Brice Turang’s New Groove

I was doing some research on hitting the ball in the air the other way when I came across this striking leaderboard:

The five guys who hit the ball hardest the other way when they lift it? Four enormous sluggers and Brice Turang. I was overjoyed by this result at first. I wanted to find a hitter who gets to more power to the opposite field than to the pull side. If Turang is hitting the ball this hard to the opposite side, hard enough to number among the top sluggers in the game, surely it’s because of some particular feature of his swing that manifests only to the opposite field. Let’s just add in pull-side average exit velocity and…

Wait, what the?! Turang hits the ball as hard as Alonso? He has more pull power than Kurtz? This merits further investigation. Luckily, FanGraphs has already been all over it. Esteban Rivera wrote about Turang’s increased bat speed all the way back in May. Michael Baumann highlighted Turang as a potential elevate-and-celebrate candidate. Over at Baseball Prospectus, Timothy Jackson noted that Turang’s bat speed gains have stuck. In fact, his 4.2-mph increase in average swing speed is the largest improvement in the sport. All those gains have brought his swing speed all the way up to… the 22nd percentile. Huh? The guys on that leaderboard with him are in the 94th, 94th, 98th, and 92nd percentiles, respectively. Clearly, swinging harder can’t be the only explanation for Turang’s breakout performance. Let’s go a little deeper than “bat faster ball go far,” shall we?

Look, I’m not going to lie: “Bat faster ball go far” is a lot of it. Turang’s 2024 season was a caricature of a slap hitter, surprisingly out of line with his scouting report coming into the league (45 raw power on the 20-80 scale). His bat speed declined by more than two miles an hour from 2023, while his contact rate surged from 82.3% to 87.9%. In percentile terms, he went from the 70th percentile in making contact to the 97th. He started swinging more slowly in order to come up empty less frequently.

That change worked out exactly as planned. Turang posted a swinging strike rate lower than he had in any year of the minors. His contact rate had never been so high. He struck out only 17% of the time, a decline of four percentage points from 2023, and he didn’t start chasing overly much either.

Just one problem: The overall results were poor. He hit a ton of grounders (2.01 GB/FB ratio, third highest in the majors) and did almost no damage to the pull side. The gains in contact rate didn’t make up for that. Sure, 17% is a better-than-average strikeout rate, but it’s still much higher than what we see from guys like Steven Kwan and Luis Arraez, who live in the single digits. That’s how you end up with an 88 wRC+ despite making so much contact.

With the knowledge that Turang purposefully dialed things down last year in hand, his 2025 changes start to make more sense. To borrow from Esteban’s article, take a look at Turang’s swing speed distribution in each of the past three years:

The biggest change is that the whole distribution has shifted right, but the second-biggest change is that he has cut out a ton of his weaker swings. Think of it this way: When a hitter sees something middle-middle while ahead in the count, they should probably take a massive hack. There’s no benefit to trying to foul one of those pitches off or punch it on the ground the other way; it’s one of the best opportunities a hitter is going to get to do damage, and it’s worth the risk of whiffing because swinging and missing won’t result in a strikeout.

In 2023, Turang appropriately swung hard at these ones. He took 106 such swings, and only nine were at 65 mph or slower, what I’m deeming a “slow swing.” That gave him a slow-swing rate of 8.5% when ahead in the count and facing a grooved pitch. The league rate is about 4%, but it’s hardly surprising to see Turang a bit higher than average here; even with his big swing speed gains in 2025, he has below average bat speed. That was a normal number, in other words.

In 2024, Turang changed his plan completely. His slow-swing rate skyrocketed to 23.6% in these situations. That’s woeful. Only five hitters took slow swings at crushable pitches in good counts more frequently: Nicky Lopez, Arraez, Kwan, Justin Turner, and Nolan Schanuel. You really don’t want to be in that group if you can help it – that’s “better have outlier bat-to-ball skills to remain in the majors” territory. It’s no surprise that Turang wasn’t lighting the world on fire in 2024; he was purposefully sacrificing power for contact even in situations where that trade-off made no sense.

This year, Turang is down to a 4.5% slow-swing rate in these scenarios. In other words, he’s correctly adapting to the situation. He’s also lengthened his swing considerably in these counts – from 6.5 feet on average to 7.3 feet – while his fast-swing rate (75 mph or harder) has exploded from 4% to 21%. This is Baseball 101: In the best spots to sell out for damage, he’s doing exactly that.

OK, so Turang has made the logical decision to attack more aggressively when he has the chance, eschew excessive contact-seeking (his 80.8% contact rate is above average but not nearly as extreme as his 2024 results), and accept extra strikeouts in exchange for production on contact. That’s all well and good – it’s a change I’m sure he and the Brewers have worked on together, and one that makes perfect sense with his skill set. We still need to explain why he’s hitting the ball like Alonso, though.

The key to Turang’s elite batted ball quality comes down to physics. How hard you hit the ball is mostly about three things: How fast the ball is moving, how fast the bat is moving, and how cleanly the bat’s momentum transfers to the ball. (The bat’s weight matters too, but let’s keep this simple for now.) This is intuitive; for a given bat speed and ball speed, the ball will fly a lot harder if the hitter catches it square than if they strike a glancing blow. Statcast measures this as something called “squared-up rate,” which is the percentage of batted balls where the collision between bat and ball produces an exit velocity of at least 80% of the theoretical maximum.

This particular skill is Turang’s best. Fine, maybe not his best overall skill – he’s an elite baserunner and spectacular defender – but it’s his best skill at the plate. Don’t believe me? Look at his percentile scores for each skill Statcast measures:

I think that played a big part in Turang’s decision to work as a slap hitter last year. Going the Arraez route is a plausible way to turn Turang’s below-average bat speed and excellent bat control into offensive production. But there was a huge problem with his choice: A flat swing meant that he wasn’t taking advantage of squared-up contact in the air. In 2024, only 65% of his elevated contact was squared up; that’s almost exactly league average. Turang was in the 83rd percentile for squared-up rate, and yet he wasn’t getting the benefit where extra exit velocity matters most. Smash a grounder hard, and you might gain a single. Smash a fly ball, and you get to wear a silly hat in the dugout.

Why wasn’t he making strong contact in the air? His average contact point came with the bat tilted upward by one degree. That was literally the flattest swing in baseball last year; league average is 10 degrees. Make contact with the bat so flat, and your cleanest strikes will come when you hit the ball at a low angle. Imagine the kind of collision that makes a flat bat path put the ball in the air, and you can understand why Turang had trouble squaring up his aerial contact despite excellent bat control.

This year, he’s redone his swing a few ways. He’s stepped back, with his back foot five inches deeper in the box and his contact point four inches back as well, which lets him take a slightly longer, slightly faster swing. More importantly, he’s up to a seven-degree attack angle on average, the better to pair his cleanest contact with the balls that benefit most from being cleanly struck. This year, 81% of his elevated contact has been squared up. Between those changes and the aforementioned removal of weak swings, he’s making contact with a faster bat, and that faster bat is transferring more of its energy to line drives and fly balls. It’s cost him some swing and miss, but the trade-off still works out massively in his favor.

Here’s what that looks like in a game:

That swing was 78 mph and tilted upward at 10 degrees at the point of contact. That’s what you’re supposed to do when Andrew Heaney throws you an 89-mph sinker down the middle in a 3-1 count. Turang has hardly crushed every such pitch, but it’s not for a lack of trying. The result? A remarkable transformation in his ability to do damage. Here are some relevant statistics for contact over the heart of the plate before two strikes, what I think of as do-damage territory:

You can think of this as the batter’s time to shine. When you’re up in the count, get a pitch to hit, and decide to swing, it’s go time. Those are ideal hitting conditions. Turang’s numbers in 2023 and 2024 were, in a word, atrocious. Now he’s bopping. Look at it in terms of run value on swings in these do-damage situations. The table below folds in foul balls, whiffs, and production on contact:

These are run values relative to league average in each count, so a negative number means less production than the average major league hitter. In other words, Turang was leaving an absolute pile of value on the table in some of the best conditions to hit. Every time he took a slow swing at a crushable pitch in a good count, he was bailing the opposing pitcher out. Now he’s doing it far less often. As good as big league pitchers are these days, you better get them when they’re at a disadvantage, and now Turang has rebuilt his game around doing just that.

The best part about this change? It seems perfectly sustainable to me. Now, will he keep squaring up so much of his elevated contact? Probably not, if only because he’s third in baseball in air squared-up rate after never having approached those heights before. Indeed, “this guy won’t keep putting up numbers comparable to Shohei Ohtani” is a great bet to make about almost everyone.

That’s OK, though. Turang doesn’t need to keep hitting like this to be a great player. Really, he would be a borderline All-Star every year if he were just an average hitter because of his defense and baserunning, and he might be quite be a good hitter. Last year, his approach held him back; now it’s boosting him, and he appears to be on a bit of a hot streak as well, always a great combination. He’s been the best player on the best team this year, and the changes he’s made underneath the hood suggest that it’s no fluke.