Brice Turang grew up swinging a bat, and the fruits of those labors are coming to fruition in his second MLB season. Following up on a rookie campaign in which he logged an abysmal .585 OPS, the 24-year-old Milwaukee Brewers second baseman is flourishing to the tune of a .301/.366/.428 slash line and a 128 wRC+ over 188 plate appearances. Showing that he can be more than a threat on the bases — he swiped 26 bags a year ago and is 19-for-20 so far this season — Turang also has 15 extra-base hits this season, as many as he had in all of 2023.
The son of former big league outfielder Brian Turang, Brice Turang was drafted 21st overall by the Brewers in 2018 out of Santiago High School in Corona, California. He was ranked no. 65 on our Top 100 Prospects list entering last year. At the time, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin wrote that Turang was “almost certain to have a significant and lengthy big league career,” albeit someone who “has never been a sure bet to do enough offensively to be an impact everyday player.” Two months into his sophomore season, one in which the Brewers are surprisingly atop the NL Central standings, Turang is looking like a hitter — small sample size acknowledged — who you just might not want to bet against.
In the latest installment of my Talks Hitting series, Turang discusses his gap-to-gap approach to his craft, which is driven more by competing than data.
———
David Laurila: How have you developed as a hitter over the years?
Brice Turang: “A lot of it is that I hit basically every day. My dad owned a facility and I would go with him from three o’clock to nine o’clock every night. I loved it. I loved going to work with him. I’d be in the cage all the time, hitting, [developing] hand-eye coordination. Then, as you get into pro ball, the work you do is more of a quality-over-quantity type of thing.”
Laurila: There wasn’t nearly as much hitting data available when your father played. How does the way you learned from him relate to the present day?
Turang: “I don’t look at the data. I’m up there to compete and hit the ball hard. I mean, the data is what it is. You can put a number on anything, so I don’t really even think about it. I just compete and try to hit the ball hard up the middle, hit a line drive up the middle.” Read the rest of this entry »
Statcast’s new public repository of bat tracking data has been out for a few weeks now. Like every number manipulator with a sense of curiosity and middling technical skills, I’ve been messing around with the data in my spare time, and also in my working time, because messing around with data is both my job and hobby.
Mostly, I’ve been reaching some conclusions that mirror what others have already shown, only with less technical sophistication on my part. This article by Sky Kalkman does a great job summing up the biggest conclusion: Pitch location and spray angle (pull/oppo) influence swing length so much that you probably shouldn’t quote raw swing length. But I thought I’d look for something slightly different, and I think I found something.
Here’s the high level conclusion of my search: When pitchers throw harder fastballs, hitters slow down their swings to compensate. It sounds counterintuitive. Shouldn’t hitters speed up their bats to try to get to the faster pitch? But I had a hunch that this wasn’t the case. If you listen to hitters describe their approach against flamethrowers, they focus on shortening up and putting the ball in play. “Shortening up” might sound like it describes swing length, but it also surely describes swing speed. A hitter who is just punching at the ball likely won’t swing as hard as one trying to launch one. If you’re prioritizing having your bat on plane with the ball as long as possible, you probably aren’t focusing as much on raw speed. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
The emotional toll of losing Ronald Acuña Jr. to another ACL tear is obvious. The entirety of the baseball world came together to express shock and disappointment at Sunday evening’s news that Acuña would need season-ending surgery for the second time in four years. At his best, Acuña is arguably the most electric player in the game, as we saw last year during his otherworldly MVP-winning campaign, when he became the first player ever to hit 40 home runs and steal 70 bases in the same season. Baseball is simply not as exciting without him on the field.
Beyond that, though, the injury is a devastating loss for the Braves, whose probability to win the NL East — which was already diminished, as Dan Szymborski noted in his column on Friday — sunk by 10 percentage points within a day after Acuña went down. Sure, he was struggling over the first third of the season — he hit just four home runs in 49 games, and his OPS was nearly 300 points lower than last year’s mark — but his importance to the Atlanta lineup is undeniable.
Monday’s game, an 8-4 loss to the Nationals, provided a look at what the Braves’ offense will look like without the reigning MVP. The good news was that third baseman Austin Riley returned after missing 13 games with an intercostal strain, but it was clear that this was not the same unit that last year drew comparisons to the 1927 Yankees. Second baseman Ozzie Albies replaced Acuña in the leadoff spot, with Riley sliding to the two-hole and DH Marcell Ozuna, who’s been the team’s most productive hitter this year, moving from fifth to third in the order, ahead of slugging first baseman Matt Olson. After that, things drop off considerably, though it helps that catcher Sean Murphy is back from the oblique strain that kept him out since Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »
The Portland Sea Dogs roster includes three Top 100 prospects, but neither Roman Anthony (15), Marcelo Mayer (42), nor Kyle Teel (83) has been the Double-A affiliate’s best player so far this season. That distinction belongs to a 23-year-old, shortstop-turned-left-fielder whom the Boston Red Sox drafted 69th overall in 2019 out of the Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy. Along with playing stellar defense at a new position, Matthew Lugo is slashing .306/.404/.653 with 10 home runs and an Eastern League-best 191 wRC+.
Markedly-improved plate discipline has played a big role in his breakout. Last year, Lugo logged a 5.9% walk rate and a 27.6% strikeout rate. This year those numbers are 13.4% and 22.5%.
The key to his newfound ability to dominate the strike zone?
“Timing,” explained Lugo, who takes his cuts from the right side. “Last year, I had a lot of movement with my hands, which made me inconsistent being on time with the pitcher. My hands were very low, and then when I got to the launch position they were very high; there was a lot of distance for my hands to go through. This year, I’m closer to my launch position before I swing. I also had a [bat] wiggle and this year I just get to my spot with no wiggle. I’m getting into my spot early and have more time to see the pitch, so I’m making better swing decisions.”
The decision to move Lugo off of his natural position and into an outfield corner wasn’t based on defensive shortcomings, but rather on the arrival of Mayer. The high-ceiling shortstop was promoted to Portland last year on Memorial Day weekend, and given his first-round pedigree, he wasn’t going to be the one moving. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about which slow-starting 2023 pennant winner (Diamondbacks or Rangers) is more likely to get back on track to return to October, explain (9:37) the saga of Dick Windbigler, the rare pitcher who actually hurt himself by pausing mid-delivery (featuring an appearance by Dick’s widow, Melba Windbigler), then (30:04) answer listener emails about the requirements for claiming to have seen a game played in every MLB ballpark, the funniest MVP chant alternatives, changing the penalty for shift violations, and clustering hits and outs, meet major leaguers (1:01:44) Ryan Loutos and Jacob Hurtubise, and Stat Blast (1:14:50) about the least productive hitting streaks and more (plus a postscript).
Before the start of the season, the Atlanta Braves were the consensus pick to win the NL East. While it wasn’t unanimous – try getting a few dozen writers to fully agree on something – 22 of 25 FanGraphs writers predicted the Braves to win the division for the seventh straight season. Sportsbooks offered odds on Atlanta that had an implied probability of 75-80% for winning the division. ZiPS projected the Braves to win the most games in the majors and gave them a 63% chance to take the NL East crown. But as we approach the end of the first third of the season, it’s the Philadelphia Phillies who are on top of the division with the best record in baseball. The team’s six-game lead over Atlanta isn’t an insurmountable barrier, but it’s still a comfortable cushion for this point of the season. So, how concerned should the Braves be? And how long do they have to overcome their rivals and keep their division streak alive?
Frequently, when I discuss surprise first-place teams at this point of the season, I compare the situation to a hypothetical foot race between Usain Bolt and me. It goes without saying that Bolt is a much faster runner than I am, to the degree that he’d probably beat me in a race hopping on one foot. But what if he gave me a head start so I could get a sufficient lead? How far ahead would I have to be to have a chance to hold off the world’s fastest man? Uhhh, 10 steps from the finish line by the time he starts running might get it done. Obviously, this isn’t the perfect analogy, because even if Bolt is the Braves of running, I certainly am not the Phillies. But you get the idea: At some point in the season, a division race becomes a question of time, not talent.
First things first, let’s take a look at the current simulated ZiPS projected standings, through Thursday night’s games.
ZiPS Projected Standings – NL East (Morning of 5/24)
Team
W
L
GB
Pct
Div%
WC%
Playoff%
WS Win%
80th
20th
Philadelphia Phillies
98
64
—
.605
62.2%
34.4%
96.6%
10.8%
103.8
91.4
Atlanta Braves
94
68
4
.580
36.4%
53.7%
90.1%
11.1%
100.7
87.5
New York Mets
79
83
19
.488
1.4%
23.2%
24.6%
1.2%
85.8
73.0
Washington Nationals
69
93
29
.426
0.0%
2.1%
2.2%
0.0%
75.8
63.1
Miami Marlins
67
95
31
.414
0.0%
0.8%
0.8%
0.0%
73.4
61.0
Well, at least if you go by the ZiPS projections, Atlanta fans aren’t getting the happiest version of this tale. ZiPS still thinks the Braves are the better team, but the margin has narrowed considerably. What was a 10-win gap in March has thinned to just a hair over a three-win separation per 162 games (20 points of winning percentage, to be exact). In fact, the Phillies are now projected to have an almost identical probability of winning the division as the Braves did at the start of the season, despite Atlanta’s aforementioned 10-game edge; as I remind people, the future is almost always far more uncertain than you think.
This is actually an impressively durable change, which further complicates matters for the Braves. Projections for teams don’t usually move quickly because, well, baseball history says they shouldn’t. ZiPS has been doing team projections since 2005. If all you had to go on to project the last two-thirds of a season was a team’s preseason projection in ZiPS and the team’s actual record for the first-third of the season, the best mix based on two decades of projections is about two-thirds ZiPS and one-third actual record.
The offenses tell much of the story, so let’s start with Philadelphia’s offense. Here are the differences between ZiPS preseason WAR and the current projected final WAR. The latter consists of the WAR already on the books and the rest-of-season projections. Remember, this already includes all those grumpy old regressions toward the mean.
Phillies Offense – ZiPS Preseason vs. Final 2024 WAR
That’s eight players projected to finish with at least a half-win more than at the start of the season. Castellanos is the only Phillies player whose projected WAR is now a half-win worse, but the projection systems didn’t expect much from him going into the season anyway. None of the hitters who are smashing the ball right now are expected to turn into midnight pumpkins. Even Bohm, the infielder ZiPS was most suspicious of, is now in the top 10 for most projected WAR added for 2025. And it’s not shocking that Harper, Realmuto, Turner (who is currently on the IL), and Stott are projected to maintain their strong starts.
As for the Braves, their vaunted offense has come out rather impotent. They rank seventh in the NL in runs scored, which isn’t disaster territory, but Ronald Acuña Jr., Matt Olson, and Austin Riley have all been just barely above league-average hitters this year. Sean Murphy has been out with an oblique injury that he suffered on Opening Day, but that’s been less of an impact because Travis d’Arnaud has been solid as the everyday backstop. Things might be a lot worse right now if not for the performances of d’Arnaud and Marcell Ozuna.
Atlanta’s current place in the standings is the fault of its underperforming stars, not its complementary talent. And that’s what makes it tough for the Braves to turn things around with a few trades, as they did in 2021 before surging to win the World Series. It’d be one thing if the problem were someone like Orlando Arcia, because the Braves wouldn’t think twice about benching or trading him to acquire a better shortstop. But when it comes to Acuña, Olson, and Riley, all Atlanta can do is wait for them to catch fire. What adds to this general feeling of helplessness is that the team’s biggest problem on the pitching side is Spencer Strider’s season-ending UCL injury. Even if the Braves were to try and swing a trade, their farm system is one of the weakest in baseball right now and only a few teams are currently out of contention. Major reinforcements aren’t on the way anytime soon.
The good news for Atlanta is that its stars are capable of breaking out of their funks at any moment, but the longer it takes them to turn things around, the more time the Phillies have to pull away. To get an idea of how much time the Braves have left, I took the current projected standings and had ZiPS simulate the rest of the season with both teams posting the same record going forward (for the sake of the example, I’m going with a 94-win pace) to see how quickly the divisional probabilities would change. Without picking up ground but also not losing any, Atlanta would slip to two-to-one divisional underdogs by June 10, and hit the three-to-one spot on the last day of the month. If this continues to the morning of the trade deadline, the Braves would find themselves with only an 18% projected chance to win the NL East, while the Phillies’ divisional odds would climb to 81%. (The Mets would still retain a few tenths of a percentage point.)
Let’s be clear: Despite the relatively gloomy outlook for Atlanta, a six-game deficit heading into Memorial Day Weekend is not insurmountable. In fact, the Phillies have the same divisional odds now as the Braves did two months ago. That said, for the first time since 2011, the NL East is the Philadelphia’s division to lose.
Xander Bogaerts‘ first season as a second baseman hasn’t gone as planned. He’s struggled mightily at the plate thus far, and while he’s fared better defensively, on Monday he suffered a fracture in his left shoulder while diving for a ball. He could miss a couple of months, leaving the Padres — who despite going just 27-26 thus far currently occupy the third NL Wild Card spot — to fend without him.
The injury occurred during the first game of Monday’s doubleheader in Atlanta. With the bases loaded in the third inning, Bogaerts ranged to his left to try to stop a Ronald Acuña Jr. grounder. He dove in time to get his glove on the ball, but he landed hard, and awkwardly. He immediately began writhing on the ground and could only wrist-flip the ball to shortstop Ha-Seong Kim, who saw the play to its conclusion — a run scored, though Bogaerts’ stop probably prevented a second one from doing so as well — and motioned for help.
“As soon as I caught the ball, I heard, like, cracks. Four cracks,” Bogaerts told reporters. “At that point, I was like, ‘Something’s wrong.’ I didn’t feel exactly like something shifted. I just felt, like, cracks.” Read the rest of this entry »
This is the year of the splitter. In 2024, 3.1% of all big league pitches thrown have been splitters compared to 2.2% in 2023, a year-over-year increase of 41%. Aficionados of the split-fingered fastball include former NPB stars like Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga, longtime MLB users like Joe Ryan and Fernando Cruz, and an assorted collection of hurlers who’ve added a new splitter or featured one much more prominently in their arsenal this year. And few starters have scaled up their splitter usage more than the man atop the pitcher WAR leaderboard: Tanner Houck.
Houck has thrown a splitter his entire time in the majors, but he’s taken it to a new level this year by doubling its usage. Among qualified starters, Houck throws the sixth-highest percentage of splitters, while his splitter’s 110 Pitching+ ranks fifth, ahead of Ryan and Imanaga. The rise of Houck’s splitter, combined with the arsenal tweaks he’s made to throw it more, have transformed him from a mixed-role swingman to slam-dunk frontline starter.
Houck has spent most of his big league career straddling the line between starter and reliever. He pitched mainly as a starter during his 2021 rookie season, but never completed the sixth inning in any of his starts. His sophomore campaign saw him make multi-inning appearances out of the bullpen. Back in the rotation last year, he posted an ERA above five and struggled to get outs as his pitches lost their bite later in starts.
Aside from stamina, Houck’s delivery served as a hurdle to his abilities as a starter. While a handful of starters fire from low arm slots, Houck is one of the only true sidearmers currently in a big league rotation. He doesn’t have an outlier release point thanks to his tall stature and mechanics that carry him toward the first base side, but his arm angle is certainly the lowest among starters. Houck’s delivery provides a great viewing angle for left-handed hitters, who comprise the majority of his competition as opponents stack platoon bats against him.
Tanner Houck Platoon Splits
Year
wOBA vs. R
wOBA vs. L
Platoon wOBA Difference
% of LH Hitters
2022
.230
.338
.108
40.9%
2023
.277
.366
.089
51.8%
2024
.230
.242
.012
55.6%
In 2023, lefties slashed .271/.356/.502 against Houck, roughly the equivalent of having to face Rafael Devers for the entire season. But through his first 10 starts of this year, he’s held them to a line so poor I can’t find a qualified hitter whose numbers I can compare with it. Neutralizing the platoon advantage is a huge deal for a pitcher with his arm angle, and much of this impressive feat has to do with his splitter.
Let’s take a look at what Houck’s approach to pitching looked like before ramping up the use of his splitter. Like most low-slot pitchers, his two primary offerings are a sinker and slider, taking advantage of the east-west movement his arm action produces. Both these pitches are chart-topping in terms of movement, dropping more than average due to their lack of backspin, and his slider breaks to the left even more than most sweepers (though Statcast doesn’t classify it as one).
While these two pitches made right-handed hitters absolutely futile against Houck, sinkers and sweeping sliders tend to generate large platoon splits, compounding with the advantage lefties gain from seeing the ball clearly out of his hand. Houck’s slider drops so much that lefties can’t do much with it, but his sinker moves directly into the path of their barrels, eager to get hammered. In the past, Houck primarily used four-seamers and cutters as his hard offerings against lefty opponents, hoping the rising action would be enough to miss bats. But these pitches still had too much arm-side movement and didn’t generate upward Magnus force, instead staying on plane with lefty swings.
Tanner Houck 2023 Batted Ball Splits
GB%
LD%
FB%
Pull%
HR/FB%
vs. L
48.4%
23.9%
27.7%
53.1%
25%
vs. R
57.7%
14.7%
27.6%
44.6%
7%
Houck’s approach to lefties wasn’t working, and he needed a change. In came the splitter. What was once a distant fourth offering became his offspeed weapon. He tinkered with its shape, adding nearly four inches of drop to make it more distinct from his sinker. He tightened up its command, finishing down in the zone more consistently and spiking fewer in the dirt. The end result of these adjustments is a lethal pitch that has been a key contributor to Houck’s success.
Houck’s splitter leads his arsenal in both swinging strike rate and putaway rate, indicating it’s already his go-to weapon in two-strike counts. And while it’s been successful at missing bats, the results it generates when batters put it in play may be even more impressive. His split has the lowest launch angle allowed of any individual pitch from a starter; it’s one of just a dozen with a negative average launch angle. After years of allowing lefties to crush the ball in the air, he’s inducing a higher groundball rate against lefties than righties in 2024. These underlying changes have manifested in big time results – lefties have just a .038 ISO against Houck this season and have yet to homer, and Statcast metrics like barrel rate confirm this is no fluke.
The emergence of Houck’s splitter has also cut down his walk rate significantly, as he’s jumped from the 42nd to the 88th percentile in avoiding free passes. Previously, Houck often nibbled around the zone against lefties, afraid of what they could do to his fastball and cutter. Now armed with a pitch that limits damage, he’s fearlessly attacking the strike zone, improving his splitter zone rate by 14 percentage points and his overall zone rate by nearly five.
The effectiveness of his splitter has also made Houck’s sinker a more effective strike stealer because hitters watch it go by expecting it to drop beneath the zone. Houck currently ranks second to Seth Lugo in called strike rate, getting ahead of hitters before disposing of them with the slider and splitter. His improved control of the count is a big reason why he ranks fourth in K-BB% increase relative to 2023.
What impresses me most about Houck’s splitter is the sheer frequency with which he deploys it against lefties, especially at the expense of his fastballs. He’s throwing significantly fewer cutters and has shelved the four-seamer entirely. After unsuccessfully throwing the kitchen sink against opposite-handed opponents, he’s essentially become a two-pitch pitcher against lefties, throwing either a slider or splitter nearly three-quarters of the time.
Tanner Houck Arsenal vs. LHH
2023
2024
Sinker
15.1%
19.4%
Slider
33.7%
38.0%
Splitter
17.9%
35.5%
Cutter
18.5%
7%
Four-Seam
14.8%
0.2%
It’s not often that you see a pitcher use two different non-fastballs as their primary offerings, but this strategy has paid off – not just for Houck but also for the Red Sox as a whole. Last month, Chris Gilligan wrote about Boston’s staff leading the leaguewide shift away from the fastball, pointing out Houck’s four-seamer had a horizontal movement profile ripe for hitters to feast on. Just a couple decades ago, a starting pitcher who almost exclusively relied on sliders and splitters against left-handed hitters would have been unthinkable, but the secondaries-first approach is now a strategy that entire teams are embracing with tremendous results.
Houck’s run as the top-performing pitcher in the majors probably won’t last — he has an unsustainably low 2.6% HR/FB rate — but the excellence of his splitter has certainly put a massive up arrow on his future projection. Just a couple years ago, it would’ve been difficult to envision that the sidewinding swingman who couldn’t handle lefties would become an excellent starter who consistently works into the seventh inning. But with a surprisingly simple fix, Houck has made it happen.
As I write this before the start of play on May 23, we’re just about a third of the way through the season, and I don’t think we can avoid it anymore. Jurickson Profar is batting .339 with a 178 wRC+. Jurickson Profar ranks 10th in baseball with 2.2 WAR. Jurickson Profar, who signed a one-year, $1 million contract on February 24. Jurickson Profar, who until this season averaged 0.8 WAR per 162 games over 10 seasons, and last season put up -1.7 WAR, making him literally the least valuable player in baseball. Jurickson Profar leads all qualified National League players in on-base percentage (.431) and ranks in the top 10 in batting average, slugging percentage (.517), RBI (32), and strikeout rate (13.7%). Jurickson Profar.
(I say qualified because LaMonte Wade Jr. and his .481 OBP did not have enough plate appearances to be among the league leaders. Naturally, between the time I wrote this post and now, Wade crossed the qualification threshold, so Profar now ranks second.)
“I imagine that everybody here at FanGraphs generates ideas for articles in different ways. Looking at leaderboards is certainly a common method. You click around, sorting by different stats until someone looks out of place. ‘How did you get all the way up here?’ is what the start of a FanGraphs article sounds like.”
Well, here we are. How the name of Bip Roberts did Jurickson Profar get all the way up here?
I honestly don’t know what the Padres were expecting when they brought Profar back, but this couldn’t have been it. Let’s quickly establish just how out of character this run has been. Not only has Profar never had a 52-game stretch like this, he’s never come close. He’s running a .949 OPS. Before this season, his best 52-game span in a single season came in 2018, when he ran an .882 OPS. That’s a 67-point difference. Profar is batting .339, but until this season he’d never once had a span this long where he hit above .300. Here’s his 52-game rolling wRC+ for his entire career. His previous high came on August 2, 2022. It was 31 points lower.
Right off the bat, this graph tells us that after a horrible 2023 season, Profar was due for some regression of the good kind. He came into this season with a career wRC+ of 92, and that figure is 97 if we limit it to his last six seasons. The smart bet was that he was going to bounce back at least part of the way from last year’s 76 wRC+ clunker.
There’s also another obvious gimme: Luck. Profar has never finished a season with a BABIP above .300, but he’s currently at .371, tied for fourth highest in baseball. His .416 wOBA is 38 points above his .378 xwOBA, a differential that puts him in the top 10 percent of all batters. The 2.3-homer difference between Profar’s 4.7 expected home runs and 7 actual home runs is the seventh-largest gap in baseball. Profar’s line drive rate, which had never risen above 27.7% in a season, is currently at 32%. It’s fantastic that Profar is squaring the ball up so much, but line drive rate is also notoriously fickle. We can and should expect all of these numbers to come back down.
Profar is running career bests in both walk rate, 13.2%, and strikeout rate, 13.7%. In order to get a handle on how that has come about, I compared his plate discipline numbers from this year to his average the four previous seasons.
Profar’s Plate Discipline
Season
O-Swing%
Z-Swing%
Swing%
O-Contact%
Z-Contact%
Contact%
Zone%
2020-2023
27.4%
67.9%
44.8%
70.6%
88.7%
82.4%
43.0%
2024
28.6%
70.1%
45.7%
66.2%
91.7%
82.3%
41.0%
As you can see, he’s seeing fewer strikes, and he’s being a bit more aggressive, especially in the zone. He’s also making more contact inside the zone, but not outside the zone. That last part is unsustainable. People don’t usually get better at making contact specifically on the pitches that they want to hit anyway. When it does correct itself, it will result in lower walk and strikeout rates, and more weakly hit balls in play. Still, the numbers aren’t shouting anything particularly clear. According to Statcast, Profar’s swing/take decisions have been worth 21 runs, just the second time in his career that it’s been a positive number. That’s the fifth-highest mark in baseball, and it slots him right between Mookie Betts and Juan Soto. However, according to SEAGER, Profar’s swing decisions put him in the 19th percentile. Right now, I just want to see a bigger sample size.
Profar has always been good at making contact, but so far this season, he’s doing so while hitting the ball harder. This is where things get real. Even though it’s propped up by a line drive rate that’s too good to be true, a .378 xwOBA is a huge jump for Profar, whose career best of .338 came during the short 2020 season, when he put up a 113 wRC+. The switch-hitting Profar is also succeeding from both sides of the plate, running a 181 wRC+ as a lefty and a 172 wRC+ as a righty.
This season, Profar’s average exit velocity is a career-high 90.4 mph. More importantly, he’s seen a big jump in his 90th percentile exit velocity, going from 101.8 mph in both 2022 and 2023 to 104.5 this season. That moved him from the 25th percentile to the 58th. His 40.8% hard-hit rate is not just a career best, but it’s the first time he’s ever touched the 50th percentile. None of this is enough to make him a power hitter or make a .517 slugging percentage sustainable, but it is a serious jump, and those kinds of numbers are hard to fake. Moreover, they’re coming after some changes to Profar’s swing. From the left side of the plate, Profar has changed up his stance significantly, starting out much more open, with a bigger bat waggle at a steeper angle. From both sides of the plate, he’s gone from almost no leg kick whatsoever last year to bringing his foot several inches off the ground this year.
Adding a leg kick is a common way for a player to try to increase power, and it certainly seems to be working for Profar so far. According to Statcast’s new bat tracking metrics, Profar is slightly above average in terms of squaring the ball up and slightly below average in terms of bat speed. There’s no way to know where he ranked in previous seasons, but based on all of this, I don’t think it would be crazy to give him the benefit of the doubt and expect some of this new exit velocity to stick.
There’s one last thing I’d like to consider. It’s possible that Profar is just very happy to be home, or that he happens to see the ball particularly well in San Diego. Profar has a career 123 wRC+ in Petco Park. Over his time with the Padres from 2020 to 2023 (excluding his time with Colorado in 2023), he’s run a 113 wRC+ at home, compared to 96 on the road. Even this season, he’s at 212 at home, compared to a (somehow) relatively pedestrian 149 on the road. I wouldn’t put a ton of stock in that theory, but there’s a possibility that Profar just feels comfortable at Petco.
So where does all of this leave us? It definitely doesn’t leave us thinking that Profar is now a true-talent .300/.400/.500 hitter. He’s due for some regression in terms of BABIP, in terms of line drive rate, and in terms of contact rate outside the zone. On the other hand, it does seem like he might have found a way to hit for a bit more power without sacrificing much in the way of contact ability. We’ll have to wait and see where exactly that leaves him.
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
Sponsor Us on Patreon
Facebook Group
Twitter Account
EW Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
iTunes Feed
Get Our Merch!
