SPECULATOR: Snap judgments with QBaB

One of the many new additions to the 2021 Baseball Forecaster (and in the works here on the site) was Quality of Batted Balls (QBaB), a metric that boils Statcast measures of exit velocity and launch angle down to a simple three-digit code for every hitter. The original research from Arik Florimonte can be found here, and QBaB's A-F grade thresholds for exit velocity, launch angle, and launch angle tightness are shown below:

 

Earlier this year, Arik looked at how quickly QBAB scores for exit velocity became meaningful and found that for any sample size, a QBaB “A” for Exit Velocity (EV) is correlated with improved QBaB scores over the next 25 Batted balls (1-2 weeks), an "F" portends worse results, and a QBaB EV score of over 100...

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