thing you will notice is that I will reference FanGraphs data to help narrow down my searches inside of this tool. You don’t have to do that if you have time to check out every team on the slate and want to more thoroughly look at everyone. But I imagine most of you reading this have day jobs and don’t have unlimited time. Thus, I’m trying to provide a method that allows you to dig deeper than the average player without requiring a full day worth of work researching.

Side Note: You’ll want to make sure your searches in the beginning of the season are looking at the 2016 season data until enough data is available for 2017.

We’re not talking about BvP in the sense of how a batter did facing a particular pitcher. Statcast allows us to see how a particular batter fares vs the handedness of a pitcher but also a pitch type.

For example, let’s say the DeSclafani is facing the Pirates. We know from FanGraphs that DeS has historically struggled vs lefties. You could filter the below by season if you wanted as well.

MLB Savant Statcast Search (3)

The next thing we’ll want to do is look up DeS pitch types and speeds to see what type of pitch he’s thrown. This is more useful to look at in a yearly breakdown to see if you are noticing changes in trends of what he’s throwing currently vs his entire career.

MLB Savant Statcast Search (4)

I don’t personally break down the different types of fastballs but you can if you want. In fact, I’m not necessarily interested in that type of pitch at all. The majority of MLB pitchers will have the fastball as the type of pitch they throw most and if you’re in the big leagues, one should hope you can hit a fastball. It’s worth keeping in mind if a pitcher is throwing his fastball 80% of the time or something like that but what we want to find out is what is his go to secondary pitch that he throws a lot.

If we look above we can see that DeS relies on his slider quite a bit when he’s not throwing a fastball but his curveball looks to have picked up significantly last year and will be something to keep an eye on as the season progresses. It doesn’t appear to have impacted his slider percentage though so he’s pulling from his usual fastball throws to get more curveballs in there. We should probably see how the Pirates fare against RHP for sliders and curveballs. More specifically we’re interested in the lefties due to DeS history vs lefties but we shouldn’t toss out righties if they matchup well vs the pitch type and help complete a stack for a lineup.

All right, so now we have the data we need to run our search. Here’s what we’ll do on the form:

  • Player Type — swap from pitcher to batter (we want to see how the batter performs)
  • Pitcher Handedness — put to whatever the handedness the pitcher is. In this example we’ll do right.
  • Pitch Type — use the main secondary pitch of the pitcher. If there’s two decent % for secondary pitches, I would recommend running them separately and together to see the results and how they may vary.
  • Pitch Velocity — not all sliders, curveballs, etc. are created equal. Be careful here though because you could limit your sample quite dramatically if you filter too much. The velocity listed above is an average so your safe bet is to do a +/- of 5 around that speed. But even then it could limit the data a bit. If you’re not getting a good sample size, you can remove the velocity. Pitch type with no velocity is better than just looking at handedness.
  • Team — if you know the confirmed lineup, you could add the players individually so you are only seeing the active starting lineup. Otherwise selecting the team can do the trick but you may have useless results show up for players not in the lineup.
  • Sort By — I personally like to see the ISO results because most DFS sites are heavily weighted to guys who get extra bases or homeruns. I wish they had wOBA as an option but your best bet is to glance at BA and ISO to see the results. Another thing to consider is Average Exit Velocity. The higher the number the better. If a guy is hitting a pitch type with an average EV in the mid 90’s with a low BA but with a high ISO, he could just be getting unlucky. And if you really want to dig in deep here, check out the launch angle. High average EV with a launch angle average over 20 could mean HR are just a couple swings away.
  • Min # of Results — this allows you to weed out those who have only faced the pitch settings you did above X amount of times. You don’t have to do this but remember if you are looking at a sample of seven results, the accuracy of data is in question due to sample size. If it’s extreme enough, you could consider using it. Or you can just filter it out to not show.

So let’s see the results vs a RHP who throws a slider… (I said don’t show unless over 10 results)

MLB Savant Statcast Search (5)

Josh Bell is a young player and has limited plate appearances but is a switch hitter and has historically performed better vs RHP. If he happened to make the lineup this day, it would be something to consider.

Interestingly enough, the next three batters are righties and because of the results we should consider them if they help complete our stack.

Let’s look at curveballs since DeS had a double digit throwing percentage of curveballs last year.

MLB Savant Statcast Search (6)

It’s pretty clear that the Pirates have performed at a much higher level with curveballs vs sliders. One would hope that the catcher for DeS would know this and stay away from that pitch vs these guys. And since it’s not his main secondary pitch, we could make an educated guess that this is what would happen.

Last but not least, we’ll take a peek at the fastball results just to see how they do in general vs RHP.

MLB Savant Statcast Search (7)

Looking at all this data, the players I’m most interested in are Sean Rodriguez, Kang, Cutch and maybe Polanco. Matt Joyce is a player that is always in play vs RHP when he is in the starting lineup for the Pirates but he’s often pulled so early that if he doesn’t do anything with his first two AB, you could be sitting with a goose egg. As you can see he crushes RHP for fastballs. Overall, depending on how large the slate is, this might not be a team I’m looking to target for batters. If it was being played at Great American, the players definitely get a boost.

You hooked on Statcast yet?

You’ll get better and faster at these searches as time goes on. When the season starts, FanGraphs will enable their customer leaderboard searches which will allow you to more easily figure out which pitchers you’re going to want to attack and that will help narrow down the teams you want to look at. I’ll write another piece on FanGraphs and how to get the most of those features later.

There are so many more ways to use the Statcast Search that you could probably write a full on book. This is one of my go to searches during MLB season and it helps highlight batters I want to target in an efficient manner. I hope this helps you as much as it helps me.

Do you have a tip or suggestion that I didn’t include? Make sure to drop a comment below.

MLB Savant Statcast Search (2025)
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