Baseball is hard. You can hit the ball like a seed and if it’s right at a defender, you get nothing for it. You can see ball four correctly and get rung up on a bad call. The fates can be cruel.
“It’s just such a tough league, man,” said Ty France this week. And with a .301 average on balls in play, he’s doing OK — it gets much worse in terms of being unlucky.
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If you take a look at underlying processes that are predictive, you can still uncover players that have better days in front of them. A discerning eye (swinging at strikes and not at balls) has shown to be valuable in projections. Hitting the ball hard in the air (barrels) is the single most predictive stat for power going forward. And players that hit the ball hard generally (hard-hit rate, or balls hit over 95 mph) get better outcomes across the board.
If you looked at players who were worse than league average at the plate last year but good at all three of these things, you would’ve uncovered some monster second halves. Willson Contreras, Ryan Mountcastle, Triston Casas, Francisco Lindor and Bobby Witt Jr. were all below-average hitters last April and May before blinding-hot second halves. In fact, the entire group of 13 hitters who satisfied these requirements went from being 15 percent worse than league average to being 28 percent above league average in the second half. Every single one who played in the second half improved his outcome — the only risk was that teams pulled the plug early. Trevor Larnach and Edward Olivares never got a shot to show that their outcomes would improve.
Seems like a decent rubric with which to find this year’s bats who will turn it around. Here are the 12 players this year who’ve been below league average so far but are above average when it comes to plate discipline (zone swing percentage minus chase percentage or Z-O%), lifting the ball hard (barrel percentage) and just generally hitting the ball hard (balls hit over 95mph or hard-hit percentage).
Name | wRC+ | Z-O% | Barrel% | HH% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
98 | 38% | 15% | 55% | |
98 | 40% | 7% | 49% | |
89 | 48% | 11% | 48% | |
98 | 41% | 14% | 48% | |
99 | 45% | 8% | 48% | |
85 | 39% | 8% | 47% | |
82 | 47% | 14% | 44% | |
95 | 41% | 15% | 44% | |
82 | 43% | 10% | 43% | |
99 | 45% | 9% | 41% | |
51 | 48% | 10% | 39% | |
99 | 39% | 12% | 39% |
It’s sort of amazing to see MJ Melendez on this list, as hard as this season has been on him. He’s still being aggressive in the zone, still hitting the ball hard and even doing a decent job hitting it hard in the air. He’s also hitting a buck-something for a team that’s in the hunt for a postseason spot. He might end up suffering the same fate as Olivares did on this team just last season. Joey Gallo’s issues are not related to having a decent eye or hitting the ball hard, and he’s sitting on a roster spot that may belong to lightning-hot outfield prospect James Wood. Edouard Julien is not currently in the big leagues, so it’s hard to bet on him, but these numbers say he will help that Minnesota Twins team again.
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The rest all seem like great bets to improve. Let’s pick our five favorites.
Julio Rodríguez, Seattle Mariners
He’s supposed to be an MVP candidate and he’s not supposed to be slugging .350. The weird thing is that you could have written this sentence about him in either of the past two seasons, too. For his career, he’s hit .264/.321/.419 in the first half and .306/.362/.577 in the second half. Those kinds of splits haven’t been predictive when it comes to the entire player pool, but maybe there’s something about the way Rodríguez adjusts to pitchers’ game plans that comes together after he’s had a little time to figure it out.
Last year, the early plan was to throw fastballs high and in and low and away, and sliders low and away. He didn’t swing at pitches down and away, but he also didn’t hit for much power and struck out on called strikes. In the second half, he swung more at fastballs that weren’t necessarily high, and he went on a tear for the ages. Right now, they’re throwing him fastballs high and in again, and he’s feasting on sinkers low and in — but he’s also swinging at four-seamers low and in, probably because they come in at the same velocity. And his slugging percentage has dropped one hundred points on that pitch alone.
This is what has to change for Rodríguez, his slugging against four-seamers. Here’s his isolated power against that pitch in each location this season:
His only homer on the four-seam fastball this year came this week off of Mason Miller, and it was high in the zone. But that’s still good news, considering his struggles against the pitch right now. Oh, and the fact that he’s still doing the other things right.
Austin Riley, Atlanta Braves
Riley is another notoriously streaky hitter so far in his career. He was around league average last year and then slugged .601 in the second half. In 2022, his slugging percentage was .885 in July. The year before that, he slugged .599 in the second half. He does this. He lays in wait, doing OK for a bit before something clicks and he goes nuts.
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“I’m going to be on the fastball and drive it to right center, and if I’m a little early on the slider I’ll catch it out in front,” Riley told me last year before that great second half. “I don’t want to be in between, I have to be on one in a way that will set me up if I get the other.”
Sometimes, I think he gets caught in between. He even admitted as much to me more explicitly as a prospect at the Arizona Fall League one year. Alex Bregman recently said that pull percentage is a good proxy for contact point and timing, and though Riley’s pull rate is only down a little bit, it coincides with a downturn in production against the fastball. He slugged .482 on the four-seamer last year, and it’s down to .188 this year.
But you can easily look at the track record for a 27-year-old with elite bat speed and say that better is coming — it does get harder to be sure as you go down the list above.
Manny Machado, San Diego Padres
He’s 31. He might be currently injured, and he’s coming off an injury. Last year he showed the worst isolated power in his past nine seasons. This year it’s much lower and he has the worst strikeout rate of his career. He may have another nine seasons left on the contract, but it’s fair to wonder if Machado is squarely on the downslope already.
Certainly, by the numbers, peak performance usually happens around 26 and 27 years old, so he’s post-peak. But his peak was so good, there’s room for him to be worse than 50 percent better than league average with the stick but still better than league average. Lots of numbers in between. And speaking of the numbers, ground-ball rate seems to be the most important.
You can see that these two lines are in opposition to each other. And it might be as simple as this: Only once before in his career has Machado swung at as many sliders in the lower third of the zone. He’s slugging .417 on those, the worst of his career. He can hit the low slider, but it’s robbing him of some power right now. This could be part of the story of getting it right.
Dansby Swanson, Chicago Cubs
You can point to all sorts of things that seem wrong in Swanson’s statistics right now. He’s missing on more swings than ever, and consequently striking out more than ever. He’s pulling more balls than ever, which could be OK except he’s got the highest ground-ball rate of his career. There’s some bad luck (a batting average on balls in play that would be the lowest of his career) but he’s seemingly earned some of it.
Here’s where the groundballs have come from:
Some of those are low in the zone, but too many of his grounders are coming on what you might consider middle-middle. The upper reaches of that heat map are also populated with four-seam fastballs. Seems like the data is suggesting that Swanson is too far out in front, causing him to roll over four-seamers that he should be catching square. He should be able to hit 14 or 15 more homers and steal another 10 or so bases along with a .260 type average, though, since the underlying process still supports that kind of outcome.
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Mitch Haniger, Seattle Mariners
“Just hit the ball in the air,” Haniger told me this week. “I’m working on all sorts of things, but sometimes it’s just as simple as telling myself to get that ball in the air.”
That statement follows the best in available research on skills acquisition, which says that giving players external goals is more effective than a hyper-focus on mechanics. But with Haniger currently facing the worst fly-ball rate of his career in one of the longer periods of struggle in his career, and the Mariners needing offense from all areas, it carries extra weight right now.
Given that his maximum exit velocity is two ticks harder than it was last year, it’s fair to say that the bat speed is there. The hard-hit rate is above his career rate. His swinging-strike rate is in line with his norms, and his strikeout rate is as well. Most projection systems say there are still another 11 or so homers in that bat, but if he can get it going like he did in his best season three years ago, in that same park, then he’ll easily surpass that number. All he needs to do is lift the ball.
(Top photo of Julio Rodríguez: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)