Trent Grisham Did the Thing He Can’t Do

They say that the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have one. In that spirit, I’d like to start today’s article with a confession: I have a Trent Grisham evaluation problem. It feels good to say it! I’ve had this problem for years. Ever since he burst onto the scene in San Diego with two straight seasons of good hitting and great fielding, I’ve consistently overestimated his future trajectory. I put him on the first cut of my trade value list every year. I think of him as a starter even when the teams that employ him don’t.

I know all of this. When I’ve looked at Grisham in the past, I’ve seen an excellent player even when others haven’t, and I understand that this bias shades my evaluation. But just when I thought I was kicking the habit, Grisham goes and does something like this and pulls me right back in. Through Monday’s action, the first quarter of the season, he’s hitting a ludicrous .288/.373/.663, and while that’s not any reasonable hitter’s slugging percentage, he’s absolutely tattooing the ball, posting career high marks in barrel rate, hard-hit rate, xwOBACON, xSLG, average exit velocity… You get the idea, he’s just hitting everything very hard at the moment.

Now, as a reformed Grishamite, I have to tell you that hitting the ball hard isn’t one of Grisham’s shortcomings. Not quite like this, of course, because the only person who regularly hits like this is Aaron Judge, but he’s always been a threat to go deep. Grisham might have a low-ish wRC+ over the past three years, but the problem has been the quantity of his hits rather than the quality. Even while he scuffled mightily, he slugged roughly 20 homers per 600 plate appearances. He doesn’t always put the ball in play, but when he does, he makes it count.

Grisham also forces pitchers to come to him. He’s among the league’s best when it comes to chase rate, and he’s walking at a double digit clip. Again, though, I have to tell you that this isn’t new. Grisham’s chase rate is higher than it was last year, and his walk rate is below his career average. Unlike your typical outfielder with a below-average batting line, this isn’t an issue of Grisham never seeing a slider he doesn’t like. He’s quite willing to work a count if pitchers won’t challenge him in the zone.

Don’t these qualities sound great? Welcome! You, too, can look at Trent Grisham and see the next great power-and-patience masher who happens to play good defense in center field. But trust me when I say that it’s easy to be misled by those traits. Grisham has had good power for years. He’s been choosy for years. Why is it manifesting itself as the hottest stretch of his career instead of, you know, the rest of his career?

Here’s an easy way to think about it: Grisham has never had a problem with swinging too much. Rather, he’s had a problem with swinging too little. Few hitters chase less frequently, particularly early in the count. But few hitters swing at strikes less frequently than Grisham; that’s just the way the bargain works. You can’t have one without the other. There’s always going to be a tradeoff.

Generally speaking, I love a player who swings too rarely instead of too frequently. It’s simple math, more or less. Swinging at a strike has some great outcomes (hits), some awful outcomes (batted ball outs), and some bad outcomes (foul balls or swinging strikes). Swinging at a ball has fewer great outcomes, because it’s very hard to do damage when you’re hitting pitches outside the zone. But the downsides? They’re still there. Meanwhile, taking a ball? That’s great. And taking a strike? Sure, it’s bad, but plenty of the times that you swing, you end up adding a strike anyway. Take more pitches, and you’ll get ahead in the count more often unless pitchers adapt.

There’s one huge problem with this approach, though, and you can see it in Grisham’s career line. How does a guy who rarely chases strike out at a 26% clip? It’s because he hasn’t quite worked out the right balance between being choosy and being selective. This approach has a weakness, and it’s a simple one: attacking the strike zone early in the count. You can take an extremely patient approach if you’re, say, Juan Soto, because pitchers aren’t crazy. They know that Soto is both patient and absolutely lethal when he does swing. He has elite contact skills and top-shelf power. He has top-shelf pitch recognition, too — that’s why they pay him the big bucks. If you’re trying to sneak a middle-middle fastball by Soto, you’ll have to live with the consequences when he deigns to swing.

Grisham was never going to be the next Juan Soto, but what about the next Lars Nootbaar? Nootbaar is about 20% better than average offensively for his career despite being outrageously swing-averse, and he also strikes out far less than Grisham. That’s because, to put it simply, when he swings at strikes early in the count, he’s swinging harder, making more contact, and keeping more of his contact fair. Yeah, those things are good, and we inveterate Grisham defenders mostly missed that distinction during Grisham’s long downswing.

That brings me to 2025. I’m trying to be measured. I’m trying not to read too much into things. But Grisham looks a lot different than he did before, and the specific thing he’s fixed is the thing that most held him back in recent years. Yes, that’s right: Trent Grisham is actually making pitchers pay when they force feed him strikes. I’ve highlighted the best result in each category below:

Really, xwOBACON? Everything is more delicious with bacon, of course, but that’s just the expected wOBA value of his balls in play, and uh, yeah, these are all great numbers. He’s making far more contact, and that contact is meaningfully louder than at any previous point in his career. Now that he’s depositing early-count fastballs into the right field stands, pitchers can’t just flood the zone and expect to win. Grisham isn’t going to keep producing at this level for long; for context, Soto has produced about four runs per 100 of these swings in his career. But Grisham is both riding a hot streak and making an improvement that was always within reach.

I mean, sure, this is against human home run generator Kyle Gibson, but a year ago, Grisham wasn’t doing this:

This one’s against a better pitcher:

Want to throw Grisham a dead middle changeup to put him down in the count? Not if he’s doing this:

Like most hitters, Grisham swings more frequently and with lower bat speed when he reaches two-strike counts. Swinging gets much better when a foul ball doesn’t cost you a strike, and taking gets much worse when it can end your at-bat. Many of the most patient hitters in baseball turn to a more contact-oriented approach with two strikes to deal with that unfortunate reality, but that plan doesn’t work as well for Grisham, who has below-average contact skills, unlike the two guys I’ve been comparing him to.

If two-strike counts are going to be bad for you, the best thing you can do is avoid them. But Grisham was never very good at that, largely because he wasn’t converting enough hittable early-count pitches into balls in play. Some of that was about not swinging, but some of it was that his swings were foul balls or whiffs instead of solid contact. Think of it this way: Over a 600 PA season, and at previous career rates, Grisham would end up in about 33 more two-strike counts than Nootbaar. That’s a ton, and he’s quite bad in two-strike counts, even relative to league average in those difficult situations. This year, he’s been basically Nootbaar’s equal in avoiding two-strike counts (and Soto’s, too, for what it’s worth). Those two end up with their backs against the wall less than the league as a whole, and now Grisham does as well.

I’ll level with you: Despite my best efforts, I’m starting to buy back into the Grisham experience more than I should. Imagine a center fielder with a double digit walk rate and 25-homer power. Poor 2025 defensive metrics in a small sample notwithstanding, Grisham is an excellent defender. He’s top 10 in baseball for center field defense since he debuted, thanks to a very good first step that makes up for his only-acceptable straight line speed. That kind of defender with walks and power? Where do I sign up?

You sign up at the Ben Clemens Trent Grisham fan club, of course, and the membership logbook is just me writing my own name over and over. I should calm down about this. You can’t expect his new form to continue. “Just miss less and do more damage when you make contact” is too simple of an explanation. Maybe it’s the new open stance, though his swing looks similar to me aside from the starting point. Maybe it’s about intent, though it’s not like his swing rate has budged much. But whatever the mechanics are, the change is easy to see: Grisham took the worst part of his game, the part where he dinked foul balls and meekly kept the bat on his shoulder at the start of every at-bat, and completely reversed it.

One thing it’s not? Some weird Aaron Judge pitch selection halo. The Yankees have feasted on fastballs this year, but Grisham’s portion size hasn’t changed. He’s seeing early-count fastballs less frequently than in any previous year of his career. Even when pitchers venture into the strike zone against him, they’re doing it with fastballs less than ever before. You could imagine Judge’s presence convincing pitchers to challenge everyone else, but there’s no evidence of that in the way pitchers have come after Grisham. He’s just been up to the task of dealing with it to a much greater extent than in previous years.

You can imagine a midway point between Grisham’s current form and what he’s done over the past few years. He’s clearly not going to keep stinging the ball at this rate, but when you’re as choosy as he is, you might as well go after pitches you can drive, and Grisham’s doing that as well as he ever has. Almost no one in baseball takes fewer swings than Trent Grisham, particularly early in the count. When he’s in three-ball (and 2-0) counts, forcing the pitcher to come to him, he has huge power, which is how he’s maintained a 20-homer pace all these years. But he hadn’t translated that mindset to the early-count swings well enough, and he’s finally starting to do it.

Will this hot form keep up? Probably not. Definitely not! But if you’ve been a Grisham stan all these years, this is the thing you always thought he’d eventually do. Not to this extent, and not forever, but it seems so easy! Just hit the pitches in the strike zone hard often enough that pitchers can’t bowl you over. Okay, I’ve gotta go. These Trent Grisham fan clubs aren’t going to organize themselves – and despite my better judgment, I’m buying back in.