Spring training is when everyone is in the best shape of their life, hitters have made swing adjustments and added muscle to their physiques and pitchers have all gone to Drive Line or Tread and have new and improved pitching arsenals and velocities. It’s also when players get hurt or pull a muscle two days into camp.

It’s very easy to look at spring training stats and make inferences on beat reporter blurbs about what every team’s players have been up to all offseason, but the simple truth is these guys are Major League Baseball players. If they are not doing everything in their power to make themselves better and healthier over the offseason, they won’t succeed.

The types of “improvements” mentioned above should be the standard, not the headline. We should also avoid blowing up the importance of small sample sizes with these types of reports.

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Let’s add some context to this before we get into which statistics we should pay attention to. In 2024, the highest number of plate appearances in the Minors was 63. Let’s look at how many plate appearances it takes for certain hitting statistics to stabilize:

• Strikeout Rate: 50-60 plate appearances
• Walk Rate: 120 plate appearances (around mid-May)
• Contact Rate: 100 plate appearances (early May)
• Exit Velocities: 40 balls in play (BIP)
• Groundball/Flyball Rate: 80 BIP (early May)
• ISO: 160 at-bats (late May)
• Slugging Percentage: 310-320 at-bats (early July)
• On-Base Percentage (OBP): 460 plate appearances (late July/early August)
• Batting Average On Balls In Play/Batting Average (BABIP/BA): 900-ish plate appearances (roughly 1.5 seasons)

Therefore, based on these stabilization rates, the only useful data we are likely to get out of spring training comes from strikeout rates and maybe some exit velocity numbers. This also only applies to players who get the most playing time. Only 64 hitters finished spring training in 2024 with more than 50 at-bats.

What about pitchers? Let’s look at the stabilization rates on some important pitching data:

• Strikeout Rate: 15-20 innings
• Swinging Strike Rate (SwStr%): 15-20 innings
• Walk Rate: 40 innings (mid-May for starting pitchers, half-a-season for relief pitchers)
• Exit Velocities: 60-65 innings (June for starting pitchers, full season for relief pitchers)
• Stuff+: About 80 pitches

Only 12 pitchers recorded over 20 innings in spring training last year, while 85 pitched over 15 innings, so there is actually a good amount of evidence that strikeout rate and stuff+ might stabilize, but these numbers can also be skewed by pitching against weaker/Minor League competition. Even these numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt, but they at least meet stabilization ratios.

Where does this leave us?

I’m going to give you the five most important stats that matter for spring training, though some of these might not be standard statistics and you may have to dig a little deeper to discover this information.

Spring Training Stats That Matter

1. Starting Pitchers: Strikeout/Walk Ratio (K/BB Ratio)

Strikeout rates may or may not have stabilized by this point. For starters, stuff+ surely has if the spring training data is available, while walk rates haven’t. Rather than watching the rate stats, look at pure strikeout and walk numbers. The sample size isn’t large enough for walk rake to matter, but a pure strikeout-to-walk (K/BB) ratio is telling. A few examples are below…

Last spring, Jack Flaherty had 26 strikeouts and four walks (6.5 K/BB ratio). He proceeded to have the best season of his career (or at least since 2019).

Shota Imanaga finished with 25 strikeouts and three walks, which should have told us something about what he was about to unleash on the league.

Reid Detmers was one of the strikeout leaders with 24, but if we looked at strikeouts alone, we might have expected a killer season. He also had 11 walks for a 2.18 K/BB ratio, which is pretty bad. The stats told us a story if we were paying attention.

Ryan Pepiot had 24 strikeouts and four walks — another breakout season.

Luis Gil had 23 strikeouts and six walks, showing much better command than he ever had, which led to a breakout season.

Joe Boyle, who was hyped by some coming into last season, recorded 19 strikeouts and 15 walks — this also told us a story.

2. Hitters: Games Started With “A” Squad

This is not easy to find. You would need to watch game logs to keep up with this stat. Watching to see which players are starting with the A squad vs. which players come in later and where certain players hit tells us of a team’s plans.

I’ve noted this before, but I saw the Nationals 2-3 times in spring training last year. Each time, James Wood started with the rest of their expected starting nine. Dylan Crews would enter the game each time in the fourth or fifth inning.

This told me Wood was ahead of Crews on the depth chart. Not only that, but Wood was hitting third in their starting lineup, which told me they thought he was a future superstar and would likely be called up earlier in the season or even break camp.

These things are a little intuitive and subjective, but you can make some pretty accurate inferences based on who is starting with which players and where they are hitting in the lineup. Are the upper starting pitcher prospects pitching in front of the likely Opening Day lineup? Or in the B squad game? Are they starting games or piggybacking? These things matter.

3. Hitters: Hits

This is a stat I more or less completely ignore for fantasy in the regular season. However, total hits in spring training give us insights into playing time and team interest. This, combined with how much they are taking advantage of playing time increases the odds they may break camp. This is the statistic that turned me on to a Matt McLain debut and breakout in 2023.

If we we paid attention to 2024, we might have noticed Wyatt Langford led all spring training batters with 23 hits. He also broke camp.

We would have also noticed Lawrence Butler had 20 hits in 55 at-bats… after he had only 26 hits in 123 at-bats in his MLB debut in 2023. Something changed.

Ketel Marte had 20 hits, which, if we read correctly, would have shown us his 2023 rebound was not a fluke and 2022 was the outlier season.

Parker Meadows had 19 hits. This one is trickier because he got off to a terrible start in 2024 and was sent down to the Minors, only breaking out when he was called back up. If we had read more into this, we should have trusted his talent and held onto him through the demotion and struggles.

Alec Burleson had 18 hits and broke out after a terrible 2023.

4. Pitchers: Swinging Strike Rate (SwStr%)

As noted above, swinging strike rate stabilizes rather quickly (approximately 70 batters faced), thus it’s a good measure to pit against strikeouts to confirm whether or not the strikeouts we have seen are sticky. The more these correlate together in the small spring training sample size, the more likely any progression made in the offseason is real.

A.J. Puk is one example. He didn’t make it as a starter but was fantastic in a relief role. Puk finished spring training with 23 strikeouts and only four walks with a 30% swinging strike rate.

Some other interesting names from 2024 spring training who had high swinging strike rates and then broke out:

• Ronel Blanco: 26.4%
• Matt Waldron: 35.1%
• Alec Marsh: 22.7%
• Shane Bieber: 22.3%
• Albert Suarez: 18.7%

Keep in mind this is less sticky, though, as we are only looking at a small sample size and also only looking at stuff stats without getting a glimpse into command or run prevention. This means we still end up with guys like Mitch Spence (22.4%) and Jake Woodford (23.2%).

5. Hitters: Walk/Strikeout Rate (BB/K)

Getting bat speed metrics in spring training would be ideal as this would allow us to compare a player’s bat speed to his career (or at least to the previous season). It would also tell us if a player is about to break out or drop off. Without bat speed, we can use walk-to-strikeout rates (BB/K) as another measure in comparison to their career average split.

For example, Paul Goldschmidt had six walks and 20 strikeouts (.3 BB/K) in spring training last year. His career BB/K is .56, so he was twice as bad as normal in the plate skills department. Generally, an aging player won’t lose his plate vision but will lose bat speed, resulting in the loss of skills and an increase in strikeout rate.

Nolan Jones had five walks and 22 strikeouts (.23 BB/K) as a Guardian in 2022 (pre-breakout). He had a .26 BB/K in Colorado. In his breakout season, he had a .42 BB/K (twice as good). Maybe we should have realized he was playing closer to Guardians Nolan Jones than Rockies Nolan Jones in spring training when he was being drafted so high.

On the flip (positive) side, a batter like Jake Cronenworth finished with 10 walks and six strikeouts (1.67 BB/K). This is after coming off a career-worst 2023 season with a .47 BB/K.

Again, these are small sample sizes. Walk rates have not had time to stabilize, but strikeout rates have by this point. Thus, out of the small sample sizes we see in spring training, this means more than most of the other stats. We might have also possibly seen some positive regression back to his career norm by looking into this statistic.

James Wood also rocked a stellar 11 walks to 13 strikeouts, previewing his breakout.

All-in-all, take spring training stats with a grain of salt. However, there are small hints and inferences, especially concerning playing time and strikeouts, that may prove of some use.

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