Isaac Paredes Keeps Getting Away With It

Surely this is just some piece of cosmic performance art. If you’re looking for proof that we live in a simulation, Isaac Paredes’ spray chart is strong evidence. Sure, you’ve heard of pull hitters. What about only-right-at-the-foul-pole hitters, though?

Paredes is doing the same thing he always seems to. Through 259 plate appearances this season, he has the best wRC+ of his career at 147. Think it’s all about his one simple trick for hitting homers? He’s 16th in baseball in on-base percentage. He’s still walking roughly 10% of the time and striking out far less frequently than average. None of it makes sense, and yet it keeps happening.

The “Paredes approach” has been endlessly rehashed at this point. He puts the ball in the air. He pulls the ball in the air. He makes a tremendous amount of contact, and he cuts down on his swing to do so. His bat speed and exit velocity numbers are unimpressive, and he hits a ton of fly balls that would be outs if they went anywhere other than the left field corner. But, well, they keep going to the left field corner, as we’ve already covered.

Let’s put it this way: Here’s a list of pull rate on fly balls for all hitters, from Paredes’ debut in 2020 through the end of last season:

This list features tons of practitioners of lift-and-pull. Ramírez, Arenado, and Altuve are the highest-profile examples of that style, and they’ve made careers out of hitting more homers than you’d expect given their raw power. Every player on this list has done better on aerial contact than you’d expect based on their launch angle/exit velocity combinations, and their pull tendencies have a lot to do with it. Paredes makes the worst contact of the group, and gets the worst results – but he still gets pretty good results. You just don’t have to hit the ball very hard to coax it out of the park if you can consistently aim for the corners.

Speaking of that consistent aim, here’s how our group of 10 hitters have done so far in 2024 (through games on June 10):

They’re still pulling the ball in the air with great frequency, as you would expect. Arenado has bemoaned his inability to pull the ball, and Wisdom has been bad in a small sample, but even with their performances in the mix, the group looks about the same as always. From 2020 through 2023, weighted by batted balls, they had an aggregate pull rate of 43.8%. This year, they check in at 43.5%.

There’s clearly skill in repeating your swing. These pull tendencies aren’t random. The league average pull rate on balls hit in the air is 30.6%. The odds of this happening by random chance are vanishingly small.

Part of that pulled fly ball skill is identifying which pitches to swing at. The hardest ball to pull is one pitched down and away. Let’s just say that pitchers understand physics when they face Paredes:

Bad news for them, though. Paredes isn’t falling for their nonsense. He keeps his swings centrally located:

It’s like Michael Baumann mentioned in regards to Ezequiel Tovar: Paredes’ Law clearly states that you should hit your balls in the air to the pull side. It almost feels weird to write about because it’s so self-evidently true. But every year, we expect Paredes to do worse, and every year, he flips some fly balls over our disbelieving heads.

Why bring up this same old effect again when you could write this rough story at any point in the last few years? For one, I do think that Paredes is going to cool off, but not in the way you normally do. Stop betting on these fly balls ending up in center field; that’s not happening. On the other hand, Paredes doesn’t hit a home run every time he swings, or even every time he puts the ball in play. In his career, he’s been thoroughly unspectacular on those non-homer batted balls, which makes perfect sense. Most of his special skill is putting the ball over the wall, where defenders can’t do anything about it. When the ball lands in the field of play, he’s merely ordinary.

In numbers, Paredes came into the year with a .236 BABIP and a .264 xBABIP. He compiled a wOBA of .233 when he put the ball in play but didn’t hit a homer. That was slightly under his expected outcomes (.264), but that’s misleading. Everyone underperforms their xwOBA on non-homer batted balls, because xwOBA gives a lot of these batted balls some chance of leaving the yard, and we’re ex post picking ones that didn’t. The gap between Paredes’ actual and expected production on balls in play is exactly the same as the league as a whole. In other words, the rules apply to him here, though they don’t when he’s doing his thing.

In 2024, that hasn’t been happening. Paredes has a .316 BABIP and a .309 wOBABIP (to make up a new stat on the fly). The expected numbers don’t back that up; he’s outperforming both xStats there. And his contact quality hasn’t meaningfully changed, which makes that performance feel suspect. His approach might produce a ton of short homers, but it also produces a ton of fly balls that don’t leave the park, and those are easy outs. That career .236 BABIP is probably affected at least somewhat by poor fortune – all of our models projected a modest increase in 2024 – but there’s just no way he can combine the extreme launch angle approach and above-average results when he doesn’t leave the yard.

I see no reason to expect Paredes’ extreme tendencies to change. I also see no reason to expect his strikingly high home run production (relative to contact quality) to change. That’s just who he is; the track record is long enough that I’m bought in at this point. But I’m extremely not bought in on him suddenly being a .300 BABIP guy. That’s the kind of variance you should look through. Lop 20 points off of his OBP and a similar amount off of his slug, and you’re looking at something like a 130-135 wRC+. That’s what I’m expecting from Paredes going forward this year.

There’s one more weird thing going on here, though I don’t have a great handle on exactly what it means. I’ve been messing around with contact quality graphs recently, and I had an inkling of what the Paredes graph would look like. I thought it would resemble Mookie Betts or Ramírez, hitters who purposefully tailor their approach to get the ball in the air:

Tons of pop ups on the right tail. Few grounders on the left. Peaks in the 25-35 degree range. This is how I imagined Paredes’ graph looking. But, uh:

He squares the ball up less frequently than they do at attractive home run launch angles. He has less of a right tail than they do. His swing hits the ball square most frequently on low line drives, which is absolutely not what you’d expect for someone with the fifth-lowest GB/FB ratio in the majors.

I’m truly not sure what’s going on there. Maybe it’s just a sample size artifact. Maybe Paredes is off his game a little bit so far this year, though nothing else points in that direction. Or maybe this is just another thing about Paredes that is hard to wrap your head around. His production is shaped differently than the major league norm in so many ways. Why not this one too?

If you take anything away from this article, let it be this: Paredes breaks the normal way we analyze hitters, but that doesn’t mean we can’t analyze him. It’s possible to accept that he’s a true unicorn when it comes to his ability to punch ones out of the park, and yet is still bound by the normal vagaries of the game when it comes to what happens to the rest of his batted balls. You can think that Paredes systematically outperforms some metrics but not others. And you can be like me – in awe of his talent, and yet sanguine about the total picture. I think that Paredes is great – and that he also won’t quite live up to his early form for the rest of the season.