PITTSBURGH – The first ball Manny Machado put in play in 2016 had an exit velocity of 116.8 mph and a launch angle of 11.4 degrees.

In 2015, only 24 balls put in play had an exit velocity of more than 116 mph. The collective BABIP of those balls was .857 and the batting average was .875 (so roughly, nine out of ten times the result of the at-bat was a hit when the player hit the ball that hard).

Moreover, of those 24 balls put in play only one that was hit in the air turned into an out – a Hanley Ramirez line drive to centerfield in the bottom of the second inning of the Boston Red Sox 6-3 win over the Miami Marlins on July 8th (the other two that resulted in outs were both ground balls, one fielded, oddly enough, by Machado).

But as the clip above shows us, we didn’t have to wait very long for our first 116+ exit velocity/line drive out of the season.

And for that we can thank Byron Buxton.

While we are still waiting to see more of Buxton’s glove work so that Daren Willman can create one of his data visualization outfield charts…

Just for fun, here’s the #Pirates OF range on caught balls last year. Right chart is w\ normalized starting point pic.twitter.com/tYtyVUA5lS

— Daren Willman (@darenw) April 3, 2016

…we do know that Buxton projects as the second-best defensive centerfielder in the game already.

And in addition to another nice late-inning grab versus the O’s yesterday, Buxton gave us this gem at the end of Spring Training:

♦♦♦

With Buxton still retaining prospect eligibility into 2016, Dan Farnsworth had him rated as a plus/plus defender in the outfield to go along with a plus arm. Those projections look pretty accurate right about now and, barring injury, can only keep getting better.

#DKBaseball