The percentage of a hitter's batted balls with exit velocity of 95 mph or higher.
Statcast measures exit velocity on every batted ball. Most analyses set a threshold of 95 miles per hour as the boundary between hard contact and softer contact, drawing on the empirical relationship between exit velocity and batted-ball outcomes. Balls struck at 95+ mph become hits and extra-base hits at far higher rates than balls below the threshold. Hard-hit percentage measures how often a hitter clears that line.
The metric is one of the most stable hitter rate stats. It stabilizes in roughly 100 batted balls — about a month of plate appearances for a regular. Year-over-year hard-hit rate has one of the highest correlations of any public stat, much higher than batting average or even on-base percentage. A hitter who posts a 50% hard-hit rate one year is, in expectation, going to post something close to that the next.
The flip side is that hard-hit% on its own doesn't tell you about launch angle. A hitter who consistently scorches grounders at 102 mph will have an excellent hard-hit rate and a poor batting average on those balls. The fuller picture comes from pairing hard-hit% with average launch angle — the so-called barrel rate combines both — to find hitters who not only make hard contact but elevate it into productive trajectories.
For pitchers, the inverse — hard-hit% allowed — is one of the more useful suppression metrics. A pitcher who limits hard contact will sustain a low xwOBA-against even if his strikeout rate is modest. Hard-hit suppression is the underlying skill that makes ground-ball pitchers and command-first starters viable in the modern game.
Our hitter projections weight hard-hit% heavily as a stabilizer. A hot streak built on weak contact is heavily regressed; a hot streak built on a jump in hard-hit% receives more credit because the metric stabilizes faster.