From Statcast with love: Breaking down data for Orioles prospects whose performances were tracked last week

Kyle Stowers' power shined through in Charlotte, but so did... Richie Martin? Who else stood out in the Statcast data on the Orioles' farm last week?

One of the fun things about getting to Delmarva and Aberdeen for batting practice is how the Orioles’ staff displays the TrackMan readings on the stadium scoreboard for batting practice, giving the players instant feedback on where the pitch they hit was in the strike zone and how hard it came off the bat.

For someone like me, the value isn’t super significant; I’ll occasionally check it when a ball gets out of the park, or when someone like Jacob Teter is just ripping the ball all over the field and I want to see what the damage was. But outside paying a subscription to a service that provides that information, or being with a team, it’s hard to get that kind of data for minor league players – and it really tells a significant story when you are able to see it.

Norfolk was in Charlotte last week, a stadium equipped with Statcast tracking. Maybe I just missed that everyone was tracking it the whole time (COVID brain), or maybe I’m just a grinder who wanted to complete this exercise, but I got to all of the game pages on Baseball Savant and had some questions I wanted to answer about the underlying data for some of the Orioles’ top prospects.

For the sake of qualifiers, it’s worth noting this was one week of data, and may have been an outlier one way or another. It’s also only the trends or areas I was focused on, and doesn’t mean there aren’t more interesting things happening in Norfolk that I am ignoring on purpose. These are more just the nuggets I was interested in, and they tell a pretty fascinating story.