One of the best things about Statcast is that it gives us something worthwhile to talk about in the first week of the season.
Wins and losses are just as important now as they are in September, but most individual player stats are worthless. You can’t tell much from the single statistic of hit or even a home run besides the fact that they probably hit the ball pretty well. The discussion starts and stops with “this thing happened” in each of those instances. Exit velocity is a whole different monster.
Exit velocity is something that you can use on a case-by-case basis on its own to see what a player is doing — we can say without a shadow of a doubt that Carlos Santana has hit the ball really dang hard in his first few games.