Wander Franco Is Making the Leap

Let’s start this article with a bold claim: Wander Franco’s first two seasons in the majors were a disappointment. That’s a startling assertion, even if it might not seem that way at first. Franco hit .282/.337/.439, good for a 121 wRC+, while playing league average defense at shortstop; he was 20 years old for the first of those seasons. He played at a 4.3 WAR per 600 PA clip, which the FanGraphs glossary helpfully notes is an All-Star level. That’s all true. For the best prospect of the past decade, though, it still feels like a letdown.

The real thing that has betrayed Franco is playing time. First for nebulous service time reasons, then due to injury, his first two seasons in the majors were both as brief as they were scintillating. He appeared in 70 games in 2021 and 83 in 2022. His counting stats weren’t exactly imposing: 13 homers, 10 steals, and a mere 72 RBI if you’re playing fantasy baseball. I acknowledge that considering that performance a disappointment is grading on a curve, but when you’re as good and hyped as Franco is, that comes with the territory.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, it’s time for the good news: that perception is as stale as the sourdough I bought last Wednesday and didn’t finish (hey, there’s a good bagel shop nearby, and I’m only human). Franco isn’t a young up-and-comer this year. He’s a bona fide star, one of the best hitters in baseball so far and the best player on the best team. It’s only a matter of time before your marginally-baseball-following friends start asking you if you’ve heard about this Wander guy. So allow me to present a gift to you as a baseball fan who wants to sound smart to their friends, a guide to why Franco is one of the best players in baseball and what he changed to get there.

First things first: your friend is going to want to know about Franco’s hitting. Defense is great and all, but offense sells tickets. Franco’s otherworldly prospect profile was based on his jaw-dropping numbers, which were compiled at levels he was far too young for. He never hit for silly home run power, but he did everything else. Think peak Nap Lajoie – or, since you almost assuredly have no mental construct for what Nap Lajoie’s stats look like, think Jose Altuve with better plate discipline.

More specifically, Franco combines solid pitch recognition with excellent bat-to-ball skills. Excellent might undersell it, honestly. When he swings at a pitch in the strike zone, he makes contact with it 93% of the time. That’s rarefied air; we’re talking Mookie Betts, José Ramírez, Alex Bregman, and Luis Arraez.

I listed Arraez just because he’s buzzy right now, but the other three share something with this year’s iteration of Franco. They make solid contact frequently. There’s a natural tradeoff between frequency and quality; if you’re getting to everything, you’re generally not getting to it with authority. Franco, like the Betts/Ramírez/Bregman trio, is an exception. Or at least, he is now. In his first two major league seasons, he swung too frequently at pitches he couldn’t do much with. He made contact with them, because that’s his thing, but nearly 30% of his batted balls were hit below 80 mph — mishits, in other words.

This year, he’s starting to make the change that those three hitters had to make to marry their phenomenal contact with good power: he’s becoming more selective about which pitches to swing at. Not everything in the strike zone is a good pitch to drive. Consider the population of pitches thrown in the strike zone when a batter has fewer than two strikes. Some of those pitches will be good ones to swing at, but not all will be. You can’t measure “good” plate discipline by asking if batters swung at all of them; plenty of the time, it’s better to take a pitch in a tough location and live to fight another day, particularly if you have the kind of contact skills that make an eventual strikeout unlikely.

In his career before this year, Franco swung at 67% of in-zone pitches with fewer than two strikes. This year, he’s down to 51%. That’s a sign of good plate discipline, not bad. When you have a strike to spare and make a lot of contact, you should be looking for loud contact, not just a pitch that is within the boundaries of the strike zone.

That passivity doesn’t work with two strikes, but Franco knows that, and so it hasn’t carried it over. Before 2023, he swung at 92% of pitches in the strike zone after reaching two strikes. So far this year, he’s swinging at 92.3% of them. In other words, he’s making the types of swing decisions that best suit his game, far more than he did before this season.

Now that we know he’s hunting pitches rather than swinging indiscriminately, we can hone in on what he’s trying to do: put the ball in the air with authority. His 0.74 GB/FB ratio is a career low, and his groundball rate is 12 percentage points lower than his previous career mark. You’d expect that to decrease his pull rate; batters overwhelmingly pull grounders, after all, which is why the shift worked well enough to get restricted. But Franco has increased his pull rate, because he’s pulling the balls he hits in the air far more frequently:

I’ll level with you: it’s still early in the season. These numbers aren’t stable yet. The magnitude of the changes make it clear to me, though, that this is something Franco is doing on purpose. He’s hunting for damage, not just contact. Another way of thinking about it? With fewer than two strikes in 2021 and 2022, Franco hit 24% of his batted balls hard and in the air. This year, that number has ballooned to 33%. Take a great contact hitter and replace some of their soft contact with called strikes, and you might get a change like Franco’s: more production on contact paired with fewer swings.

This change shows up all across Franco’s statistics this year. He’s barreling the ball up more frequently (11.8% of the time against 4.7% before 2023). He’s compiling more extra base hits, hitting 13 in 93 plate appearances so far, a 50% higher rate than in his previous major league career. His hard-hit rate is up. His expected slugging percentage based on launch angle and exit velocity is up more than 100 points. His actual slugging percentage is up more than 100 points. To put it plainly, he handed in his slap hitter card in exchange for a doubles-and-dingers license.

The downside of this change is more strikeouts; even if you have Franco-esque bat control and pitch recognition, going to two-strike counts more frequently gives you more chances to strike out. Indeed, Franco’s strikeout rate has ticked up – all the way to a still impressive 16.1%.

Here’s the thing, though: those strikeouts won’t last. Franco is displaying absolutely exquisite discipline with two strikes. When pitchers throw in the zone, he swings 92.3% of the time, as we talked about up above. That’s the same rate as in his career before 2023, and tremendously aggressive overall. You’d think that aggression might lead to an excessive number of chases, but you probably weren’t considering that Franco is in the process of making the leap to superstardom.

Think of it this way: across the majors, batters swing at 88% of two-strike pitches in the strike zone. In other words, Franco swings more often than average, which is a very good thing with two strikes. On pitches outside of the strike zone, the league as a whole swings 39% of the time. That’s understandable; if you’re in maximum protection mode, you’re more likely to chase. Franco chased out-of-zone pitches 42% of the time with two strikes in 2021 and 2022; he was slightly more aggressive both in and out of the zone, which makes sense given his bat-to-ball skills.

This year, though, he’s only swinging 31.5% of the time. He’s chasing far less often. You can’t throw one by him in the zone with two strikes. Sure, he’ll strike out more by passing on pitches in the strike zone more frequently and getting to two-strike counts, but make no mistake, he’s still one of the best in the business at avoiding strikeouts. The best way to get him might be with a little outside assistance:

These changes are worth recapping. He’s looking for pitches to drive before he reaches two strikes, and driving them when he gets them. When he does get to two strikes, he’s phenomenally aggressive in the strike zone and makes contact at an elite clip. If you leave the zone, he chases far less frequently than average. This is what a superstar hitter looks like. He might not have top-tier power, but he makes up for it by never giving away at-bats and by tapping into everything he has frequently.

It’s hard to spot a breakout in real time. They’re far easier to see in retrospect; early-season statistics fly around, and even bad hitters post good starts. But I’m comfortable saying this isn’t a string of good luck. This is one of the most talented players in baseball starting to put it all together. There simply aren’t many hitters capable of doing what Franco is doing.

I don’t expect this start to fade. There’s nothing fluky here, no red flags that scream “regression.” It took Bregman two seasons to find his footing in the majors. It took Betts roughly the same amount of time, and it was four seasons before he went incandescent in 2018. Ramírez posted a 78 wRC+ in his first 635 plate appearances across three seasons. The superstars who share Franco’s skill set haven’t hit always hit the ground running, but that hasn’t made their long-term trajectory any less impressive.

The biggest question around Franco, in my eyes, is whether he can play a full season. The only way he’ll be able to prove that is by doing it. Short of that, I think he checks every box. After a rough start to his career defensively, he looks solidly average out there, though he’s also capable of turning in highlight reel material:

Umm, Wander… WUT IN THE WORLD WAS THAT ? pic.twitter.com/D3KxYLzD8a

— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) April 25, 2023

He’s been caught stealing three times already, but not on any egregiously bad attempts, just close calls that come from pushing the envelope. This is what a great player playing well looks like – no fluky numbers, no glass cannon approach just waiting for pitchers to attack it, just good baseball.

This time next year, I don’t think Franco is going to be a fresh new face. He’s going to be one of the game’s established stars, largely held back by the fact that he doesn’t play in a big market in a coastal city (fine, in an ocean-coastal city, if we’re being literal). This is your chance to get in now – after he’s already made the leap to stardom but before anyone has noticed. Change your mental heuristic of Franco, and thank me later.