On Sept. 23, Prep Baseball hosted its inaugural High School All-American Game at American Family Field in Milwaukee. The unique event featured the nation’s top high school seniors who battled against a roster of the country’s best juniors in Class of 2024 vs. Class of 2025 action, giving pro scouts a unique look at current and future draft classes. This game also provided us with a valuable dataset of the top high school players in the country. We wanted to compare the average high school tools with the All-American Game average tools to see the difference and what it takes to be an All-American.

Here is a brief overview of the tools we will be including in the plots and why they are important for evaluating high school baseball players:

1. Bat Speed measures the speed of the barrel at impact. The higher the bat speed the more likely you have a higher exit velocity and more power. Higher bat speed also allows hitters to wait longer before deciding to swing.

2. Rotational Acceleration measures how quickly the bat accelerates into the swing plane or in other words how quickly a player can accelerate into their bat speed. The higher the rotational acceleration the better chance a hitter has of having success against elite pitching because they have longer to decide if they want to swing and they have more power at contact

3. Exit Velocity measures the speed of the baseball immediately after a batter makes contact. Exit velocity is important because it reflects power and the ability to drive the ball. High exit velocities indicate that a player is able to make solid contact with the ball.

4. 60-yd. Dash time measures how fast a player runs sixty yards. A player’s 60 time demonstrates their agility, acceleration, and overall speed. Speed is important for base stealing, base running, and range in the field.

5. Jump Height measures how high a player can jump. Jump height is a strong indicator of a player’s overall athletic ability and lower body power. 

6. Arm Strength (velocity) measures how fast a player can throw a baseball. A strong arm is key for being successful defensively at the next level and can determine what position a player should be playing.

7. Vizual Edge's 'Edge Score' measures the core six visual skills (Alignment, Convergence, Recognition, Depth, Divergence, and Tracking). The Vizual Edge score is scored out of 100 and takes all six skills into account. Vision is important to measure because it affects many aspects of the game including timing of a swing, reaction speed, ability to pick up spin, movement, and pitch type early on, and ball tracking. Players with better visual skills perform better in plate discipline, hard contact percentage, on-base percentage, and more.

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STANDOUT PLAYERS

We have established what it takes to be an All-American, but now let’s dive into the players who attended the All-American Game to see which among them has the best tools and, thus, stood out the most to our data team. Here are the top-five players based on how much higher their tools graded out among their fellow All-American peers: