Analyzing Spring Training’s Exit Velocity Leaders, Part 2

On Monday, we wrote about three interesting players who had been putting up massive exit velocity numbers in spring training. Today we’ll highlight two more players in depth, and touch briefly on a two more. Ben Clemens will be writing about Ryan McMahon, who happens to be the spring training exit velocity champion, tomorrow.

Now that spring training is over, you can find the final exit velocity leaderboard at the bottom of this article. It’s got some notable names: Ke’Bryan Hayes is crushing the ball, but he’s still not elevating it; Kris Bryant is healthy and mashing; Nolan Gorman is demonstrating that Jordan Walker isn’t the only exciting prospect in St. Louis; Christian Walker is making last year’s breakout look more sustainable, rocket by rocket; and Zac Veen is giving Colorado fans something, anything to look forward to.

If you read Monday’s article, you likely noticed that the featured players shared a similar profile. A list of players who can demolish a baseball but aren’t established stars is going to be heavy on strikeouts and problematically high groundball rates. You should expect that trend to continue today.

Kyle Lewis
If you’re going to pick one player to root for in this article, make it Kyle Lewis. The 27-year-old has already undergone three knee surgeries, including an ACL reconstruction in his first season as a professional. After a November trade from Seattle to Arizona, he is starting the season on the Diamondbacks’ big league roster, at least partly because the team will be facing several lefties out of the gate.

The other part? That would be Lewis’ 1.260 OPS over 37 spring training plate appearances. In all, he has hit 18 tracked balls with an average exit velocity of 95.5 mph and a hard-hit rate of 61.1%. Lewis has never quite had a stretch of 18 batted balls with this combination of exit velocity and hard-hit rate — not during a torrid 2019 cup of coffee when he slugged .592, and not even during his unanimous Rookie of the Year campaign in 2020. On March 17, he hit a José Ureña sinker 111.5 mph for a double, the highest EV he’s ever recorded. It is truly heartening that Lewis is now showing the most strength of his career.

Maybe just as exciting as Lewis’ power is his plate discipline (though that’s much easier to fake over a sample this small). He walked 13% of the time and struck out 21.6% of the time during spring training. Both of those numbers are far better than his career rate and his 2023 projections. He also ran a better chase rate and a much better contact rate than he’s ever displayed before. Lewis has generally been successful whenever he could keep his chase rate below 28%.

It’s hard to say for certain what Lewis needs in order to be a productive big leaguer. As Justin Choi noted in November, “Lewis’ career to date doesn’t even amount to one full season; he’s a talented player who deserves a fresh start.” Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen has been candid about the fact that Lewis is an upside play. Arizona has an outfield full of exciting young players, and they’re gambling that with enough rest, he can stay healthy enough to DH and provide some much needed right-handed thump.

Lewis has never had more than 242 PAs in any single season. From 2021 to ’22, his sprint speed dropped from an above-average 27.7 feet per second to 24.1. He needs to stay healthy and get a real chance. It’s great to see him showing that he’s still capable of brilliance when he feels right. Hopefully both his health and his play continue apace.

Ryan Jeffers
Over 39 plate appearances and 18 BIP during spring training, Ryan Jeffers had a 66.7% hard-hit rate and a 95.3 mph average exit velocity with a .250/.308/.583 slash line. ZiPS forecasts a 104 wRC+ for the 6-foot-4 catcher, featuring plenty of power and strikeouts. After making his big league debut in 2020, Jeffers shared time with Mitch Garver in 2021 and Gary Sanchez in ’22, but last July, he missed two months with a fractured thumb. He has 591 career plate appearances, so once again we’re talking about a young player (especially for a catcher) and a small sample size.

There’s always a delicate balance to aggression at the plate. In theory, everybody should swing less. In practice, each player tends to have their own level. We sometimes see players who get too passive and stop swinging at their pitch, or take too many strikes to make the tradeoff worth it. From 2021 to ’22, Jeffers’ walk rate jumped from 7.5% to 9.7%. He knocked more than 10 percentage points off his strikeout and whiff rates, along with seven off his groundball rate and 3.7 off his chase rate; 55.4% of his balls in play came on pitches in the heart of the zone, up from 50.9% in 2021. Those are all great things! But his wRC+ only went from 83 to 87, in part because of some bad batted ball luck, but also because his hard-hit rate and exit velocity fell.

It’s not that the thumb injury dragged Jeffers’ numbers down. In fact, in the 13 games after he got hurt, he performed better and increased his EV. Take a look at the heat maps below. On the left is Jeffers’ slugging percentage on balls in play over the course of his career, in the middle is his swing rate in 2021, and on the right is his swing rate in 2022.

Like anybody, Jeffers enjoys a nice juicy pitch right down the middle, and in 2021 his swing decisions reflected that. In 2022, he swung at pitches all over the zone. Keep in mind that his swing rate on pitches in the zone was nearly identical from 2021 to ’22. It’s not that he swung at absolutely everything in the zone; it’s just that he was less focused on getting his pitch. He was much more likely to swing at pitches up in the zone, where he’s never had any success.

As you’d expect, Jeffers is much more likely to elevate those high pitches. On pitches in the upper third of the zone, his average launch angle is 28.3 degrees; in the middle third, it’s 17.6 degrees; and in the bottom third, it’s 5.6. That brings us to our next table. Jeffers’ results didn’t change too much on line drives or groundballs, but take a look at his fly balls:

Sure, he got unlucky, and if you look at his spray chart from 2022 you’ll see a whole lot of balls that got caught right at the warning track. But his average fly ball was hit higher and softer, falling 29 feet shorter and losing 249 points in expected wOBA. That’s a massive difference. Pitchers noticed, and they put the ball in the zone more often.

The spring training success is a great sign that Jeffers is healthy and capable of doing damage. He’s swinging at lower pitches again; maybe he’ll even get some of that batted ball luck the universe owes him. All the same, his game features some question marks. Can he keep his chase and strikeout rates down in the Scary But Not Catastrophic range? Is he capable of doing so while laying off the high ones?

Eric Haase
Eric Haase’s place on this leaderboard isn’t necessarily a surprise. The Detroit catcher (and sometimes left fielder) posted above-average hard-hit rates in each of the last three seasons, and in 2021 his average exit velocity ranked in the 79th percentile. From 2021 to ’22, he raised his wRC+ from 101 to 112, but he did it in an unusual way: He chased more, so pitchers threw him fewer strikes. That’s not normally a recipe for making more contact, but Haase dropped his whiff rate, resulting in a 3.6-point drop in strikeout rate. With so much contact outside the zone, his exit velocity dropped all the way to the 25th percentile, but that was offset by the strikeouts and some BABIP luck. He’s back to crushing the ball in spring training, so maybe the lesson is that Eric Haase just can’t lose.

Rainer Nunez
Rainer Nunez is 22 years old, and last year he won the Florida State League batting title and the Dominican Winter League Rookie of the Year. He put up a .346 BABIP in low-A, then played in 27 games at high-A and put up a .400 BABIP. In spring training, his 64.7% hard-hit rate and a 94.1 mph average exit velocity resulted in a paltry .590 OPS. All of this is to say that Nunez puts the ball on the ground a lot, but he’s working on it.

Nunez is a (questionable) third baseman and first baseman who hits the ball hard and on the ground, and while that might sound familiar, you probably shouldn’t let yourself get too excited. He is in our Blue Jays Top 41 Prospects article, but he’s below the rankings in the Power-Over-Hit Fliers category. There are a lot of spring training at-bats to go around, so it’s inevitable that a few prospects will run into a hot streak. All the same, he hit one ball 114 mph, and only 15 big league players did that last year, including You Know Who, so maybe let yourself get excited about Nunez.