ST. LOUIS -- Two years ago, Major League Baseball introduced Statcast™ tracking technology into all 30 of its stadiums. The state-of-the-art system can track the location and movements of every player, pitch and hit, allowing for unparalleled insight into a game that is no longer viewed merely through the prism of baseball-card stats.
In order to introduce fans to a sliver of the data now available, I held a Statcast™ Q&A session via Twitter on Tuesday. Fans asked questions; Statcast™ provided the answers. Here are highlights of that chat, along with some additional commentary.

The Cardinals hit 121 of their 225 homers on the road in 2016, which begged the question of how much Busch Stadium may have tempered the team's homer total at home. While this graphic doesn't account for atmospheric conditions, it does show that more than a dozen of the team's road home runs would have been no deeper than the warning track if hit in St. Louis.

Though Molina watched his consecutive Gold Glove streak come to an end in 2016, he did finish the season with more called strikes on pitches outside the strike zone than any other catcher. Of course, it helps that he also logged more innings behind the plate than anyone else. Perhaps the fairest comparison is percentage of stolen strikes; Molina ranked ninth in the Majors (minimum 10,000 pitches) with 5.62 percent.
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Matt Carpenter has long been lauded for his keen eye and plate discipline. But that doesn't always mean he's rewarded for laying off borderline pitches, as this Statcast™ data show. However, his luck actually did improve in 2016. A year earlier, Carpenter led the Majors in percentage of pitches (9.38) called a strike that were outside the zone.

Plate discipline was not a strength of Grichuk's last season, and contributed to his pair of midseason demotions. And yet, while he swung at 424 pitches outside the zone, that did not represent the highest percentage among the Cardinals' position players. That distinction went to Matt Adams.

The bad luck didn't help Garcia, who endured the most inconsistent season of his career. One explanation for the high number of in-the-zone pitches called balls could be the unique movement Garcia gets on his sinker. Statcast™ notes that 24 of these 42 pitched balls were two-seam fastballs. Nevertheless, these calls only accounted for 1.63 percent of the pitches Garcia threw all year.

This doesn't come as much of a surprise, given how free-swinging Wong can be. Stephen Piscotty led the Cardinals with 241 two-strike swings, but Piscotty also took 269 more at-bats than Wong.

Adams was intentional about trying to reduce his pull-heavy tendencies, and he did show some opposite-field power last season. No one else on the team had a higher exit velocity on an opposite-field blast all season. The hardest-hit opposite-field homer by a right-handed-hitting Cardinal came off the bat of Grichuk. He sent a Jacob deGrom fastball into the right-field seats with an exit velocity of 106.8 mph.