The Inside Scoop on Matt Olson

Matt Olson is striking out a lot. Exactly 30% of the time, to be precise. His swinging strike rate has never been higher. He’s only posted a lower contact rate once, in his disastrous 2020 campaign. Obviously, then, you know how he’s doing this year: incredibly well. His 140 wRC+ is the second-best mark of his career. Clearly, something interesting is going on, so let’s take a look at what it might be.

Honestly, the strikeouts are nothing new for Olson. His career 24.1% strikeout rate isn’t ideal for a top-tier hitter, particularly one with limited defensive value. It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of his game. You can succeed while striking out a lot, but you have to do a lot of other things well to strike out a quarter of the time and be a great hitter.

Throughout his career, Olson has mostly done that. Take his 2019 season, when he struck out 25.2% of the time. He hit for a ton of power – even playing in the cavernous Coliseum, his ISO was in the top 15 in the majors – and walked enough to post a reasonable OBP. But you can see the downside easily. Consider 2022, for example. Olson again struck out roughly a quarter of the time – 24.3% – and walked a similar amount. He again posted a top-15 ISO; a lower number, to be sure, because 2022 had far fewer homers than 2019. But he ran a .274 BABIP, and that along with the fact that he was playing in a better offensive environment but putting up similar numbers meant he was only 20% above average rather than 35% above average.

Seen next to each other, these two seasons explain the chief worry with Olson. Without much change in his underlying skills, he was only 20% above average offensively last year:

That’s still a nice player, but a first baseman with that kind of batting line is hardly an All-Star. It was the 13th-best batting line for a first baseman in the majors, hardly better than his replacement in Oakland, Seth Brown. That’s the kind of tightrope that a player with Olson’s skill set is always walking; a slight dip in power or BABIP can be the difference between average and excellent.

Olson apologists point to his 2021 season as evidence that there’s a solution to the strikeout conundrum. Olson struck out much less in 2021, only 16.8% of the time. That’s a pretty nice solution, but it didn’t take, and I’m not surprised. He posted a career high in contact rate by a fair margin, and actually chased pitches at a higher rate than he had in his career before 2021. I don’t think we’re headed back to that version of Olson.

Why isn’t this year’s uptick in strikeout rate proving disastrous? It’s because everything else is ticking up too. Olson has never hit for more power than he has so far this year, and he’s never walked more frequently. Do those two things, and that strikeout rate starts to feel a lot less onerous.

Let’s look at these two developments one at a time. First, the power hitting. Olson has already smashed 17 home runs, half of last year’s total in roughly one third the plate appearances. He has a career-high barrel rate and a career-high hard-hit rate. He’s putting the ball in the air more frequently, too: he has a career-high fly ball rate, and a near-career-low GB/FB ratio.

How’s he doing that? Easy – he’s hunting bad sliders and putting them in the seats. That might sound like a bad way of going about business – sliders, after all, are hard to hit. But Olson is an excellent breaking ball hitter. He’s swinging at three quarters of the sliders he sees in the strike zone, a career high. He’s particularly aggressive when he gets an inside slider, the kind that he can turn on. If you want to pull a slow pitch, here’s where you should be swinging:

Olson has always crushed those pitches. For his career, he’s incandescent when he puts an inner-third slider into play. He’s batting .339 with an .887 slugging percentage on those balls, and that doesn’t look fluky. His expected statistics on those batted balls are even higher; he hammers them and puts them in the air. He’s in a class with Juan Soto, Corey Seager, and Rafael Devers at the top of the majors when it comes to damage on contact there.

His hot zone is bigger than just the inner third, though. If you divide the strike zone into a three-by-three grid, he’s at his best in the four areas that start middle-middle and go inside and low, basically the red areas in that graph up above. He’s swinging at a ludicrous 88% of the sliders he sees in those zones this year. He’s always absolutely demolished those pitches; across his whole career, only Shohei Ohtani, Bryce Harper, and Joey Gallo have posted a higher average exit velocity on them.

Does swinging at these sliders come with downsides? Sure. When pitchers throw their sliders either off the plate inside or low on the inner half, Olson is chasing more frequently than ever. That makes sense; he’s looking for breaking stuff low and in. Sometimes the breaking stuff is just too low, or too in. Here are his swing rates on sliders in his happy zone, as well as out of the zone nearby:

This approach explains why he’s swinging at more pitches outside of the strike zone this year. He’s not chasing other pitches more frequently; his chase rates on fastballs, curveballs, and offspeed pitches closely resemble last year’s. He’s just looking for a slider to hit, with all the attendant side effects.

One of those side effects: more walks. By bisecting the plate and hunting for one particular area to swing, Olson is chasing near the bottom inside corner more, but he’s also completely ignoring more pitches. He’s never seen more pitches per plate appearance. His chase rate on pitches that are either high or outside is an excellent 21.9%. If you’re a pitcher who looks to attack lefties away, you’re probably going to either strike Olson out or walk him. He just doesn’t engage out there.

That’s a rough bind unless you have pinpoint command, because pitching Olson away seems like a great plan. He’s obviously an excellent inside hitter; that’s what I just spent the whole article so far detailing. You should throw him stuff he can’t turn on, naturally. So pitchers do that – he sees pitches on the outer third or off the plate away more frequently than your average lefty. He especially sees a lot of fastballs out there; if he wants soft and inside, pitchers will give him hard and away.

That leads to a lot of pitches taken. It also leads to a lot of walks when pitchers aren’t precise with their location. That’s the easiest way to explain Olson’s uptick in walk rate; he’s willing to keep the bat on his shoulder if pitchers work him away, for better or worse.

I’m not sure if this plan is a stable long-term solution for Olson. I think it likely makes him more vulnerable to lefties, because lefty pitchers work away to lefty batters more often than righty pitchers do. That’s just a more comfortable pitch shape, particularly for breaking balls. He might also need to make an adjustment against fastballs; by looking for sliders so much, he’s putting up the worst numbers of his career against hard stuff. But one thing is clear: looking at traditional plate discipline numbers doesn’t explain what Olson is doing.

At the extreme, that might mean creating a completely new swing decision metric, like Robert Orr’s bad decision rate. But even if you don’t want to download every batted ball to back into hitter hot zones, you can add a little nuance to the analysis, like with Olson. He swings more than you’d expect, which means more strikeouts. But he also swings at pitches he can absolutely pummel, and takes pitches he can’t do anything with because they’ll sometimes lead to walks. Olson might not be a balanced hitter, but he’s inarguably an effective one.