How Real Is Nicky Lopez’s Batting Line?

When Nicky Lopez steps to the plate, there is no in-between to his game. Of the 315 players who have seen at least 1,000 pitches over the past two seasons, Lopez places 27th in swinging strike rate (7.5%), in the top third in chase rate (24.7%), and in the top quarter in terms of the percentage of pitches put into play (18.8%) (all stats are through games on August 10). He combines elite plate discipline with an uncanny knack for making contact, an unusual mix of skills in the majors today. Players tend to make a trade-off when choosing to be more selective by accepting that they will put fewer balls in play. Balls in play have about a 178-point wOBA advantage over plate appearances that end in a walk or strikeout. But balls in play on pitches outside of the strike zone only enjoy a 97-point advantage over the combination of walks and strikeouts, a much less enticing proposition. Thus, by avoiding swinging at pitches outside the zone, hitters maximize their chances of putting a high-value batted ball into play, but also lengthen the plate appearance and increase the chance they strikeout. Lopez does not make this tradeoff, as you can see below:

I referenced Lopez’s minuscule 7.5% swinging strike rate; as a percentage of the total number of pitches he has seen, he rarely swings and comes up empty. He either makes contact or doesn’t swing at all. And the rate at which he swings at pitches overall is another indication of his selectivity. Over the last two seasons (2020-21), he’s swung at just 44.2% of the pitches he has seen, 2.9 percentage points less than the rest of the league over that sample.

Selectivity is great if you make it count when you do swing and put the ball in play on those pitches more towards the heart of the zone. Lopez’s problem, especially in his 2019 debut and last season, is that he often hasn’t reaped the benefits of his patience. This is the other side of his game. He has posted barrel rates in the second, fourth, and first percentiles and hard-hit rates in the second and sixth percentiles in his three seasons in the big leagues. He has also yielded zone run values per 100 pitches of -4.44, -5.17, and -3.02 in those seasons, compared to 1.86, 2.30, and 2.97 on pitches out of the zone, a product of his excellent approach but lack of punch when pitchers challenge him (average is 2.10 for out of zone and -2.21 for in zone). His career wOBAcon on the balls he puts in play inside the strike zone is just .302, 101 points lower than the league over that span. Through 937 major league plate appearances, he has hit three home runs, none of which have come in 2021. His extreme lack of pop has manifested itself in a 56 and 55 wRC+ in 2019 and ’20, respectively, the latter of which was also a product of his in-zone contact rate cratering to 82.4%. That placed him in the 51st percentile in 2020, not nearly high enough to offset the types of balls he puts into play.

This year has seen a marked improvement in Lopez’s top-level results. His strikeout rate has returned to a level close to that of his debut and minor-league numbers (with the help of an in-zone contact rate about 10% better than league-wide figure), while his walk rate is still at a healthy 9.3%, solidifying the gains he made last year without the corresponding loss of contact. This has enabled him to reach base at a 34.8% clip, the primary factor in his near league-average batting line (96 wRC+). Given his high-end defense (he has 21 career Outs Above Average per Baseball Savant, including 14 just this season), average performance at the plate would make Lopez a good regular who can slot in at either spot in the middle infield. But his extreme approach and batted-ball quality, coupled with his disastrous first 594 plate appearances, do make you wonder: can he be anything close to an average bat going forward? The best way to evaluate the future is to examine the past. Using qualified player seasons in the Statcast era (I left out 2020 due to its brevity), I investigated the feasibility of Lopez’s skills carrying him as a fringe-average bat.

Taking a high-level view of the quality of his approach (his walk and strikeout rates), Lopez fairs well. From 2015-19, there were 20 qualified player seasons in which the player posted walk and strikeout rates within 10% of Lopez’s 2021 season in either direction:

This is a list of very good hitters; the average wRC+ of the players in this cohort (weighted by their number of plate appearances) is a strong 116. Think Kyle Schwarber, Trey Mancini, and Adrian Beltre in this time frame. Of course, using just walk and strikeout rates doesn’t paint the whole picture. This collection of hitters posted slugging and isolated slugging percentages of .470 and .187, respectively, compared to .350 and .073 for Lopez this year. So they put the ball in play at similar rates as Lopez but with much more authority. As such, the entirety of this 20-hitter sample is not that indicative of Lopez’s potential sustainability. The players here with seasons with a wRC+ below 100 would be a more useful comparison set, though their collective .394 slugging and .138 ISO still pace Lopez’s performance. Here is how these players performed the following season, assuming they qualified:

Collectively, this group posted a 98 wRC+ with a .428 SLG and .169 ISO, but this is clearly skewed by almost a quarter of those plate appearances coming from Yonder Alonso and his swing-change-led 2017 career season. Pull Alonso out and the collective wRC+ drops to 87. This looks eminently more reasonable, given that LeMahieu (2018), Kinsler (’18), and Mercer (’17) combined for swing, hard-hit, and barrel rates of 43.2%, 25.6%, and 4.2%, respectively, rates that aren’t that far off Lopez’s percentages of 43.8%, 28.6%, and 1.1% this season. I will note that of these metrics, barrel rate is most closely correlated with wRC+ and Lopez’s 1.1% rate is 71.5% less than the collective barrel rate of those three players in those three seasons. Expecting even an 87 wRC+ from Lopez might be optimistic. I filtered the player seasons I described above by those with barrel rates between 1-2%, right around where Lopez sits. Those hitters produced a slugging percentage of .364 (14 points above Lopez), an ISO of .094 (21 points above) and an 84 wRC+. Given the similar power outputs, this seems like a reasonable estimation of what to expect from Lopez as his major league career progresses.

Part of Lopez’s success is a result of his career-high BABIP, which currently resides at .328 after just a .269 mark in 2019-20. His plus sprint speed (77th percentile in 2021) will help prop up this value more than his batted ball quality would indicate, but I would still expect some regression in this department going forward (as do our Depth Charts projections, pegging him for .297 the rest of the way). Clearly, he is hitting over of his skis thus far, but the types of players who have been comparable to him in the past have been much better than the 55 wRC+ Lopez displayed in 2019-20. An 84 wRC+ would not make Lopez a viable regular, even with elite defense at shortstop or second, but it would make him an extremely useful bench piece going forward. And ZiPS seems to agree; his wRC+ projections over the next three years are 86, 87, and 88 with 0.5 WAR in each season (with anticipated plate appearances between 460-490 a season). Definitely not someone who should be in the lineup and get a full slate of plate appearances, but a versatile piece that can make a good team whole. With little in the way of draft pedigree (he was picked 163rd overall) and a disastrous start to his major league career, that kind of outcome is a positive development for Lopez and should allow him to carve out a productive niche in the professional baseball landscape.