If you played baseball as a kid, you’re familiar with the phrase “a walk’s as good as a hit.” Your coaches probably shouted it at you. You probably shouted it yourself when your friend was at the plate with a three-ball count. Shouting a bromide is one thing, but believing it is another. We didn’t really buy it as kids, and for a while now, we’ve been able to quantify the difference. This season, hits have a wOBA of 1.129, while walks have a wOBA of .694. A walk, it turns out, is 61.5% as good as a hit. All of our coaches were liars.

On Wednesday, I was checking to see where Alejandro Kirk’s wOBAcon – his wOBA when he makes contact – ranked in relation to the rest of the league. The top of the list caught my eye. It couldn’t help but catch my eye. Aaron Judge is so far ahead of the pack he may as well be playing a different sport. He’s currently running a .685 wOBAcon. The difference between Judge and Cal Raleigh in second place is the same as the difference between Raleigh and Brandon Lowe in 47th place. Here’s the most shocking way I can find to express just how absurd Aaron Judge’s wOBAcon is right now: When Aaron Judge puts the ball in play, he’s nearly as good as a walk.

I know that may not sound particularly sexy, but that number is remarkable. A walk is a sure thing. It’s a bird in the hand. Putting the ball in play is a gamble. The league as a whole has a .362 wOBA on batted balls. A walk is nearly twice as valuable. This is why every couple years we write a whole mess of articles about how if batters were really smart, they’d just stop swinging. But there’s Aaron Judge, so, so, very close to having his batted balls be as valuable as a walk. He’s just nine points of wOBA away. That’s nothing. It’s the value of a popup to the second baseman.

If all this talk about Judge and the value of a walk is giving you déjà vu, that’s because just about a month ago, Ben Clemens wrote a whole article about when it makes sense to walk Judge intentionally. We’ll circle back to that point, but the first thing I did when I saw that number was try to figure out just how special it was. Turns out it’s pretty special.

I checked the pitch tracking era first. Since 2008, Judge is the only player in baseball to break a .600 wOBAcon. He’s done it three times, going .600 in 2017, .602 in 2022, and .617 in 2024. Mike Trout’s never done it. Shohei Ohtani, Yordan Alvarez, no one but Aaron Judge has done it, and this season he’s surpassing his 2024 mark by, at present, 68 points. Judge will likely cool off at some point, and over at MLB.com, Mike Petriello has addressed how much of his sky-high BABIP is the result of luck and how much is just coming from the fact that it’s really hard to field a ball that’s been hit at the speed of sound.

Still, this made me really curious. I started wondering whether anyone had ever been as valuable as a walk when they put the ball in play. That meant a lot of math, because wOBAcon isn’t readily available for players who preceded the pitch tracking era. I wanted to go all the way back to 1901, so I had to reverse engineer it by myself (and when I say “by myself,” I mean “with the help of Ben Clemens because he’s good at math”). I pulled the stats for every qualified player-season since 1901, so I had everybody’s wOBA and counting stats. I split each player’s plate appearances into three sections: balls in play, strikeouts, and walks/hit by pitches. To calculate the number of balls in play, I took at-bats, subtracted strikeouts, then added the number of sacrifices. Then I got to the algebra and set up an equation that looked like this:

Total wOBA = (BIPwOBA x BIP%) + (BBwOBA x BB%) + (KwOBA x K%)

(Since strikeouts have a wOBA of zero, I didn’t actually need the third part. It would always equal zero.) At that point, my numbers didn’t look quite right, so I went to Ben, who taught me that for arcane reasons, hit by pitches have a different wOBA from walks and intentional walks don’t count toward wOBA at all, so I had to rework my calculations some.

The numbers still weren’t perfect, sometimes because of rounding issues, but more often because we don’t have all the data, like intentional walks and sacrifices, for older players. With the help of Stathead’s Katie Sharp, I incorporated intentional walk data from Retrosheet to the players in the top 20. The Retrosheet data isn’t official, but it made the numbers more accurate, and I care more about that. So keep in mind that this isn’t iron-clad, but here you go, the highest wOBAcons ever recorded in a qualified season:

Eight of the top spots belong to Aaron Judge and Babe Ruth; Ruth’s 1927 Murderer’s Row season also ranked 11th at .589. Judge is only one point above the all-time record, so he’ll almost certainly lose it at some point over the next 97 games, but he’s still 50 points above the third-place entry and 90 points above 10th place. He’s staying on this top 10 list unless something horrible happens.

More importantly, the answer to our question is “no.” Nobody’s has ever been as valuable as a walk when they put the ball in play. As a matter of fact, Judge is closer this season than anyone else has ever been. He may not beat Ruth in terms of overall wOBAcon, but keep in mind that wOBA is a seasonal constant. It changes every year based on the run-scoring environment. Back in 1920, walks had a wOBA of .741. This season, Judge’s wOBAcon is 98.7% the value of a walk. Ruth was at 92.3% in 1920, and that was the only season when anyone had ever reached 90%. If we look at things that way, Judge has two of the top three seasons of all-time, plus his current campaign, which is in first place and will likely stay there even after his BABIP luck runs out:

Judge still has a shot at reaching the magic number, though he’d have to hit even better to do so. I don’t think that’s really something we can ask of Judge right now. It’d kind of be like if you were an Athenian and Pheidippides had just run all the way from Marathon and shouted, “We win!” and collapsed and died, and then you started nudging him with your sandal and saying, “That’s great buddy, but now that you’re back, could you run and get me a sandwich?”

Still, let’s get back to Ben’s article. Ben combined Judge’s stats over the last four seasons with a run expectancy matrix and win expectancy numbers to figure out when it was smarter to put Judge on than to let him hit. Ben allowed for a wider range, but the math indicated that the answer was very narrow: in the ninth inning of a one-run game, with two outs and a runner on second or third. That’s it. Other than that situation, it’s smarter to pitch to Judge than to walk him. A lot of this discussion is centered around risk aversion. It’s scary to give up a 500-foot homer to Aaron Judge, and that makes you overreact, giving him a free base when the numbers say that’s not the smart move. But maybe we’re right to be scared of Aaron Judge. First of all, he’s run a ludicrous 239 wRC+ since that article came out. That’s somehow worse than the comical 248 mark he had at the time, but it also represented an improvement on the numbers that Ben was running. Those numbers went back to 2022, when Judge ran a pathetic 206 wRC+. It makes more sense to walk Judge intentionally now than it did back in May.

Knowing all this, I’d like to run a quick scenario by you. Say you’re a pitcher facing down Aaron Judge. First of all, I’m so sorry. No one deserves to be in this position, and you should check and see whether you have any legal recourse against whoever got you into this mess. Second, take a moment to ask yourself a question: Can I strike out Aaron Judge? Seriously. Judge strikes out at a roughly average rate, which means that nearly 77% of the time that he comes to the plate, he doesn’t strike out. So be honest with yourself. Do you have it today? Is the slider biting? Does the ball feel good in your hand, or are the seams a little flatter than you’d like them to be? Did you sleep OK last night? If your answer to any of those questions is something other than, “Hell yeah, let me at him,” then it’s a very firm “no.” If you can strike out Aaron Judge, then by all means, pitch to him. You’ve got a 51% chance of getting him out and just a 15% chance of giving up extra bases. But if you don’t feel like you can strike him out, if your choice is either a walk or a batted ball, then you should probably just put him on. He’s 99% as good as a walk anyway.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember the scene from The Benchwarmers when Clark is up to bat, except that he is absolutely nowhere near the plate? Back when I used to catch and would see hitters set up way off the plate, that was always the image that popped into my head. After an internal laugh, I’d give my sign, then take one big side step to the opposite side of where the hitter was standing to make sure my pitcher didn’t come close to fixating on the inner half. Unless you’re swinging a 40-inch bat and simultaneously have the strength of Giancarlo Stanton, you’re not making good contact on anything away. Gabriel Arias is a prime example of this.

In 2025, there hasn’t been a single hitter who stands farther from the plate than Arias. This is a relatively new extreme. Since 2023, Arias has moved farther and farther from the plate, starting at 31.9 inches in 2023, to 33.0 in 2024, to a league-leading 35.4 this season. For context, let’s take a snapshot of the 2025 leaders:

Most of these players are on the very tall side. That’s not to say you have to be tall to stand off the plate, but if the goal is to make sure your barrel aligns with the heart of the plate, it would make sense that the taller players are the ones who, generally, would benefit from having more space between the plate and where they set up. Conversely, when shorter players set up far off the plate, they increase the area they need to cover with their swings while lacking the length to do so.

That seems to be what’s happening with Arias, who despite being among the shorter players on this list, is standing nearly two more inches off the plate than the next guy, Paul Goldschmidt, and nearly three more inches off it than Aaron Judge, who is six inches taller than the Guardians infielder. How can Arias possibly reach pitches on the outer third of the plate? Here is an example from a game last week:

If I had any video editing skills, I’d overlay Clark as a comparison to highlight just how far this is. It’s an interesting strategy that needs to be reasoned out. Despite his power potential, Arias entered 2025 with a career 74 wRC+, so it’s understandable he would want to make some changes. Setting up even farther away, though, seemed like a bizarre choice, given his average height for a ballplayer and the way it would expose him to outside pitches. Initially, I thought the new setup would hurt him more than it would help. I mean, why would pitchers ever throw him a pitch over the inner third? But then I noticed Arias’ wRC+ is higher this season than it was in 2023 and 2024, up to 88 as of Thursday morning, which is still quite bad but represents a sizable improvement nonetheless. Maybe he was on to something after all.

To see what’s going on here, let’s first zoom in on how this change is playing out on a zone-by-zone basis. In 2023 and 2024, Arias’ xwOBA against pitches on the outer third was .224 and .248, respectively, putting him near the bottom of the league. That number is nearly the same this year, at .235. I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten worse. Where he’s standing, the outside corner might as well be Narnia.

My best guess for why he’s setting up farther away is he wanted to have a better shot at damaging inside pitches. Perhaps he often felt handcuffed and thought moving off the plate would give him more space to get his barrel on plane and make it easier for him to elevate pitches. How’s that working out for him?

OK, now we’re talking. In his previous two seasons, he was not competitive against pitches on the inner third. He was both whiffing a lot and not balancing it out with a ton of hard-hit balls. This year, he’s flipped the script by whiffing less and hitting the ball hard more often.

On top of that, he’s making sweet-spot contact at an impressive rate, helping him pull off a .436 xwOBACON on the inner third. Of course, that only accounts for his performance against pitches to one-third of the zone, but it’s still an improvement that has propelled his offensive performance from unplayable to bearable.

At some point, though, pitchers are going to have adjust, right? They can no longer beat him inside like they did before, but there’s a large chunk of the zone still available to them. And that area might be larger than just the outer third. Because Arias is standing so far off the plate and looking to turn on inside pitches, he might also have a tough time covering at least some pitches over the middle, too.

Hitters who shift farther away from the plate should still be able to crush middle-middle pitches, but depending on how their swing works, it could be difficult for them to reach either high or low pitches over the middle. Before diving into how Arias’ swing works, let’s see if the data tell us a bit more about that:

As expected, Arias’ new location in the box has created another hole over the middle third of the plate. His .053 wOBA and .182 xwOBA up top are absolutely brutal under any circumstances, but they’re especially jarring compared to his .366/.394 from last season. The drop-off alone isn’t entirely uncommon because of the small sample sizes when looking at one-ninth of the zone, but to go from above average to fourth worst in baseball is tough. His numbers have also declined on middle-middle pitches. The .123 margin between his wOBA and xwOBA says bad luck may be involved, but there are many hitters with much wider gaps between their actual numbers and their expected one. However, it’s also interesting to see Arias’ improvement on low-middle pitches. He’s always been good against these pitches, but now he’s demolishing them far more frequently than before.

Even so, that leaves a massive area for opposing pitchers to target, and their pitch mix to get Arias out should be fairly simple: Overwhelm him with heaters up, then put him away with soft stuff outside. He has a .177 xwOBA against offspeed pitches and a .234 xwOBA against breaking balls this season. Those numbers are even worse on the outer third, with a .127 xwOBA against offspeed and a .128 xwOBA against breakers. So far, pitchers don’t seem to be giving him a noticeably different pitch mix compared to how they attacked him in other seasons, or even earlier this year, but they are definitely starting to throw more offspeed pitches to locations that are farther away. Maybe they’re catching on, maybe not. Time will tell.

Here is some video of swings he’s taken against outer-third pitches:

Almost everything is off the end of the bat. Any right-handed pitcher that can locate away is going to have a good shot at beating Arias. In almost all of these clips, he’s making contact off the end of the bat and/or swinging off balance. His closed stride helps him cover pitches that are closer to the middle — like the one from Carlos Rodón in the final GIF above — because his swing path is moving more toward the heart of the plate, but his barrel doesn’t stay in the hitting zone on an upward trajectory long enough to have much room for error. So unless he perfectly times his swing to connect with these pitches over the middle, he’s either not going to square them up or he’ll miss them altogether.

It’s clear Arias is trying to maximize his strengths, damaging inner-third and low-middle pitches, even if it means making his weaknesses even worse. So far, that trade-off is working for him. Although he remains below average at the plate, he’s a better hitter now than he was before; that improvement is enough for him to be a valuable player overall because he’s a good defender at multiple infield positions and he runs the bases well. But we’re only a third of the way through the season, and I have my doubts about how sustainable this will be for him. The holes in his plate coverage should be large enough for major league pitchers to exploit. If (read: when) that happens, Arias is going to have to punish every location mistake they make, which is difficult for even the most talented of hitters, or he’s going to have to continue to refine his game. Maybe that means closing off his stride even more to get to more pitches over the middle, or altering his swing to remain on an upward trajectory through the zone for a longer period of time. If his current setup proves to be too extreme, he can always slide ever so slightly closer to the plate. Not too much, just enough to cover a bit more of the zone without compromising his ability to turn on inner-third pitches.

But we’re not there yet. The most important thing to take away from this is Arias has shown he can make a fairly drastic adjustment and have it work as intended. So when pitchers inevitably adjust to him, perhaps he can do it again.

In 2023, Mets left-hander David Peterson struck out 128 batters in 111 innings. Peterson’s strikeout rate that year, 26.0%, was 27th in the league out of 127 pitchers who threw 100 or more innings. He was tied with Zac Gallen, not far behind Luis Castillo, Gerrit Cole, and Zack Wheeler.

The next year, Peterson’s strikeout rate dropped by more than six points, to 19.8%, but he shaved three-quarters of a run off his FIP, and more than two runs off his ERA. This year, Peterson is striking out 21.5% of opponents, and after Wednesday night’s complete-game shutout of the Nationals, his ERA is 2.49, which is 14th among qualified starters.

But I thought striking batters out was good! How did Peterson turn into this unhittable monster while running a lower strikeout rate than Shane Baz? Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Olson is having an outstanding career. Since breaking into the big leagues late in the 2016 season, the 31-year-old first baseman has blasted 273 home runs — including 54 in 2023 — while logging a 132 wRC+. A left-handed hitter, he’s garnered two All-Star nods, two Gold Gloves, and one Silver Slugger award. Originally with the Oakland Athletics, Olson has worn an Atlanta Braves uniform since they acquired him via trade in March 2022.

He was a promising-yet-polarizing prospect when Kiley McDaniel ranked him second behind Franklin Barreto on our 2015 Athletics Top Prospect list. Olson’s raw power was obvious, but there were also question marks. While some scouts were bullish on his future, others had their reservations. Drafted 47th overall in 2012 out of Parkview High School in Lilburn, Georgia, Olson had a degree of boom-or-bust in his profile.

What did Olson’s February 2015 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Olson to respond to it.

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“Olson has some pedigree as a former sandwich pick out of an Atlanta-area high school.”

“Once you get into pro ball it doesn’t matter too much,” Olson said. “At the same time, organizationally they kind of care more about the investment that is put into a guy than the player actually playing the game. As far as [having signed out of high school], you’re only playing 50 games in college, as opposed to 140 in the minors. As a hitter, I think it can be beneficial to get out there and get the day in, day out a little bit sooner.”

“He had a huge year in the Cal league last year and he has some big tools, headlined by easy plus power from the left side.” Read the rest of this entry »

Though the Padres have largely been treading water for the past six weeks while using a rather makeshift rotation — a situation not unlike that of the Dodgers, albeit with fewer ex-Rays (and probably X-rays) — that description does not extend to Manny Machado. The 32-year-old third baseman, who went 3-for-5 while driving in five runs during an 11-1 romp over the Dodgers on Tuesday, has been red-hot lately. Indeed, he’s putting together one of the best seasons of his 14-year career while doing his best to keep the NL West race a tight one.

Admittedly, Machado did not face the Dodgers’ best pitching on Tuesday. The Padres’ NL West rivals are without starters Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki, and Tony Gonsolin, the last of whom landed on the injured list earlier this week due to discomfort in his surgically repaired elbow. On Tuesday, they used an opener, Lou Trivino, who retired Machado on a routine grounder in the first inning. In Machado’s next three trips to the plate, he faced bulk guy Matt Sauer, against whom he connected for RBI singles in the third (88 mph) and fifth (77.8 mph). Sauer, a thrice-optioned righty who was forced to Wear One on behalf of a gassed staff — he gave up 13 hits and nine runs in 4 2/3 innings — finally retired Machado on a grounder in the sixth, but even that drove in a run to give the Padres a 7-0 lead. Read the rest of this entry »

Something weird is happening with Alejandro Kirk. It’s not that he’s having a great season. That’s not weird at all. Kirk ranks third among catchers with 2.4 WAR and 21st among all players. He’s also hitting much better than he has in the past two seasons, but that’s not necessarily weird either. After combining for a wRC+ of 95 in 2023 and 2024, Kirk has a 129 wRC+ this season, the same as he ran in 2022, when he was an All-Star and won the Silver Slugger. He’s always been great with the glove, and it now looks like his bat is back. His .370 xwOBA and 119 DRC+ are also his best since 2022.

What’s weird is that he’s hitting the ball harder – much, much harder – but he’s not necessarily hitting for more power. Let me show you what I mean with a table. Below are a bunch of contact-quality metrics for the five full seasons of Kirk’s career. On the far right is his isolated power. Usually, contact quality and power are pretty much synonymous. If you hit the ball hard, you’re going to end up with doubles, triples, and homers. Usually.

This season, Kirk is running the highest average exit velocity, 90th percentile exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and slugging percentage of his entire career, and not by a little bit. These are huge jumps. Everyone’s favorite 5’8” catcher is in the 97th percentile in hard-hit rate! Yet his ISO is merely the third best of his career, a mere nine points above last season’s mark. I’m curious about why Kirk is hitting the ball so much harder all of a sudden, and I’m curious about why it’s not resulting in a massive power spike. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought the other shoe was dropping on Andrew Abbott when the Brewers knocked him around last week. If your worst start of the season is five runs on seven hits in six innings, that means you’re having a damn good season, but I didn’t expect Abbott to keep rocking an ERA in the 1.50s all year. Surely some regression was coming.

A week later, it seems the other shoe remains aloft. Abbott followed up that rough day at the office with a shutout of the Guardians on Tuesday, his first career complete game. It was his fourth scoreless start of five innings or more this season, and the ninth time (out of 11) that he’s surrendered one run or less.

How’s he doing it? Well, a few weeks ago Jake Mailhot called Abbott a “contact-suppression monster,” owing to his funky fastball movement and some offseason tweaks to his changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

In the sixth inning of Monday’s game between the Blue Jays and the Cardinals, George Springer got a pitch to hit, a hanging curveball that split the center of the strike zone. He recognized the pitch late and fouled it off:

His post-swing demeanor suggests that he considered it a missed opportunity, and it’s clear to see why. With a pitch like that, he was thinking extra bases; instead, Andre Pallante got a strike for his troubles. Now Springer’s back was against the wall. Pallante came back with a much better pitch on 1-2, but Springer spoiled it:

Unlike the previous miss, this looked like a calculated act to me. Springer was late on the pitch, but it was too close for comfort, so he took a defensive cut, meeting the ball early in his swing and punching it harmlessly away.

Welcome to the confusing world of analyzing foul ball rate. Both of Springer’s swings produced the same result, but the first one was a poor outcome for him and the second a desirable one. You can argue that the second pitch would have been a ball if he hadn’t swung, but he certainly wasn’t sure of that when he committed to swinging; living to fight another day against such a well-located pitch is a good outcome.

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Luis Arraez, Nick Allen, and Brice Turang are among the leaders in early-count foul ball rate (foul balls per swing). They swing a lot, make a lot of contact, and spray their contact to all fields, including foul territory in every direction. On the other side of the coin, you’ve got sluggers like Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and yes, Springer. These guys don’t swing as often, which means a few things. First, they swing at better pitches on average, which leads to better contact. Second, they make less contact on average, and less contact means fewer fouls, even for the same rate of fouls-per-contact.

I’d rather be in the second camp than the first there. Early-count foul balls are a waste, literally the same as a swinging strike. They might be worse, even – baserunners can’t steal, catchers can’t block poorly and allow a passed ball. A full 46% of Arraez’s swings – 48% for league leader Wilyer Abreu – end up as foul balls. Sure, contact is great, but when half of it counts as a strike, it’s a lot less enticing.

Things change with two strikes, though. When a foul ball extends the at-bat instead of ending it in a strikeout, it becomes valuable instead of detrimental. Have you ever watched Jake Cronenworth hit? With two strikes, he turns into a lacrosse goalie, trying to redirect everything in the vicinity of the strike zone. He’s not trying to hit a homer unless the pitcher truly grooves him one; he’s specifically looking to avoid a strikeout. Cronenworth sports the highest foul-per-swing rate in baseball with two strikes at 51.2%. It works – he still strikes out a decent amount because of his penchant for running deep counts, but he walks 16% of the time because eventually pitchers miss the zone.

The bottom of the two-strike foul ball rate list, on the other hand, is filled with strikeout-prone types. Javier Báez makes foul contact on just 27% of his two-strike swings. Judge, who still strikes out a ton even as he rewrites the record books, is towards the bottom. So are Jackson Chourio, Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Kyle Schwarber, and all nature of excellent sluggers. You can get away with it if you hit like those guys, but Andrew Vaughn, Brenton Doyle, Miguel Andujar, and Michael Toglia are floundering under the weight of their inability to fight pitches off. This isn’t a disqualifying statistic, in other words, but it’s surely a bad thing; it’s directly leading to higher strikeout rates, and unless you have light tower power, many of the pitches you swing at with two strikes aren’t the kind you can hit for extra bases anyway.

I’d posit that high foul ball rates before two strikes are bad, while high foul ball rates with two strikes are good. Early in the count, fouls are a waste, while late in the count, they’re a get out of jail free card. Assuming that these two events are equivalent doesn’t make much sense to me; hitters behave differently, and if we don’t credit them for that different behavior, we’re missing something essential about the act of hitting.

To measure this, I had to put everything on the same scale. I first took every hitter who has swung at 200 or more pitches early in the count, found the average foul ball per swing rate, then normalized each player’s foul ball rate into z-scores. I did the same for every hitter who has swung at 100 or more pitches in two-strike counts. That gave me two scores for every hitter: early-count foul rate and two-strike foul rate. I flipped the sign of the early-count foul rate scores – lower is better – and then summed the two.

This let me separate out the hitters who always have high foul ball rates or always have low foul ball rates – they don’t demonstrate this skill of changing their approach in a measurable way. Arraez, for example, makes foul contact on 46.2% of his early-count swings and 46.3% of his two-strike swings. It’s the same approach, and because the league as a whole cuts down on their swings and makes more foul contact with two strikes, Arraez rates below average in this metric. He’s two standard deviations above average in his early-count foul rate and only 1.6 above average in two-strike foul ball rate, a net of -0.4 for his “foul score.” Allen is even worse – he makes foul contact on 47.1% of early-count swings, but only 39.3% of two-strike swings. When pitchers try to throw the ball past him, they succeed. His foul score is a woeful -2.15.

That’s among the worst marks in the majors, but the actual worst hitter is doing a lot worse than that. That would be Andujar, who is making a ton of foul contact early (44.6%) but almost never when he needs it to stay alive (27.4%). The result is a foul score of -4.2. If you’re wondering why a guy with his skills – solid bat speed, elite contact rate – has never taken off in the majors, it might be related to this. Likewise, if you’re trying to puzzle out what’s ailing Xander Bogaerts this year, it can’t help that he makes foul contact 39% of the time early but only 30% of the time late, for a foul score of -2.2.

Most big leaguers aren’t outliers to this degree. More than 60% of the league has a foul score between -1 and 1, and 93% fall between -2 and 2. The top 10 hitters by this metric have an aggregate wRC+ 20 points higher than the bottom 10, but most players fall into the broad, undifferentiated middle. I’m not saying that this is a skill that everyone in baseball has or should use, but I do think that it’s measuring a real ability.

That brings us back to Springer, a paragon of adaptability. Early in the count, he’s allergic to foul balls, fouling the ball off just 30.6% of the time. Put him in a two-strike count, however, and he goes into protect mode, fouling off the ball with 42% of his hacks. He’s demonstrated some version of this skill throughout his career, in fact. His worst two years for modulating his foul ball rate were 2023 and 2024 – perhaps not coincidentally, those were the two worst offensive years of his career.

Another standout in the field? Springer’s erstwhile teammate, Carlos Correa, who is roughly Springer’s equal in foul score this year and has been even better over the course of his career. Was this part of the Astros’ famed no-strikeouts transformation? I obviously can’t say with any certainty, and they might have been doing a few other things to tilt things in their favor, but a solid approach like this can’t hurt.

It’s not all former Astros. Harper has learned this skill over time. During his Nationals tenure, he didn’t change his approach much at all when reaching two strikes. Since joining the Phillies, however, he’s running one of the largest differences between early-count foul rate and two-strike foul rate in the entire major leagues. And hey, would you look at that, he has a huge foul score this year, too – his 28% early-count foul rate and 37% two-strike foul rate land him fourth in the majors in foul score.

When fans and analysts talk about smart hitters with bat control, I’d argue that they’re implicitly describing this skill. The ability to take different swings depending on the context – prioritizing loud, fair contact early, then choking up and defending late – thrills old-school and new-school fans alike. That ability to adapt is more valuable than always slapping at the ball or always trying to hit it out of the park.

If you’re like me, you have one big question: Is this a sustainable skill, or does it flicker in and out from one year to the next, introducing noise into hitters’ production? The outliers here clearly seem to have an edge – Harper, Springer, and Correa do it consistently. Allen and Andujar have always made more foul contact with two strikes than early in the count; they’ve never possessed this skill. Still, I wanted to check whether it’s a talent (or hinderance) held by only a few.

To do so, I took data from 2023 and 2024. I identified the top 10% and bottom 10% of hitters in 2023, then compared their performance to 2024. The top 10% of hitters averaged a score of 1.7 in 2023 and 0.6 in 2024. The bottom 10% of hitters averaged -2 in 2023 and -0.4 in 2024. Expand it to the top 25%, and you get a similar result: 1.2 in 2023 and 0.3 in 2024 for the top 25%, -1.6 in 2023 and -0.4 in 2024 for the bottom 25%. There was a 0.3 correlation between year-one foul score and year-two foul score. It’s a real skill – not as strong as, say, home run rate or swinging strike rate, but nevertheless something where hitters who are good at it in one year tend to be good at it in the next.

So the next time you see George Springer foul off an early hanging breaking ball, you’ll know: That’s a rare event. And next time you see Bryce Harper turn an 0-2 count into an all-out foul ball battle, yep, that’s years of training showing through. These guys are good at what they do, and it’s a thing that you, the fan, implicitly know is a good thing. Isn’t baseball cool?

One of the many common themes in mythology, across myriad cultures, is the tragic tale of a protagonist who is undermined and ultimately defeated by the original source of their strength. Oedipus was brought down by his search for truth, Karna by his generosity, and Cú Chulainn by his obligations to his code of honor. Luis Arraez isn’t the hero in an ancient tale, but his ability to hit baseballs at will is the stuff of a modern baseball legend. And like those heroes and heroines in lore, his greatest strength is contributing to his downfall.

Arraez is so fun because he defies an unfortunate aspect of today’s game, what I’ve referred to in the past as its “Anna Karenina problem.” Every lousy lineup seems incompetent in their own way, while most great lineups are nearly indistinguishable from the others. It certainly feels like there’s less run-scoring variety than there was when I was young, a concerningly long time ago. Nobody could possibly mistake Arraez for the greatest player in baseball, but he has won three straight batting titles despite being so very different than the type of player you would see on the cover of a Modern Hitter magazine. He doesn’t work counts to draw walks or pull a bunch of barrels into the stands. Instead, he can turn nearly any pitch into a line drive hit, leading to high batting averages in an era when that has become a relative rarity. In 2025, Arraez has struck out only five times; there are five players this season who have done that in a single game, including former MVP Jose Altuve and two young phenoms, Dylan Crews, Jackson Chourio.

Without boasting the traditional markers of a valuable offensive player, Arraez has nonetheless been one since he broke into the league with the Twins in 2019. He entered this season with a career 120 wRC+ across nearly 3,000 plate appearances, even though he’d hit just 28 home runs. Still, that doesn’t mean Arraez has maintained the same level of nonconformity throughout his career. He remains a contact extraordinaire without much power, but some of his defining characteristics have become more extreme as his career has progressed. With a 103 wRC+, Arraez is having his weakest offensive season, and it’s largely because his signature formula for success isn’t quite mixing the way it did before. Read the rest of this entry »