Vlad the Omniscient

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a force of nature. He’s one of the best hitters in baseball, and in a very obvious way: he scalds the baseball to all fields and hits a bunch of home runs. Last year was a down year, and he still left the yard 32 times. He perennially records some of the hardest-hit batted balls in the game. When you think about a prototypical first baseman, Guerrero’s combination of power and hit tool is probably what you’re picturing.

One of the impressive parts of Guerrero’s career has been his ability to limit strikeouts while still getting to his power. See, low strikeout rates aren’t an inherently great thing. If you don’t strike out very often but don’t do any damage when you put the ball in play, you’re not really making a good trade. Adam Frazier is a good example of this type of hitter. He struck out just 12.1% of the time last year, but posted an 81 wRC+ anyway because when he did make contact, it was generally weak. You can probably conjure a picture of this type of hitter on your favorite team. You love that they never give away an at-bat, but hate that they never take matters into their own hands and park one in the seats or smack one off the power alley wall.

Guerrero doesn’t suffer from that problem. He struck out just 16.4% of the time in 2022, but when he made contact, he wasn’t Fraziering it up out there. Let’s get that in numbers: in his career, Frazier is batting .317 with a .456 slugging percentage when he ends a plate appearance with a batted ball, good for a .327 wOBA. Guerrero is hitting .351 with a .616 slugging percentage, which works out to a .403 wOBA. One of these things is not like the other. That’s why low strikeout rates are great statistical markers for power hitters and yet broadly uninteresting in the population as a whole. What you do with those extra balls in play matters a ton, as Michael Baumann covered yesterday, and with far more Pitbull references than I could even think up.

Now that we have that covered, I’ve got good news: Guerrero is barely striking out this season. You think Frazier’s 12.1% mark last year was nice? It’s still early, but Guerrero is striking out just 11.5% of the time in 2023. He’s also crushing the ball just like always. He’s sporting a career-high hard-hit rate, and his barrel rate is the second-best of his career, behind only 2021, the best season of his career so far. In other words, he’s got the “but what happens when he makes contact” part of the equation covered.

It’s too early in the season to pay a ton of attention to exactly what results a player has earned for their batted balls, but it’s not too early to look at the broad shape of them and draw some conclusions. If you’re hitting the ball on the ground a ton and not hitting it hard when you do put it in the air, that’s bad. If you’re making loud aerial contact, that’s good. As you might expect from those hard-hit and barrel rate statistics I quoted up above, Guerrero is on the right side of all of these numbers. He’s in the 95th percentile for hard-hit rate, the 75th for barrel rate, and the 92nd for average exit velocity.

Statcast’s measure of luck-adjusted production, xwOBA, considers only how hard and at what launch angle you hit a batted ball to assign expected outcomes. It’s a good way of looking at early-season batting lines, so long as you treat it with some reasonable level of suspicion. For example, a player subsisting on flares that just clear the infield and land in front of the outfield probably won’t keep doing that forever. When it comes to hard-hit baseballs, however, xwOBA does a good job of looking past the noise (Was the ball hit right at a fielder? Was the wind particularly rough that day?) and telling you how good someone’s contact has been.

Guerrero’s has been, in a word, excellent. His xwOBA on contact this year stands at a sparkling .450, the second-best mark of his career – you guessed it, behind only 2021. That would’ve been a top-15 rate in baseball last year, and it’s an 92nd-percentile mark this year even with plenty of players putting up small-sample hot streaks. In other words, the power is as promised: loud and frequent.

Combine that with Guerrero’s newfound lack of strikeouts, and he’s really onto something. He’s hitting .364/.449/.470 so far this year – and xwOBA thinks he’s under-performing his raw batted ball metrics significantly, by a whopping 40 points of wOBA, the difference between Aaron Judge‘s 2022 (awe-inspiring, generationally great) and Paul Goldschmidt’s (excellent, not Aaron Judge). That’s how you end up with only three homers (he hit another Tuesday night) while putting the ball in play frequently and with power.

That brings up the key question for me: how has Guerrero cut down on his strikeouts? Not every reduction in strikeouts sticks. Sometimes, you strike out less by chasing bad pitches less frequently. Sometimes, you do it by making more contact. Sometimes, though, you do it because pitchers throw their nastiest slider with one strike rather than two, or because they simply can’t execute on key pitches for a day. In the long run, those breaks of the game even out, but we’re not in the long run; teams have played just over two weeks worth of games.

There’s even another complication to consider: sometimes making more contact isn’t a good thing. The more contact you make when chasing bad pitches, the fewer strikeouts you’ll accrue, but the more weakly hit batted balls you’ll put in play. That’s particularly true if you chase pitches that aren’t right on the fringes of the zone. In 2022, when batters swung at and made contact with pitches in the “chase” zone – think pitches that would never be called strikes but still draw swings fairly often – they hit .278 with a .345 slugging percentage.

That’s not what Guerrero is doing, though. Break the plate down into four zones – attack zones in Baseball Savant parlance – and the picture becomes clear. First, let’s look at how often he swings at pitches in each zone:

Doesn’t look like there’s much to see here. Fewer swings over the heart of the plate isn’t ideal, obviously, but that’s a tiny difference that might disappear with two pitches he feels like swinging at tomorrow. Contact-wise, he’s not filling up the scoreboard by making contact with poor pitches. Instead, he’s connecting in the zone more frequently and missing just as often on pitches where he wouldn’t be able to do much with them anyway:

That’s great news. It does raise the question of how he’s walking more and striking out less, though. The key to his good decisions so far lies in his mastery of the shadow zone, which sounds far more sinister than it actually is. The shadow zone is the fringes of the plate and the area just outside of that; “pitchers’ pitches,” in other words. When a pitcher hits their spot, it’s hard to counter, because those pitches are often called strikes, generate a fair number of whiffs, and don’t surrender hard contact even when hitters do connect.

All you can do, as a hitter, is try to minimize the damage. Guerrero has done just that. When pitchers throw him a shadow zone pitch that clips the strike zone, he’s swinging more often than last year; he swung 64% of the time last year and is swinging 70% of the time this year. When pitches just miss, he’s swinging way less frequently. Last year, he swung at 47% of those. This year, it’s down to 34.5%. To simplify things, that’s very good.

The shadow zone, as I mentioned, is a pitcher’s best friend and a hitter’s worst nightmare. Take a bad pitcher, grant him the ability to only hit the corners, and he’d be a good pitcher right away. Stated mathematically, pitchers saved 1.6 runs per 100 pitches in the shadow zone relative to league average across all pitches. If you assume 150 pitches per nine innings, that’s 2.4 runs per nine innings. That’s a rough estimate, but seriously: pitches that hug the boundaries of the strike zone on either side are really, really good.

Last year, Vlad saw 1,092 pitches in the shadow zone. He was 10.9 runs below average on those pitches. On every other pitch combined, he was 28.8 runs above average over 1,504 pitches. In other words, he was a bad hitter (-1 runs per 100 pitches) in the shadow zone and an elite one (+1.9 runs per 100 pitches) everywhere else. That’s how hitting works. It’s just downright hard to deal with well-placed pitches; it’s much easier to take clear balls and hammer clear strikes.

This season is still in its infancy, but uh, he’s seen 119 pitches in the shadow zone, and he’s produced results 1.6 runs above league average (across all pitches) against them. He’s taking the ones that are juuuuust barely balls and swinging at the ones that are strikes. That should be nearly impossible. Only 15 out of 247 hitters who saw at least 500 shadow zone pitches produced results better than the overall league average on them. Only four – Freddie Freeman, Goldschmidt, Joc Pederson, and Michael Harris II – were one run above average per 100 pitches.

Put another way, this skill is like a hitting cheat code. Everyone is great on pitches right down the middle, or pitches that bounce six inches in front of the plate. Fine, maybe David Fletcher and Javier Báez would disagree, but almost everyone is great against them. Guerrero is especially great against them, what with his prodigious power and great contact skills. Pitchers lose on those pitches and make it up in the shadows.

Only, not against Vlad. He’s going full on Neo in The Matrix, watching the pitches in slow motion and passing on the bad ones while swinging at the good ones. He’s also making more contact when he swings at pitches over the heart of the plate. What are you supposed to do if you’re a pitcher?

The amusing answer is “nothing.” What are you supposed to do if your good pitches don’t work in your favor and your bad pitches get sent to Bedford Park, which Google informs me is the Toronto neighborhood of choice for families with small children? You should probably employ the strategy that Preacher Roe memorably claimed to employ against Stan Musial – “throw him four wide ones and then try to pick him off first base.”

More realistically, what they need to do is wait. The odds that Guerrero can keep displaying monk-like discipline on pitches that are missing the strike zone by fractions of an inch are vanishingly low. Few hitters in baseball are capable of doing that and fewer still suddenly develop the skill after years in the league. Even if he’s better at it – and that seems both likely and terrifying for opposing pitchers – he can’t keep being this good.

On the other hand, he probably won’t continue to hit for as little power as he has to date. As we covered earlier, he’s been absolutely crushing the ball so far this year, but he only has a handful of extra-base hits to show for all that loud contact. That’s not going to keep happening; the hard contact is going to start to either leave the yard or find outfield gaps. Guerrero was already a terrifying hitter; if he’s starting to turn the places where he’s supposed to be the weakest into strengths, it might be a long year for Blue Jays opponents. Well, it’s already going to be long – they’ve got some hitters, maybe you’ve heard – but Guerrero might make it even longer.

All statistics in this article are as of Monday, April 17.