The 120 Club Is Closed This Season

Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images Back in March, I wrote about Jac Caglianone’s entry into the 120 Club. Even during a spring training game, when the brawny Royal sent a line drive into the right field gap at 120.2 mph, it was news. Statcast has been measuring exit velocity since 2015, and one thing we’ve learned from the data is that batted balls don’t get hit that hard very often. In fact, I can tell you the exact frequency. Between spring training, the regular season, the playoffs and the All-Star Game, Statcast has registered an exit velocity for just under 1.45 million batted balls. Twenty-nine of those balls were hit at least 120 mph. That works out to 0.002% of batted balls. It’s not never, but it’s not all that far from never. If you’re willing to include spring training, Caglianone became just the eighth person to join the club, out of 2,593 players who have registered an EV, which means this skill is limited to just 0.231% of the player population. Still, we’ve seen at least one ball hit 120 mph in the regular season in every year of the Statcast era. But with just 11 days left in the regular season, that streak looks like it’s about to be snapped. Last year we saw three balls hit at least 120 mph, and in 2024 we saw six of them. So far, the hardest-hit ball of the 2026 regular season belongs to usual exit velocity culprit Oneil Cruz, who turned around a Foster Griffin cutter for a 119.0-mph double all the way back in April. And that’s it. Caglianone is still the last person to reach 120 mph, in a game that didn’t count. The only other player to broach 118 mph is Yordan Alvarez, who has managed to do it twice. For the most part, this is just a statistical anomaly. As fun as it would be, I don’t think we can or should blame this on the composition of the baseball. Over at The Athletic, Eno Sarris and Evan Drellich reported on this year’s ball drama, but they were talking about how the ball was livelier. Moreover, that discussion was centered on how drag affects its flight through the air, not about the coefficient of restitution that determines whether it jumps off the bat faster. That said, it’s worth noting that exit velocity is down across the league. On its own, that’s not particularly notable. Since 2015, EV has consistently performed a delicate two-step, jumping upward in the first year, then dropping back down in the second. The drop has almost always been a bit smaller than the initial rise, though, which has led EV to creep from 88.2 mph in 2015 to a record of 89.4 mph in 2025. This year’s mark is 88.8 mph, a drop of 0.6 that’s the second-largest ever, and it’s fairly evenly distributed. You Aren't a FanGraphs Member It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. You want to read this article. 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A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. When I say it’s evenly distributed, I mean that the EV of the average player is down. I pulled the average EV and the hard-hit rate of every player who put at least 150 balls in play in both 2025 and 2026. It’s a sample of 242 players, and as you’d expect, some hit the ball harder and some players hit the ball softer. The overall trend, though, was down. Of that group, 74 saw their EV rise, while 161 saw it dip. The average player lost 0.6 mph and 2.1 percentage points of hard-hit rate. That’s the part that surprised me, and not just because this year’s average bat speed of 72.1 mph is the highest since Statcast started tracking the data in the second half of the 2023 season. Exit velocity drops every two years like clockwork, so I’m not prepared to get too huffy about the fact that this particular drop was a fraction of a tick larger than the ones we’ve seen over the past seven years, especially in a season that was always going to be at least a little bit weird due to the introduction of the ABS challenge system. It surprised me because I had a theory about the reason the league’s average EV was down, and it brings us back to the 120 Club. I mentioned earlier that just seven players have reached this club in the regular season, and their names will not surprise you. You might have noticed that those players have more in common than their shared ability to pulverize a baseball. The 120 Ouch Club in 2026 Player Games Played Giancarlo Stanton 24 Oneil Cruz 87 Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 137 Shohei Ohtani 134 Ronald Acuña Jr. 99 Aaron Judge 65 Gary Sánchez 82 The injury bug has hit this group hard. Guerrero and Ohtani are the only ones who have had something approaching a full season, but Guerrero’s bat speed is down in the midst of the worst offensive year of his career, while Ohtani has been dealing with a nagging injury that now has him on the IL. Judge missed three months this summer with a rib stress fracture and just left Wednesday’s game with right leg tightness. Acuña made two trips to the IL earlier this season with hamstring strains. Sánchez hasn’t missed time due to injury, but he’s a part-time player at this point in his career. Stanton and Cruz are the only players powerful enough to reach 120 mph with what we could generously describe as regularity. Stanton has been out nearly the whole year, while Cruz suffered a broken hand that sapped some of his power. That’s a whole lot of top-of-the-scale bat speed on the shelf. So much, in fact, that I thought it might be enough to exert its own small drag on the entire leaguewide exit velocity. Instead, it looks like the numbers are just down across the board, but all these injuries to the most powerful men in baseball have certainly played a big part in the absence of 120-mph batted balls. None of these players is as young as he used to be (nor, if you want to get cute, is anyone, ever). As Tom Tango established a few years ago, bat speed starts to really drop off around age 32, but it peaks in from 22 to 24. At 27, Guerrero and Cruz are the youngest of the bunch, and in baseball terms that puts them squarely in their primes. However, in terms of the physical and rotational strength that informs pure bat speed, they’re already a couple years past their peak. The 36-year-old Stanton, the 34-year-old Judge, the 32-year-old Ohtani, and even the 28-year-old Acuña have all seen their average bat speeds drop in each progressive season since Statcast started publishing the data in 2024. If we’re going to see more balls hit at least 120 mph, the 120 Club is going to need an infusion of young blood. The group of prospective members isn’t hard to come by. Nine of the 10 balls hit at least 120 mph during the bat-tracking era have come on swings of at least 82 mph. Technically, Statcast says it’s only eight, but I’m counting one swing from Cruz that has no listed bat speed. I’m counting it because Statcast throws out any swing above 88 mph as a likely misclassification, but Cruz is one of the few players who really can get the bat going that fast. He’s credited with 38 swings of at least 87 mph, the most of any player, and over the past three years, he’s also credited with 42 hard-hit balls that have no listed bat speed. Knowing that, here’s the list of players who have taken at least 300 swings this year and broken 82 mph at least 7% of the time. It’s bonkers that Cruz is still near the top after the broken hand, and I don’t know how on earth Robert is still on this list given everything his body has been through. But this list includes a lot of the names you’d expect, and it’s a good reminder that a whole lot of those names belong to 23- or 24-year-olds with a lot of very fast swings ahead of them. Our 300-swing cutoff cost us youngsters Joshua Báez (23) and Gabriel Rincones Jr. (25). It also cost us Stanton, who even at this stage of his career, and in an injury-marred season, would have placed fourth at 17.3%. The guy is a machine, no matter how much time he spends with an “Out of Order” sign on his chest. Caminero and Walker are so young and so strong that it seems like it’s just a matter of time before they break 120 mph. The real question is how often they’ll ground into double plays at 120+ mph. The 120 Club may be closed this year, but if recent history tells us anything, it’s that exit velocity will jump back up next year, and we’ve got a bumper crop of hard-swinging candidates to lead the charge.