BANG, or ‘BANG Factor’ to use its full government name, is our stat at HeatRadar. It’s an overall measure of how likely a player is to hit the ball at home-run quality each time they come to the plate, combining Statcast exit velocity, distance, and launch angle with contact rate. Strikeouts and walks both count as an identical zero.
đ„ heating up · đ„¶ cooling off · based on last 15 games of BANG vs season pace (more flames/cubes = more extreme)
Most advanced baseball stats split contact quality into separate columns. Exit velocity tells you how hard the ball was hit. Launch angle tells you the trajectory. Barrel rate tells you how often a hitter combined both into the optimal HR profile. Each is useful, but they live in separate Statcast leaderboards, and no single column tells you whoâs actually about to leave the yard tonight.
BANG combines them into one number, per plate appearance. Every batted ball gets a 0-100 score based on its exit velocity, launch angle, and hit distance, with the curve calibrated to historical HR outcomes (most actual home runs score 60-95 per BBE). Strikeouts and walks count as zero in the denominator, so a hitter who racks up Ks but rarely barrels up doesnât rate above one who makes consistent loud contact.
The result: one column to sort, league-wide. 10+ is elite, 8 to 10 is great, around 6 is average, and below 6 is a hitter you can comfortably fade in HR props. Those thresholds come from a full season of results rather than a preseason guess; nobody has finished a year above 11.
Statcast already produces a wall of expected stats: xBA, xSLG, xwOBA, xHR. Each is rigorously calibrated for its specific outcome (xwOBA for run value, xBA for hit probability). BANG is different in that itâs calibrated for HR specifically and reported per plate appearance instead of per batted ball event, which is the unit that matters when youâre deciding which players to back in a player-prop or DFS lineup.
If you want the full Statcast metric drill-down (exit velocity leaders, barrel rate leaders, hard-hit %, launch angle distribution), open the Player Stats page. If you want one number that wraps them into HR-likelihood per appearance, this leaderboard is it.
Itâs a HeatRadar stat, built from MLB Statcast data. Every batted ball is scored 0-100 by its exit velocity, launch angle, and hit distance, then averaged per plate appearance with strikeouts and walks zeroing the contact slot.
Above 10 is elite and only a handful of hitters get there in a season; the top mark this year is 10.7. From 8 to 10 is a genuinely good bat. Around 6 is league average, and under 6 is a hitter worth fading in home run props.
One number worth knowing separately: a single batted ball is scored 0 to 100, and most actual home runs land between 60 and 95. The per-plate-appearance figure on this leaderboard is much lower than that because strikeouts and walks enter as zeros, which is the whole point. A hitter who crushes the ball twice a week is not the same bet as one who puts it in play every night.
Backtested across 240,852 MLB batter-games, hitters in the elite BANG band went deep 5.4 times more often than hitters in the poor band, and 1.6 times more often than league average.
That gap is the reason the HR Model is built on it rather than on exit velocity alone. Plenty of metrics correlate with power; the question is whether the separation is wide enough to bet into, and a 5.4x spread between the top and bottom of the scale is.
Everywhere. This leaderboard ranks every hitter and pitcher by BANG. The HR Model uses it to project todayâs home run picks. The Todayâs Pitchers page ranks every starting pitcher by BANG-against (the contact quality theyâre giving up). The Bullpens and Team Batting pages roll BANG up by unit and team.
Daily, after the previous nightâs games finalize in Statcast (usually around 5am ET).