CJ Abrams Takes The Lead

CJ Abrams befuddles me. There’s no question that he has plus raw power in his bat. Look at this year’s statistics; he’s sitting in the 81st percentile for maximum exit velocity. But despite that fact, he’s in the 10th percentile for average exit velocity, and the 17th for hard-hit rate. He’s a power hitter! He’s a slap hitter! Both are true.

Likewise, I’m not quite sure what to make of the rest of his game. He has blazing straight line speed, and he uses that to his advantage on the basepaths. We have him down as the third-most valuable baserunner in the majors this year, behind only Esteury Ruiz and Corbin Carroll. But almost all of that value comes on stolen bases – he’s 25th in UBR, which measures non-steal advancement. And on defense, he has tremendous range and an average throwing arm, but grades out somewhere between average (DRS) and poor (OAA) anyway. His profile is a series of contradictions.

The thing is, all of these have been true about Abrams since the Padres drafted him in the first round in 2019. He was a divisive prospect from the start; it was never clear whether he’d end up as a slugging second baseman or a rangy, leadoff-hitting shortstop. Then the pandemic canceled the 2020 minor league season, and he missed most of 2021 with injury even as the Padres aggressively promoted him. Suddenly he was debuting in the big leagues at 21 as an injury replacement for, gulp, Fernando Tatis Jr. Life comes at you fast.

Sometimes, it recedes pretty quickly too. The Padres sent Abrams back down to the minors in May of his debut season, then called him back up again as they struggled to replace Tatis in their lineup. Then they shipped him to Washington as part of the Juan Soto return. He struggled mightily in San Diego, struggled more in D.C., and came out of the gates slowly in 2023. Could the answer to the question “Is Abrams a power or contact hitter?” somehow be neither?

If the past month or so is any indication, Abrams might have found a happy medium. I’m about to commit a sabermetric faux pas: I think that a lot of Abrams’ improvement can be traced to his batting leadoff. He batted exclusively in the bottom third of the order through July 6. On July 7, the Nats moved him to the top of the order, and he’s looked like a completely different hitter since then. His baserunning and fielding are smaller issues, because both look like they’ll be solid enough in the end. If Abrams can hit, he’s valuable, and now he’s hitting.

Of course, anyone can get hot for a month and a half, and Abrams hasn’t even been that hot; he has a 109 wRC+ since making the switch. But I think that a number of changes in his offensive approach stemmed from that change, and that Abrams’ game is well-suited to the mindset he’s bringing to the plate these days. Let’s compare and contrast to see what Abrams has changed and how it might help.

The mindset involved in hitting leadoff can be boiled down to a single statement: get on base. That comes with tradeoffs, but the easiest way to do that is to swing at bad pitches less frequently, and miss them less frequently when you do. Abrams has done just that:

Obviously, there are tradeoffs in this approach. One possible side effect of swinging less often at balls is swinging less frequently at strikes. But that hasn’t been Abrams’ deal; he swung at 72.4% of pitches in the zone before switching to leadoff, and he’s swinging at 72.6% since. A granular analysis of in/out of zone can miss subtle changes, but even if you look at pitches right down the heart of the plate, he swung at 75.4% before the switch and 72.6% since. That’s just not much of a difference.

That leaves three options: either Abrams waved a magic wand over his eyes to improve his pitch recognition, he’s on a hot streak, or he’s doing something against a particular pitch that helps his entire game. Turns out, it’s the last of the three. The worst pitch in baseball to swing at is a fastball outside the strike zone. Abrams was awful – awful – about it early in the year, swinging at 37.9% of these pitches, which should be easy takes. The league average is 25.2% – and since July 7, he’s swinging at 25.9% of them.

A fastball outside of the strike zone is pretty much the worst option for pitchers. Batters rarely chase them, which means better counts for the opposing hitter without much chance of something good happening. But Abrams was letting opposing pitchers off the hook game after game. It might not sound like much, but swinging less often at bad pitches does so much for you as a hitter. Not only do you get ahead in the count more frequently, but you put bad pitches into play less often.

Speaking of putting pitches into play, I mentioned Abrams’ whiff rate up above, and that too has taken a turn for the better. That’s partially because he’s swinging at fewer fastballs that he should be taking, but it’s also because he’s staying within himself more frequently.

What do I mean by that? Despite Abrams’ improvement at the plate in the last month and a half, he’s hitting the ball hard far less frequently. 36.1% of his batted balls left the bat at 95 mph or harder before he switched to leadoff; since then, he’s down to 29.6%. Neither of these numbers are good – the league average is around 40% – but he seems to be sacrificing a bit of hard contact as part of a “chase fewer fastballs” mindset.

The weird thing about it? You’ll note that I didn’t say that his contact quality is down. By pretty much any measure you can think of, he’s doing just fine in that category even with fewer hard-hit balls. His xwOBA on contact is up over the past month and a half. He’s hitting more barrels (8% against 5.9%) and more line drives. When he gets the ball in the air, he’s pulling it slightly more frequently, and he still has enough power that those pulled air balls have been quite valuable.

In other words, it seems like the tradeoff is working. He’s sacrificed hard hit frequency, but not much else. He’s walking more often, though still quite rarely, and striking out far less. His on-base percentage has skyrocketed from .281 to .339. That’s not some BABIP fluke, either; he’s running a .306 BABIP in his recent hot streak, hardly an unsustainable clip. For what it’s worth (and honestly, not a ton in samples this small), Statcast thinks he deserves an even higher batting average based on his contact quality.

Abrams himself isn’t quite sure what’s changed. “I don’t know if it’s approach. It’s more the comfortability part of it,” he told Howard Megdal of Baseball Prospectus of his recent heater. He’s not up there trying to take walks – and given his history, that seems pretty reasonable. Perhaps he really is just more comfortable now, and the bad swings are falling away naturally.

This is a short enough burst that it could absolutely just be a hot streak. Anybody can do anything in a small enough sample, and we’re only looking at 167 plate appearances worth so far. All the hair splitting I’m doing could be washed out by a week of intemperate swinging and hard-hit grounders. But consider the alternative: Abrams had less than 350 professional plate appearances under his belt when he debuted in the majors. He’s only 22, and he just crossed the thousand-PA mark this June. It’s hardly surprising that he’s struggled intermittently; Dylan Crews and James Wood, the two heralded prospects that top the Nationals system, aren’t much younger. Maybe this is Abrams finding his way in the big leagues. Washington’s rebuild is looking better than ever, and he’s no small reason why.