A lot of my thoughts on hitting are rooted in my own experiences playing, for better or for worse. When I was in school playing ball, I was constantly working through a particular mechanical issue. Traditionally, it is called “getting stuck on the back side,” but I always said I got stuck on a pedestal. When I got to the highest point of my leg kick (which was moderately high), I sometimes transferred too much of my weight over my back foot – it was a swing path killer. Because of my extensive experience with it, I’ve always been keen on identifying hitters who have a similar issue.

Rotational movements like hitting and pitching have linear components, but hitters need to do more than just move on the coronal plane (from left to right or right to left) in order to have a deep entry into the hitting zone. A hitter has to rotate with his hips and/or spine while moving along that linear plane to create rotational power and an ideal bat path. In the case of pedestal hitters, they reach their peak leg lift while sometimes neglecting those other aspects of movement.

Take Will Smith, for example. He uses a high leg kick to create space in his swing and fell into the pedestal hitting habit during the second half of last season:

October 9th

September 22nd

September 7th

A few hittable pitches in the heart of the zone with no barrels to show for it. On the middle-middle heaters, his path was cut off and he only skimmed the bottom of the ball, rather than hitting it flush. That led to can-of-corn fly balls to right field instead of barreled line drives. This was a persistent issue for Smith throughout 2023 – the worst offensive season of his five-year career and the first with an ISO below .200.

When you transfer too much weight over your back foot, you either get stuck and create a path which leads to lazy fly balls to the opposite field or you fall too heavy on your front side and hit grounders like Smith did against Manaea. You lose depth in your bat path and can’t cover as much of the zone with your barrel. For Smith, that negatively impacted his wOBA on outer third pitches. For the bulk of his career, he has been able to cover those pitches, so this should be something he can fix. To do that, he’ll have to get back to his early 2023 swings where he was balanced and creating space for his bat to work through the zone.

April 30th

Smith is a good enough hitter that he still posted a 119 wRC+ last year despite his mechanical flaw. Not everyone has that much room for error, though. Enrique Hernández has had a wRC+ below 75 in consecutive seasons after running a 109 mark in 2021. Like Smith, he typically relies on a big leg kick to create space, rhythm, and timing in his swing. And while the size of his leg kick fluctuates more than Smith’s, it’s still a key driver in his process. Here are a few swings from 2023 before he was traded to the Dodgers:

April 11th

June 25th

July 2nd

Even if you want to cut Hernández some slack on the high quality changeup from Shane McClanahan, that swing is still a good example of how his lack of balance causes him to land heavily on his lead leg. The heavy landing is even more obvious in his swing against Jesse Scholtens in the second clip. With that swing in particular, his leg kick works straight up and down, which causes him to force a lead hip external rotation.

What do I mean by that? If you’re trying to explode your lead leg open, you would create the counter movement (internal hip rotation) first. That way, you’re creating a reciprocal pattern that leads to smooth external rotation. Staying neutral at the beginning of the swing creates an imbalance, causing the hitter to stand on the pedestal instead of rotating into and then out of it as he swings. Hernández has hyper mobile external rotation, which is seen by his tendency to stride open. To control it, he needs to create sufficient counter rotation with his hips. Unsurprisingly, when he went to Los Angeles, he made a clear change in his leg lift that allowed him to stack his center of mass over his midpoint instead of his back leg. Pay attention to the direction he works his leg kick:

August 19th

September 9th

His leg lift started working on an angle towards his back leg, which allowed him to have a controlled explosion and balanced swing. With the Dodgers, he had a 96 wRC+ – much more in line with his career 94 mark. Yes, it was over a sample of 185 plate appearances, but the movement quality improvement is undeniable.

The last example I’ll use to portray pedestal hitters is Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan. His case is a bit more complicated. In his rookie season, he splashed onto the scene with a 126 wRC+. However, his peripherals suggested there would likely be a regression – his .341 wOBA was considerably higher than his .312 xwOBA. In 2023, those numbers almost completely converged. He had a .313 wOBA and .318 xwOBA. From a mechanical point of view, this wasn’t completely surprising.

His big leg kick is a crucial component of his swing. It keeps him stable, which plays a key role in his great plate discipline. However, the movement also makes him heavily reliant on his hands to do most of the work to get on plane. Given his elite bat-to-ball skills, he can successfully do that more than other players, but he doesn’t have much room for error. If he gets stuck on his back side, his hands can only do so much. If he identifies a pitch too late, even just slightly, then he puts himself in a tough position to make flush contact. Here are a few swings showing that:

July 9th

August 30th

September 22nd

Each of these fastballs were thrown between 96 and 97 mph, but were right down the middle. Kwan couldn’t get his hands on plane despite the hittable locations. This was a trend for him all year. In 2023, he saw 190 four-seamers with a velocity of at least 96 mph and had a .155 wOBA against them. This is another example of why rotational hitters like Kwan, Hernández and Smith need to be on top of their mechanics at all times. Pedestal hitting gives batters even less margin for error than other hitters against high velocity.

Every hitter has his weakness, and for this trio of players, theirs is directly related to how they load with their leg kick. As I watch each of them in 2024, I’ll be looking for any potential adjustments they might have made over the offseason, or might make as the season progresses.

We’ve spent a fair deal of time the past few months discussing the AL West, producers of the past two World Series winners. There’s the reigning champion Rangers constructing a pitching staff built for next October, the always-potent Astros assembling a mega-bullpen to go along with their core of offensive talent, and the Mariners making a whole lot of trade as part of their perpetual roster churn. Each of these three teams won at least 88 games last year, and all three had a shot at the division crown entering the final weekend of the regular season. Their offseason moves reflect their hopes to contend again in 2024.

The same cannot be said for the two other teams in the division. The Angels spent most of the offseason bolstering their bullpen while doing nothing to fill the Ohtani-sized hole in their lineup. The 112-loss Athletics did even less. They signed reliever Trevor Gott, traded for Abraham Toro, and that’s about it. That is, until a few days ago, when Oakland signed lefty Alex Wood and Los Angeles added outfielder Aaron Hicks. The two players improve their new clubs along the margins, but it’s going to take more than them to turn things around.

Alex Wood Moves Across the Bay

Wood, 33, agreed to a one-year deal with Oakland over the weekend, though the terms of the contract have not yet been reported. He began his career as a highly effective starter on the Braves and Dodgers, posting a 3.29 ERA and 3.36 FIP through his first six seasons. Since then, he’s been more up and down. After injuries limited him to nine appearances combined in 2019 and 2020, he took a prove-it deal with the Giants on their miracle 2021 squad, parlaying a bounceback campaign into a two-year, $25 million contract, which didn’t work out as well. Wood had a 4.77 ERA across the two seasons and was nearly replacement level in 2023, looking nothing like the mid-rotation arm he once was.

Wood’s struggles in the first year of his second contract with the Giants were largely the product of batted ball luck; he outperformed his peripherals by about a run and a half. While his numbers in 2023 returned to nearly league-average levels, the under-the-hood numbers took a big turn for the worse. Take a look at his three-year run in San Francisco.

The numbers in 2021 and 2022 look remarkably similar, despite a vastly different ERA. But nearly everything fell apart last year. The drop in strikeout rate is significant, but what stands out most to me are the elevated walk rate and plummeting chase rate, signs of a loss in command. Part of the issue may be mechanical; Wood dropped his arm slot significantly upon joining the Giants, and his funky delivery almost resembles a shotput throw rather than a baseball pitch. But between 2022 and 2023, his vertical release point stayed about the same while his arm got about two inches less horizontal extension.

In terms of actual pitch locations, Wood often missed his spots high. I’m not just talking about intentionally-placed flat sinkers; his slider and changeup also had a generally upward drift – not an ideal outcome for someone who uses the lateral action on each of his offerings to induce ground balls. Indeed, last year he had the worst grounder rate of any full season in his career. These frequent misses made it easier for batters to lay off pitches just below the zone, an area where Wood has frequently generated value in the past, leading to a ballooning of his walk rate.

This signing is as much about Wood’s role as it is about his performance. A career starting pitcher, Wood was frustrated last year when the Giants made him a swingman. San Francisco’s decision to break down the traditional roles of starter and reliever gave jobs to rookie arms like Keaton Winn and Tristan Beck, but staff veterans certainly had to adapt to the unorthodox change. Wood averaged less than four innings a game in his dozen starts, while making relief appearances of between one and 15 outs. On one occasion, he tossed four innings and 70 pitches the day after a bullpen session and on short rest from his previous appearance.

Luckily for Wood, the A’s are the perfect team for a veteran to attempt a comeback in a consistent role. He joins fellow low-slot lefty JP Sears as the only members of the projected rotation to ever complete 120 innings in a big league season. The presence of “relative innings eaters” like Sears, Wood, and Paul Blackburn (who has topped at 111 innings) will allow a pair of young arms with big stuff in Luis Medina and Joe Boyle to pitch full seasons in the rotation with minimal risk of being overworked. They’ll also help take the load off Mason Miller, who touches 102 mph and projects as a top-five reliever by Steamer, but has spent the bulk of his professional career on the injured list. With this signing, both sides gain some stability, and if Wood pitches well, the A’s could trade him to a contender before the year is over. In the meantime, though, Wood gets a team willing to give him the ball every fifth day, while Oakland gets a live breathing man willing to pitch on a bleak-looking squad – the smallest of win-wins.

Aaron Hicks Comes to Anaheim

Once an everyday center fielder who received an MVP vote in 2018, Hicks has taken quite the fall from grace in recent years. He signed a seven-year deal worth $70 million with the Yankees after his ’18 campaign, when his combination of solid home run power and a disciplined approach made him a four-win player. But his subsequent issues with injuries and performance have sapped his value, and in May, he was released with nearly three years left on his contract. He played out the rest of 2023 with the Orioles and had a surprising return to form, though he did this in just a 65-game sample and outperformed his expected numbers considerably. The Yankees will now be paying Hicks over $8 million to play for the Angels as he attempts to rebuild his career.

First, there’s the health aspect of things. The season that prompted Hicks’ lengthy extension is, to date, the only time he’s qualified for the batting title, thanks to a laundry list of injuries that have afflicted pretty much every body part there is. These issues have had a considerable impact on his performance, most notably seen in his steady decline in power over the past half decade. Since his best season, his maximum exit velocity has declined by 4 mph, and his barrel and hard-hit rates have cratered. As someone who’s never excelled at spraying line drives, Hicks isn’t able to rely on soft flares that land in front of outfielders.

A switch hitter, Hicks tapped into his power with New York because of his ability to pull the ball in the air, a skill aided by the juiced ball era and Yankee Stadium’s short porch for left-handed hitters. The Yankees as a whole were successful in optimizing the batted ball profiles of many of their hitters, turning DJ LeMahieu and Didi Gregorius into 25-homer threats. During the peak juiced ball years of 2018 and ’19, Hicks hit nearly all of his homers to the pull side, especially taking advantage when stepping into the box as a lefty. Since then, his aerial contact has been considerably weaker. Combine that with a baseball that behaves in line with normal physics, and his entire source of power disappeared. From 2017-19, Hicks homered every 22 plate appearances; that rate has been slashed nearly in half over the past four seasons. Hicks is still likely a near-average hitter, but that value will be exclusively coming from his still-great walk rates, not through homers.

The addition of Hicks, now 34, complicates the Angels’ outfield situation a bit. They already have two clear everyday outfielders in Mike Trout and Taylor Ward, leaving just one spot and a fraction of DH time for Hicks, Mickey Moniak, and Jo Adell. Even without Hicks in the picture, allocating playing time is still a challenge. On a contending team, it would make sense to set up Moniak and Adell in a power-heavy (and OBP-light) platoon. But the Angels aren’t in such a situation. Rather, they should be prioritizing the out-of-options Adell in their plans, either to build up trade value or to give him a last chance at being a viable everyday player. Now with Hicks, a veteran and known quantity who can also be traded, in the picture, the playing time picture gets squeezed a bit more.

Because of the team’s outfield logjam, Hicks probably won’t see tons of playing time to start the year. But he certainly provides a much-needed insurance policy if things don’t go as planned. He can play center field if Trout gets injured or a corner if Moniak or Adell are waived or traded. And the positional shuffling in the case of an Anthony Rendon injury could open up time at DH for him to fill. Hicks certainly shouldn’t be stealing playing time, but especially at his price point, the Angels will be glad to have him if (or when) things go wrong.

Richard Fitts is a big right-hander hoping to do big things in a new organization. He has a chance to do just that. Acquired by the Boston Red Sox from the New York Yankees in December’s Alex Verdugo trade, the 6-foot-4, 245-pound Auburn University product is coming off a season where he logged a 3.48 ERA and fanned 163 batters in 152-and-two-thirds innings with Double-A Somerset. A 2021 sixth-round pick slated to begin the forthcoming campaign in Triple-A, he ranks among the top starting pitcher prospects in the Red Sox system.

Fitts discussed his game earlier this month when Boston held its annual Rookie Development Camp at Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with how you approach your craft. Are you a pitching nerd?

Richard Fitts: “I’d like to be considered a pitching nerd. I’m by no means a genius, but I take a lot of pride in trying to get better every single day, and that includes figuring out the ins and outs of what can make me the best that I can be.” Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Turner, the longtime Dodgers stalwart and kind of guy who makes you wonder when “professional hitter” stopped being a baseball idiom in common usage, has a new gig. After one season in Boston — moderately successful for him, less so for his team — Turner is moving west to Toronto, where he’ll make $13 million this season, with the chance to earn an additional $1.5 million in bonuses and incentives.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you probably saw the news that Turner would be sharing an infield (and/or a DH spot) with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and thought, “Wait, didn’t Turner come up with the Orioles around the same time Guerrero père was winding down his career there?” And sure enough, he did. But Turner isn’t just so old he played with his new teammate’s dad. He’s so old he played four years of college, got drafted, spent three seasons in the minors, played parts of two seasons in the majors with the Orioles, and got traded away before his new teammate’s dad even got there.

Turner just turned 39, which is still 39 years old in Canada after you account for the exchange rate. I checked. That’s relatively young for someone who spent their young adulthood working on a humanities PhD while all their friends were starting families and getting established professionally. (You’ve still got your whole life ahead of you! I believe in you!) But it’s old for a ballplayer. Particularly a ballplayer on a contract that indicates he’s meant to be a key contributor on a playoff team. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you, or have you ever been, in a position to make decisions about major league team personnel? Do you like trading? Have you ever held a dime and wished it were two nickels, or vice versa? If so, stay where you are, remain calm, and Jerry Dipoto will be calling you soon to make some deals. Like this one:

MLB righties Anthony DeSclafani and Justin Topa along with prospects OF Gabriel Gonzalez and RHP Darren Bowen is the four player return for Polanco, per sources. Believe cash is also involved. https://t.co/GQDKtwaogh

— Kiley McDaniel (@kileymcd) January 30, 2024

Prospects! Relievers! Reclamation projects! Everyday regulars! This one has a little bit of everything. But it’s more complicated than that, because it’s not your standard offseason trade, where one team is downgrading to look for the future while the other builds for today. Both of these teams have playoff hopes this year, and they’re each using this trade to improve their chances. It’s a weird one.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing this article because I’m worried that one of my favorite baseball things is going away. It’s not Shohei doing Shohei stuff, or Mookie Betts nonchalantly doing something that seems impossible when you watch it in slow motion. It’s not even a hipstery, less-popular-but-still-cool thing, like watching Ke’Bryan Hayes charge a tricky grounder. I like all those things, but nothing has given me more joy over the past half-decade than watching Jacob deGrom calmly dissect opposing lineups.

Maybe I’m too hasty to treat this like it’s in the past. The Rangers expect deGrom back in July or August this year – perhaps he’ll hit the mound and pick up right where he left off. Maybe he’ll be even better, though I’m not exactly sure how that would work. But I’m worried, because nothing lasts forever, and deGrom’s impossible peak has already gone on longer than I expected. At some point, he’ll fall back to the pack, and “right after returning from a major surgery” seems like a fairly likely candidate for when that might occur.

I’m afraid that I’ll forget what it was like to see deGrom at his domineering best. So I started looking at some of the stats that he put up during that run, and watching videos of it, and before I knew it, a few hours had passed. It’s just that fun to look at what he’s been doing and marvel. Maybe the fun will continue when he’s back. Maybe his run will extend for years. But just in case, I’m going to take a preemptive look back so that I can show you some GIFs and graphs and tables that drive home just how spectacular deGrom has been. Read the rest of this entry »

The Detroit Tigers locked up one of their top young prospects to a long-term extension over the weekend, signing infielder Colt Keith to a six-year contract worth $28.6 million guaranteed, including a buyout after year six. With three team options totaling an additional $38 million, Keith might not hit free agency until after the 2032 season. Those options can be enriched further, by up to $18 million, depending on Keith’s success at earning MVP votes, Silver Slugger awards, and All-Star appearances. The deal has a maximum value of $82 million over nine years.

One of Detroit’s recent struggles has been its inability to find and develop offensive talent. This wasn’t the case during the team’s run of success in the early 2010s, with future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera as its anchor. But as Cabrera and Victor Martinez aged, and other key contributors, such as Prince Fielder, J.D. Martinez and Austin Jackson, left for other teams, the Tigers’ offensive output dropped to the bottom of the league. Aside from Nick Castellanos, who was traded in 2019, none of the young hitters coming up through the system have panned out.

That said, the Tigers have seen some signs of hope over the last few years. When healthy, Riley Greene has been very good, and while Spencer Torkelson had a rough start to his big league career, he improved significantly in the second half of 2023. Detroit still needs more, though, and that may come in the form of Keith, a fifth-round pick from the COVID-abbreviated 2020 draft. Keith showed promise in 2022, hitting .301/.370/.544 for West Michigan of the High-A Midwest League, but he injured his shoulder badly on a pickoff attempt in June, costing him the rest of the season. He recovered enough to play in the Arizona Fall League, where he hit .344/.463/.541 in 80 plate appearances over 19 games.

Despite the short season, he ranked atop Detroit’s prospect list found in our humble home. Splitting 2023 between Double- and Triple-A, Keith stayed healthy and hit a combined .306/.380/.552 with 27 homers and 38 doubles. ZiPS translates that performance into a .268/.328/.454, 20 homer line, well below the level of phenom, but more than respectable for a second base/third base prospect in his first go at the high minors.

With a contract that can stretch for nine years, let’s crank out the long-term ZiPS projection for Keith.

While those are not star-level projections, they are the ones of a player you’d like to keep around through his prime. There are lots of familiar names among Keith’s ZiPS comps, such as Eric Chavez, Hank Blalock, Jedd Gyorko, Castellanos himself, Rafael Devers, Ryan Zimmerman, Travis Fryman, and Joe Crede. No, none of them were Hall of Famers – though it’s plausible that Devers could hit enough homers to prove the exception – but each were solid big leaguers.

One of the largest remaining questions around Keith is what position he’ll play in the majors. He’s played both second and third base, and appears to be below average at both. The probabilistic coordinate method that ZiPS uses graded Keith at about eight runs below average at second base, per 1300 innings, in 2023 and six runs below average at third. My colleague Eric Longenhagen feels that Keith is more likely to stick at second, rather than third.

During his stay in Toledo, Keith began to see more time at second base rather than his native third. He’s a bad defender at both spots but has a much greater chance at becoming passable (read: hidden) at second, where some of Keith’s issues with throwing are masked.

[…]

Keith has bulked up considerably since signing, and the effects of his increased size are evident on defense. Once a fair bet to stay on the middle infield, he is now fighting just to stay at third. He is stiff and bulky, his actions are well below average, and while he shows you a big arm when he gets to wind up and really let it eat, he struggles to throw from odd platforms. It’s feasible a team could live with him playing third base situationally, but it’s not ideal, and Colt is a 30-grade defender right now.

In a perfect world, Keith would stick at one of the two positions, with Jace Jung manning the other. One of the nice things about a rebuild is that teams get the chance to experiment, and the Tigers take advantage of that with Keith. Playing him in left field would be a great deal less exciting, but not a disastrous outcome, with mean projected OPS+ numbers in the high 110s during his prime. Left field Keith profiles similarly to Lourdes Gurriel Jr., who as one of the best outfielders available in free agency this offseason managed to snag a three-year deal with the Diamondbacks.

There are risks that come with signing a player with so little professional experience, but those are reflected in the price. Yes, $28.6 million is a lot of cash, but not so much in the context of baseball, and the ZiPS projection for Keith suggests a $38 million offer, taking into consideration the reduced salaries of the cost-controlled years. Similar extensions to Jon Singleton and Scott Kingery didn’t work out particularly well for the teams that made them, namely the Astros and Phillies, but those deals weren’t detrimental, either. The upside for Detroit here is considerable.

Are the Tigers playoff contenders in 2024? Probably not. But they’re not so far away that it would be a black swan event if they made some noise in the AL Central race or threatened to grab the last wild card spot. If they succeed, it will likely be in large part due to players like Keith taking a step forward.

In the second half of the 2023 season, three players shared designated hitting duties for the Arizona Diamondbacks: Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Tommy Pham, and Evan Longoria. Three more started multiple games at DH: Dominic Canzone, Kyle Lewis, and Buddy Kennedy. By mid-November, none of those players remained with the organization. The D-backs quickly replaced Longoria, trading for veteran third baseman Eugenio Suárez in November. A few weeks later, they re-signed Gurriel. However, neither move fully addressed the hole at DH; Suárez will slot in at the hot corner, while Gurriel should start most days in left field. The Diamondbacks still needed a regular designated hitter, and late last week, they finally found their guy in Joc Pederson.

Pederson will earn $9.5 million in 2024, with a $14 million mutual option ($3 million buyout) for 2025. If both sides pick up their end of the option, the deal will max out at $23.5 million over two years, quite similar to our crowdsourced estimate of two years and $24 million. In the more likely scenario where one side or the other declines the option, Pederson will earn $12.5 million for a single year of work, almost perfectly in line with Ben Clemens’ prediction of one year and $12 million. That is to say, nothing about this contract comes as much of a shock. Read the rest of this entry »

Edouard Julien had a remarkable rookie season. Called up for good in late May, he knocked 16 home runs and ran a 136 wRC+ over 109 games, finishing seventh in the AL Rookie of the Year voting. Among second basemen with at least 400 plate appearances, that 136 wRC+ ranked third in baseball, behind Mookie Betts and Jose Altuve and ahead of Luis Arraez. That’s pretty good company. Using the same plate appearances threshold, his 17.2% chase rate was the lowest in baseball, which enabled him to run a 15.7% walk rate, good for fifth highest. John Foley recently wrote an excellent breakdown of Julien’s patience over at Twinkie Town.

There are also plenty of non-baseball reasons to enjoy Julien. He’s the bearer of the fanciest name in MLB, and so far as I can tell he’s just the second player in big-league history whose name includes the vowels O, U, and A all in a row. The first was also an Edouard: Joseph Albert Rolland Édouard, better known as Roland Gladu. A French-Canadian like Julien, Gladu played all over the world, homering in the professional leagues of five different countries: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Great Britain. Julien’s name also flows off the tongue in a pleasing way. Because of the scansion of Edouard Julien, whenever I think about him for an extended period of time, this song gets stuck in my head:

I even wrote a Julien-inspired version of the song — mostly because I couldn’t not write one — which you can listen to at the bottom of this piece.

Back to baseball, there was a bit of helium in Julien’s 2023 numbers. His wOBA outpaced his xwOBA by 18 points, and his .371 BABIP ranked fifth in all of baseball. Understandably, the projection systems see him stepping back to a wRC+ around 115 next year. There are still some holes in Julien’s game. He doesn’t make enough contact, especially on pitches in the zone. Combined with his preternatural patience, that leads to a big, scary strikeout rate of 31.4%. While that did help him fit in with the rest of Minnesota’s roster, it’s not exactly ideal.

Today we’re going to worry about a different part of Julien’s profile: hitting left-handed pitching. To say that it wasn’t a highlight of his rookie campaign would be an understatement. Julien’s splits against righties and lefties were downright historic. In fact, he took home the first annual Scooter Gennett Award for Offensive Asymmetry, which goes to the player with the largest difference between their wRC+ against righties and lefties (minimum 400 PAs). Since 2002, which is as far back as our main leaderboard tracks handedness splits, 4,418 player seasons have met that PA minimum. Gennett became the face of the award thanks to a 2014 season when he put up an excellent 118 wRC+ against righties and a downright depressing -40 against lefties. In 2023, Julien put up a wRC+ of 151 against righties and 22 against lefties, for a difference of 129. Since 2002, only 10 players have had a wider range.

Keep in mind, a lot of this is small sample size theater. There aren’t that many left-handed pitchers, and if your team doesn’t trust you to hit against them, you’re not going to get what few chances are available. This can also create a chicken-and-the-egg situation. You can get fewer PAs against lefties because you can’t hit them, or you can fail to hit lefties because you don’t see them often enough to get comfortable. Julien had just 48 PAs against lefties in 2023. Of the 4,418 seasons in our sample, only 42 of those players faced lefties less often than Julien’s 11.8%. Julien would probably improve against lefties if he ever got regular plate appearances against them, but even if he doesn’t, it would be foolish to assume that a wRC+ of 22 represents his true talent level.

However, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in December, Nick Nelson noted Julien’s splits with Double-A Wichita during the 2022 season. Julien slashed .332/.465/.566 against righties and .210/.373/.276 against lefties. If you’re keeping score at home, that works out to OPS splits of 1.031 and 649.

There’s one more important caveat before we dive into the numbers: The splits don’t matter that much. Most pitchers are righties. That means Julien will get to face righties most of the time, and it also means that finding a righty to platoon with him won’t be terribly hard. If his platoon splits were to stay exactly the same, Julien would still be a league-average hitter as long as he didn’t face lefties more than 40% of the time, and that’s not going to happen. Of our 4,418-season sample, only 27 players ever saw lefties that often.

However, none of that made me less curious about what was going on when Julien faced lefties, so I broke down the splits.

His strikeout rate is higher against lefties, but the walk rate is what really jumps out. It’s 13 percentage points higher against righties than against lefties. That’s an enormous difference! All of our small sample size caveats apply, but in terms of walk rate, depending on the handedness of the pitcher, Julien goes from very nearly Juan Soto to literally worse than Javier Báez. Let’s take a look at what’s going on under the hood:

Well that’s simple enough. Julien swings a lot more against lefties, especially outside the zone. He’s still patient by any reasonable standard; a 21.5% chase rate is still in something like the 92nd percentile. However, Julien also whiffs more, and not just outside the zone. His zone contact rate is already the most worrisome part of his profile, and against lefties it’s even worse.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t stop there. When he does put the ball in play against lefties, Julien not only hits the ball a lot softer, but he hits it straight into the ground.

There’s a big difference if you go by Statcast’s hard-hit rate, but take a look at the soft, medium, and hard percentages, which come from Sports Info Solutions. By their reckoning, Julien’s hard-hit rate is more than 30 percentage points lower against lefties. And then there’s the launch angle. Julien hits the ball on the ground more than would be ideal against righties, but against lefties? That’s not a typo; just one of Julien’s 30 batted balls was a fly ball. That’s how you get a 24:1 ratio of groundballs to fly balls. What does that look like in a heat map? It looks like never hitting the ball out of the infield.

This doesn’t seem to be a pitch location issue. When facing Julien, lefties have targeted the bottom of the zone more often than righties have, but only slightly. The same is true of his swing decisions. Julien swung at lower pitches from lefties, but just barely. It doesn’t seem to be a pitch type issue either. Against lefties, 56.7% of his balls in play against came on sinkers, breaking balls, or offspeed pitches, compared to 48.4% against righties. That’s not an insignificant difference, but it’s nowhere near enough to explain an 18.2-degree shift in launch angle. It just seems to be the way he hit the ball against lefties.

This is, I swear, the last time I remind you that everything I’ve just said is based on small samples, but seriously, the samples are very small. I’m hoping that we’ll get some bigger samples in 2024, but so far that doesn’t seem likely. He started just seven of the 38 games the Twins faced a left-handed starter with him on the roster, ceding the keystone to Kyle Farmer and Jorge Polanco. Polanco’s current contract ends after 2024, with a club option for 2025. Even if the trade rumors around Polanco turn out to be true, Farmer and the Twins just agreed on a one-year deal, avoiding arbitration, with a mutual option for 2025. It’s a bit disappointing. I would love to see what Julien could do over a bigger sample. If he does turn out to be passable against lefties, it would be extremely fun to watch and it could propel him to another level. And if it turns out that a 22 wRC+ really does represent his true talent level, that would be pretty interesting, too. More importantly, it would lock up the Scooter Gennett Award for Offensive Asymmetry for years to come.

It’s been a rough week for workers in certain sectors of the American economy, but for veteran right-handed relief pitchers, business is a-boomin’. David Robertson has signed a one-year contract with the Texas Rangers worth $11.5 million, with a mutual option for 2025. Hector Neris has landed with the Cubs on a one-year deal worth $9 million, with a team option for a second year at the same amount. If you pitched in relief for the 2019 Phillies, stay by your phone — a team is going to call any moment. That means you, Adam Morgan! Read the rest of this entry »