Jackson Chourio, Stuck in the Middle

Jackson Chourio is a star. You can see it the second he steps to the plate. He looks like he’s always been in a batter’s box, like hitting comes as easily as breathing. He has easy power and shockingly good contact skills for someone who swings so hard. So, uh, why can’t he take a walk?

Fine, that’s hyperbole. It’s May 8, 38 games into the season, and he’s walked three times in 165 plate appearances. That works out to a 1.8% walk rate, the third lowest among qualified hitters. Jacob Wilson? He’s walked six times already. Michael Harris II? Four walks in fewer games. Name a guy you think can’t walk, with the exception of platoon players Kerry Carpenter and Michael Massey, and you can be sure that Chourio is walking meaningfully less than they are. Chourio didn’t walk a ton in 2024 – his 6.8% walk rate was in the 31st percentile – but this is something different entirely.

Naturally, when I started writing this piece before Tuesday’s game, Chourio had two walks in 161 plate appearances for the lowest walk rate in baseball, but then he walked his second time up in the Brewers’ 9-1 loss to the Astros. (For the rest of this article, I’ll be using stats as of the start of play on Tuesday.) Anyway, the point still stands: Chourio isn’t walking. What’s going on here?

It starts, as so many things in hitting do, with the first pitch. Chourio has tapped into some newfound aggression on pitches down the middle. Perhaps he was looking for extra power. Perhaps he found it baffling that pitchers attacked him early in the count like he was just some average hitter, not a thumping power hitter with room to grow even stronger.

Chourio’s response has been emphatic. When pitchers attack the center of the zone to start at-bats — and in his case, they’re almost entirely at-bats because, again, no walks —  he’s up there swinging. His 65% swing rate on middle-middle first pitches is second in baseball among batters who have seen 50 such pitches to start at-bats. Last year, only Nick Castellanos swung more frequently at first pitches over the heart of the plate. That name should clue you in to the fact that this amount of aggression is not necessarily good. Sure, Chourio is getting some extra hacks at hittable pitches, but only on the margin. He’s putting 18% of first pitches into play this year, but his .358 xwOBA on those is actually below league average, and his wOBA is below league average too.

You can’t just swing at more pitches over the heart of the plate without changing other behavior. To get dialed up for those swings, he’s thinking aggressively. The worst thing you can do on the first pitch of an at-bat is swing at a ball, and Chourio is doing that a ton; he’s chasing 32% of the first pitches he sees, compared to 20% last year. League average is around 16%. That’s putting him behind the eight ball right away. In 161 plate appearances, he’s gotten to a 1-0 count only 43 times, a 26.7% rate.

Let’s just call that ratio what it is – awful. Only Yainer Diaz and Jake Burger are getting ahead less frequently. Diaz is meaningfully below replacement level right now thanks to anemic offense, and Burger got demoted to Triple-A on Friday to reset his game. It’s really hard to walk when you don’t start out 1-0. Across the majors, hitters are walking 5.5% of the time after falling behind 0-1 and 15.9% of the time after getting ahead 1-0.

Chourio is on the wrong side of the damage-versus-patience breakeven. There’s nothing wrong with swinging aggressively at first pitches that you can hit. Freddie Freeman, Teoscar Hernández, Alex Bregman, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. – plenty of good hitters come up to the plate ready to attack first-pitch meatballs. But those guys are swinging at balls far less frequently than Chourio does. Hernández, hardly a paragon of plate discipline, offered at 19% of first-pitch balls in 2024. That’s about as aggressive as I can imagine a hitter getting without ending up unbalanced, and as I mentioned up above, Chourio is above 30% this year.

If that were the extent of Chourio’s walk woes, though, I wouldn’t be writing an article about them. Sure, he’s not getting ahead in the count frequently enough, which is a tough way to live against modern pitching. But that’s just the start of his problems. Even after getting ahead 1-0, Chourio has only walked a single time. The problem, in my eyes? He hasn’t come up with a cohesive plan for how to maximize his count advantage.

Think of the strike zone and the area around it as separated into three quadrants: the heart, the “shadow zone,” which comprises the fringes of the zone and the area just off of it, and everything else. The big benefit of getting ahead in the count is that you can ease off in that shadow zone and hunt for something more hittable. Pitches down the middle? Always good to swing at. Pitches that don’t even threaten the zone? Those are easy to take. But when you’re ahead in the count, why swing at pitches that aren’t where you want them? They might be called a ball, but even if they’re called a strike, it’s not as though you’re likely to do damage even if you hit them. Chourio is no exception. When he puts the ball in play over the heart of the plate, he’s batting .398 with a .762 slugging percentage. When he puts the ball in play in the shadows, those fall to .302 and .465.

In 2024, Chourio seemed very aware of this. When he was ahead in the count, he tried to keep the bat on his shoulders unless he saw a pitch he wanted. His 45% swing rate on pitches in the shadow zone was lower than the league average of 51%. This year, he’s swinging at those pitches 62% of the time. Want some context? Last year, he was in the 22nd percentile for shadow zone aggression. This year, he’s in the 87th.

It’s hard but not impossible to make hitting work while being that aggressive. I say not impossible because José Ramírez is incredibly successful despite a ravenous approach when ahead in the count. But José Ramírez is a freak of nature, in the most complimentary possible way. Sure, he swings at a lot of pitcher’s pitches, but that’s because he wants to swing, period. When pitchers venture over the heart of the plate while behind in the count, he’s blindingly aggressive, swinging 85.5% of the time. Chourio checks in at a modest 65%, hardly more frequently than he swings at balls on the edges.

That’s the crux of Chourio’s problem: Whatever he’s thinking when he steps in the box, it’s leading him to swing too frequently at pitches that he can’t do much with, and he’s not crushing the easy ones enough to make up for it. When someone throws a fastball on the black in a 1-0 or 2-0 count, hey, good for them. That’s a nice pitch; now they have to do it multiple more times. If you swing at those, you’ll surely swing at pitches just off the plate, too, and swinging at a ball when ahead in the count is one of the worst things you can do as a hitter.

I hardly think it’s an unsolvable problem. I even think it comes from a good place. Chourio is swinging at fastballs more frequently this year, and a ton of his increased swing frequency on marginal pitches comes because he’s willing to expand the zone a bit against heaters. I don’t love this swing, but I don’t hate it either:

Still, balance is essential, and Chourio hasn’t found it. Pitchers are getting rewarded for making good pitches against him – find the edges of the zone, and he’ll swing. But when they miss over the heart of the plate, he’s not attacking often enough to make them pay. Pitchers have taken advantage of this by aiming for the plate. You’d expect a guy like Chourio, swing-happy and powerful, to see very few strikes. But instead, pitchers are flooding the zone when they fall behind.

Think of it this way: 331 batters have gotten ahead in the count 50 or more times this year. Out of that group, only 18 have seen pitches in the strike zone at a higher clip than Chourio when ahead in the count. He isn’t doing enough to make pitchers avoid him, and so they’re flatly unwilling to let him get even further ahead in the count. The only way to counter that zone-heavy approach is with aggression of your own, but thus far, Chourio hasn’t been able to dial it up correctly. If you’re going to swing like he does at pitches on the corner, you better bring the pain when pitchers miss over the heart of the plate. But Chourio turns into Juan Soto or Lars Nootbaar, taking nearly 40% of the middle-middle fastballs he sees when ahead in the count.

If that sounds weird given his overall increased aggression, I’m with you! How can you swing more often at fastballs, and yet not so often against fastballs down the middle? All I can do is speculate, so speculate I shall. I think that Chourio is looking for pitches rather than locations. If he’s looking fastball and gets one, he swings, regardless of where it is. If he’s looking slider and doesn’t see one, he’s taking – whether it’s down the middle or in the dirt. That’s how you end up swinging at pitches on the corners as often as over the heart of the plate.

This is going to work out. Chourio is 21 and still adjusting to big league pitching. He has many good ideas that haven’t quite clicked yet. He’s so aggressive early that he doesn’t get ahead in the count often enough. But when he does get ahead in the count, that aggression fades away. Plenty of powerful, swing-happy hitters get their walks because pitchers just won’t risk throwing them a meatball. Chourio hasn’t been able to put that into practice yet, and as a result he’s ending up in between far too often.

Two different approaches would each work well for Chourio. He could stick with last year’s overall patient plan; he has the contact and power skills to wait pitchers out. He could be more of a hack-and-slash masher if he’d prefer, with monomaniacal aggression in the zone and enough bat-to-ball skills to avoid a huge strikeout rate. But his current plan, aggressive early and then caught in between later in at-bats, just won’t work. That’s how you end up walking only three times in the first 20% of the season, and how you end up with a league average wRC+ when you’re one of the most talented hitters in baseball.