See the ball, hit the ball hard. When you say it that way, sounds super easy. Once you’re stepping in against upper-90s heat in the big leagues, though, it seems a lot harder.
Often, young hitters struggle a little when they first encounter the polish of a major-league pitching staff. Doesn’t mean they can’t figure it out — especially if they’re showing some of the skills that we want. Especially if they are seeing the ball well, and hitting it hard.
There are plenty of interesting ways to dissect a player’s ability to discern balls and strikes, but there’s a simple one that is pretty strong. If you take how often a player swings at pitches in the strike zone and subtract how much they swing at pitches outside the zone, you get a metric that is correlated to future power in a good way. It’s better than just being super passive on all pitches (which can hurt a player’s power by turfing their ability to get the ball out in front), or super aggressive on pitches outside the zone (which can hurt a player’s power because he’s hitting balls that usually provide sub-optimal outcomes).
Hitting the ball hard is a little easier to appraise. Barrel rate is a great predictor of future power, and maximum exit velocity is a good descriptor of a player’s raw power. They are also fairly useful statistics even in small samples, so we can throw them into this mix easily if we’re trying to find young breakout players before they break out.
But hitting the ball hard also requires hitting the ball, so we should have some sort of contact metric in our special sauce. Swinging strike rate isn’t perfect — especially since it’s related to aggression, and the same swinging strike rate can produce different strikeout rates depending on how often the batter swings — but it does give us a way to take a peek at a player’s hit tool.
Four metrics — zone minus outside zone swing rate, maximum exit velocity, barrel rate, and swinging strike rate — into the blender. That should help us understand these young players in terms of their plate discipline, raw and game power, and hit tool, to some extent.
Let’s look at all players last season under the age of 25 by adding up their relative quality in these four stats, and then remove all the players that have already broken out. That’s the most subjective part of this exercise, but it also keeps us from staring at Juan Soto, Julio Rodríguez and Gunnar Henderson when we’re looking for breakouts.
Here are those players, sorted by their combined score in the four stats (judged by z-scores). We’ve color-coded the stats so you can get a sense of how they compare to their peers.
NAME | TEAM | ZONE-CHASE% | SWSTR% | BARREL% | HARDHIT% | MAXEV |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
DET | 42.5% | 10.3% | 14.1% | 50.5% | 112.7 | |
PIT | 40.5% | 10.9% | 15.7% | 43.4% | 114.7 | |
KCR | 43.1% | 16.1% | 21.4% | 48.2% | 111.4 | |
CHC | 41.8% | 17.1% | 15.5% | 50.0% | 113.6 | |
NYM | 40.4% | 13.0% | 12.5% | 44.7% | 114.1 | |
KCR | 42.6% | 15.0% | 11.4% | 49.6% | 113.2 | |
TOR | 48.4% | 13.7% | 17.8% | 38.4% | 108.8 | |
CIN | 35.9% | 10.6% | 7.9% | 46.1% | 115.6 | |
KCR | 41.3% | 7.7% | 3.9% | 50.6% | 110 | |
CIN | 25.8% | 12.3% | 8.5% | 45.9% | 119.2 |
Oh man. Tell your friends. Elly De La Cruz is a young player that could break out this year. Heard it here first.
Joking aside, there are still plenty of interesting young bats on this list. Let’s highlight some of them. Last year, this enterprise netted you Lars Nootbaar, Isaac Paredes and Riley Greene. Let’s hope it is as fortuitous this season.
GO DEEPER
Five young pitchers with the stuff (and command!) to break out this season
After hitting 31 homers and being around 7 percent better than league average with the stick last season, Torkelson at least announced himself as a regular power threat. As a former No. 1 overall pick, he also kept himself off any ignominious lists going forward. But for him to join the elite ranks at his position, he’ll need to take one more step and add the ability to get on base more regularly (if not defend better at first).
He walked 14 percent of the time in the minors and has an above-average zone swinging rate and a below-average…
This article was originally published by a theathletic.com . Read the Original article here. .