Milwaukee Brewers

StaTuesday: Brewers' Broxton among fastest players in majors

Published Jun. 27, 2017 12:35 p.m. ET

Dave Heller

If as the old saying goes speed kills, then the Milwaukee Brewers' Keon Broxton is one of the most deadly players in Major League Baseball.

On Tuesday, Statcast unveiled the Sprint Speed of MLB players, which measures "feet per second in a player's fastest one-second window." There's a lot more detail on how the stat is measured here, but it revolves around a player using maximum speed around the bases.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the five-fastest players in MLB according to this measurement are center fielders.

Cincinnati's Billy Hamilton tops the list at 30.1 feet/second -- Statcast describes a rate of 30 ft/sec as elite; average is 27.0 ft/sec and poor is 23.0 ft/sec -- with Minnesota's Byron Buxton, who led the league in this category each of the last two years, next at 29.9 ft/sec.

A couple of rookies are next -- Cleveland's Bradley Zimmer is third at 29.8 ft and San Diego's Franchy Cordero is fourth at 29.6 ft/sec.

Broxton, who has been surging offensively in May and June, is fifth at 29.4 ft/sec. Last season, Broxton led Milwaukee in Sprint Speed at 28.9 ft/sec, which was 20th in MLB.

While no other Brewers rank highly overall in the majors in 2017, Eric Thames is third among regular first basemen (the Angels' Jefry Marte is listed above Thames but he has played just 25 games at first this season).

Of the 12 qualifying Brewers (a player needs at least 10 max effort runs), six are above average and six are below average.

PLAYER	SPEED
Keon Broxton	29.4
Hernan Perez	27.7
Eric Thames	27.4
Domingo Santana	27.2
Jonathan Villar	27.2
Orlando Arcia	27.1
Eric Sogard	26.8
Ryan Braun	26.7
Travis Shaw	26.2
Manny Pina	25.9
Jesus Aguilar	25.0
Jett Bandy	24.2