Fletcher Lives! (In the Form of Brendan Donovan)

This will sound ridiculous, but I have a hipster-ish choice for my favorite Los Angeles Angel. Trout and Ohtani? They’re fine, I guess, if you like generational superstars. Rendon? Ward? If we’re really reaching, Tyler Anderson? Again, I’m not against them, they’re just not exactly my taste. My favorite Angel? It’s none other than David Fletcher, a man ripped from the Deadball era and placed on the infield dirt in Anaheim.

How could you not love Fletcher? His skill set is delightful and also mind-boggling. In a power-mad era, he has none to speak of; he’s managed nearly as many triples as homers in his career. He hits nearly anything he swings at, particularly when he cuts his already short swing down with two strikes; he has a career strikeout rate in the single digits and comically low swinging strike rates. Fletcher often looks like he’s playing a different sport than the other guys on his team, but he’s so good at what he does that he was able to put together a three-year run of above-average play with first-percentile exit velocity.

Sadly, those three years are now in the past. Fletcher was ineffective in 2021 and then injured in 2022. His high-wire act worked for a long time, but in the end the numbers didn’t quite add up. Pitchers pounded the zone so much that he started swinging more to protect himself from called strikeouts, but that eventually drove his chase rate up and walk rate down, and the rest was history.

Why am I telling you about this? Because I have a new favorite light-hitting on-base machine. Meet Brendan Donovan, the second-year Cardinal who burst into the majors out of nowhere in 2022 and looks to be the heir to Fletcher’s throne as a no-power middle infielder who nevertheless gets on base at a mouth-watering clip. If you’re into sudden rises and unique hitters, Donovan is exactly what you’re looking for.

Let’s start with his approach to the strike zone. As Alex Eisert noted, Donovan gets the most out of his plate appearances by keeping the bat on his shoulder. Of the 205 batters who racked up 400 or more plate appearances in 2022, only three swung less often than Donovan. You’ve maybe heard of those three; they’re Juan Soto, Daniel Vogelbach, and Steven Kwan.

As Alex pointed out, though, Donovan isn’t up there calling an infallible zone like Soto. He doesn’t have a particularly low chase rate given his overall swing rate, which would be indicative of a superlative batting eye; he’s simply focusing on not swinging. His plan starts with the first pitch of each plate appearance, where he swings essentially never. Of that same 205-batter sample, only Kwan swings less frequently in 0-0 counts. This isn’t some trick of never swinging at pitches out of the zone, either; Donovan and Kwan have the lowest in-zone swing rates on 0-0 pitches too. Donovan swings at only 17.6% of first pitches in the strike zone; league average is a robust 44.6%.

From there, he doubles down on his strategy. He swings far less frequently than average at 0-1 pitches as well as 1-0 pitches. He’s less extreme in two-strike counts, but the point remains: that leaderboard of lowest swing rates isn’t misleading, it’s a true representation of his strategy. He’s looking to draw a walk – he walked a whopping 12.8% of the time – and he’ll take some pitches to do it.

That strategy only works if you’re a spectacular contact hitter, and guess what: Donovan is a spectacular contact hitter. He finished 20th in the majors in contact rate, roughly on par with guys like Jeff McNeil and Mookie Betts. On pitches in the strike zone, 92.9% of his swings produced contact, 13th-best in the majors.

This willingness to let the count run deep and then protect the zone with two strikes led to his juicy walk total. For batters as a whole, reaching a two-strike count means the end of your chances of a walk. That wasn’t so for Donovan last year, because he just did better at staying alive and waiting for four balls:

If you’re paying attention, you might remember this pattern from early in Fletcher’s career. He came up with a near-identical plan: just don’t swing at all until the count reaches two strikes, and then rely on a decent eye and superlative contact rate to make things work. In his first full big league season, it led to an 8.4% walk rate, and an 8.7% mark in 2020. What happened next, you say? Well, Fletcher has walked in only 4.3% in 2021 and 2022 combined, because pitchers caught on and aimed dead center with every pitch.

The same treatment likely awaits Donovan in 2022. Pitchers threw him something in the zone 42.6% of the time (per our basic Plate Discipline leaderboard), which is above average but not extreme. Fletcher never saw so few strikes, but he checked in at 46.2% in 2019-20, before skyrocketing to 47.8% since. There’s simply no chance that Donovan is going to keep seeing strikes at the same rate as Max Muncy and George Springer. He doesn’t have the power to punish opposing hitters for getting too casual; he had 28th-percentile maximum exit velocity and an eighth-percentile barrel rate. In other words, he wasn’t crushing doubles left and right when pitchers did challenge him.

Our two projection systems see Donovan holding up to the challenge. Steamer sees him posting a sterling .362 OBP and 120 wRC+. ZiPS, while generally quite high on the Cardinals, thinks he’ll get on base at a .353 clip and slug not at all (.346 to Steamer’s .391). Both systems seem to believe in his walks, though: Steamer projects him for an 11% walk rate and ZiPS agrees (11.1%). To be fair, though, those projection systems consistently thought Fletcher would keep getting on base over the past two years, so it’s hardly written in stone that Donovan will walk his way to the bank again in 2023.

That said, I’m starting to view Donovan as the logical evolution of Fletcher. If you think of Fletcher as the personification of making offense work one base at a time, Donovan does that even better. Consider the ways to reach first base. You could walk, hit a single, get hit by a pitch, or bunt your way on.

Fletcher is good at the singles part of things, and he was briefly good at the walk part of things, but that’s where his skills end. He’s never mastered bunting, and more importantly, he doesn’t get hit by many pitches. He’s been hit seven times in his 2,083 career plate appearances, which is roughly one-third of the major league average rate. Getting hit by pitches is a skill, or at least a persistent tendency; if you’re good at it one year, you’ll likely be good at it the next, and Fletcher just doesn’t reach base that way.

Donovan? He’s not above rubbing some dirt on it. He got hit a whopping 14 times in 468 plate appearances last year. That’s 3% of his plate appearances, a Rizzo-esque mark. It’s no recent development; he’s been getting hit at an elevated clip his entire professional career. That skill gives him a much higher floor. Think of it this way; if Donovan had been hit at a league-average rate, and reached base at his own non-HBP clip in those at-bats instead, his OBP would have been 12 points lower. And that’s probably too generous to him; a whopping seven of those 14 HBPs came with two strikes, so they transformed a bad situation into a great one.

Another way of thinking about it: if you gave Fletcher Donovan’s HBP rate and kept everything else about his game constant, he would have reached base an additional 16 times in 2021 and 2022, which would have raised his OBP from .295 to .313. That’s worth nine or so points of wRC+; it wouldn’t have made Fletcher a good hitter, but it would have given the Angels a ton of extra baserunners and made his overall line look much better. It’s roughly an extra win’s worth of offensive value, no joke when you’re operating on the thin margins that slap hitters like Donovan and Fletcher deal with.

When pitchers come after Donovan next year, they’ll need to make sure to do so without giving him a chance to get on base cheaply. That changes the equation somewhat, and even if you ignore pitcher behavior, he’s just going to get extra bases by dint of his close-to-the-plate stance and willingness to stand in as pitches clip his lower body – 10 of his 14 HBP’s hit either his legs or feet. A backfoot slider to Donovan can easily turn into a free base.

But wait, there’s more. As I mentioned, Donovan doesn’t make much loud contact, but he makes consistent contact. I’m partial to an Alex Chamberlain statistic for bat control: launch angle tightness, measured by the standard deviation of launch angles of every batted ball a hitter creates. It’s a great listing of hit tool guys; the top six hitters by SD(LA) in 2022 were Freddie Freeman, Bo Bichette, Luis Arraez, Michael Brantley, Mike Trout, and Jeff McNeil.

Donovan checks in at 15th on this list, out of nearly 300 hitters who posted 200 or more batted balls. That’s elite territory, and as Alex Eisert noted, it helps explain his elevated BABIPs throughout the minors and even in the majors last year. He’s lacing line drives with great regularity, and wasting fewer batted balls than almost anyone else.

Perhaps the simplest way to think of this: Donovan almost never pops up. Baseball Savant defines a pop up as a batted ball with a launch angle of 50 degrees or more. Donovan popped up on only 3.7% of his batted balls by that definition, the 10th-lowest mark in the game. Sure, he wasn’t getting much high-end production out of his batted balls, but he had very few completely wasted at-bats. He didn’t strike out much and didn’t pop up much, and posted an above-average line drive rate to boot. That’s not a particularly sticky statistic, but a tighter-than-average launch angle distribution is correlated with a high line drive rate, so I’d expect him to keep hitting more than his fair share of liners in 2023.

Will Donovan’s pitch-magneting, line-drive-hitting ways be enough to keep his batting line afloat in 2023? I think the total package will work, and that he’ll continue to get on base at a drool-worthy clip despite a worrisome lack of power. I also think he’ll be meaningfully worse than he was in 2022, at least offensively; there’s simply no way that pitchers will give him as many free passes as they did last year, and I don’t think he can make up for that shortcoming without adding some power.

The bottom line is this: there are always going to be players who succeed in the majors without prototypical power. To make that balancing act work, you need to add value somewhere else. It can be an unrivaled ability to make consistent hard contact, like Mookie Betts. It can be blinding speed that turns outs into singles. It can be great bat control, the Luis Arraez path, or impeccable strike zone management, like Steven Kwan. Brendan Donovan isn’t the best at any of those skills. He’s so good at so many little things, though, that I think he’ll continue to be an above-average major league hitter, even as he continues to put up batted ball metrics that scream minor leaguer.