Who Is Justin Turner Right Now?

You’re surely familiar with the trope of aging sluggers who sell out for pull-side power because they can’t catch up to the fastball like they used to. They need to start gearing up to swing earlier, forcing them to guess what pitch is coming instead of reacting to what they see. They hope that extra homers will offset the extra whiffs that come when they get fooled by slower stuff. The interesting thing about this trope is that its strategy is very similar to the one that swept through the entire baseball world roughly 10 years ago. Justin Turner was a leading light of the launch angle revolution, the movement that emphasized getting on plane early, attacking the ball out front, and pulling it in the air. Essentially, that movement turned the last refuge of an aging slugger into the mainstream way of hitting. At 39, Turner is now an aging slugger himself, with a wRC+ that has fallen in each season since 2020. His swing is already optimized, and now that he’s largely relegated to designated hitter, his 106 wRC+ doesn’t quite cut it.

A cursory look at his stats might tell you that Turner’s been unlucky this season. After all, he’s running his highest xwOBA since 2021 and his highest walk rate since 2018. Meanwhile, his BABIP is the lowest it’s been since 2011, and his wOBA is nearly 30 points below his xwOBA. Unlucky, right? Here’s the problem: Turner’s 30.6% hard-hit rate and 87.1-mph average exit velocity are not just career lows, they’re miles beneath his career averages of 39.6% and 89.8 mph. Turner’s popup rate has also ticked up. If your quality of contact gets drastically worse, luck probably isn’t the thing that’s driving down your BABIP. But there’s still that pesky xwOBA to worry about. Why hasn’t it plummeted along with Turner’s barrel rate?

The answer is that Turner is running a 32.4% line drive rate, his highest since 2018. xwOBA loves line drives for the same reason that hitters love them: Line drives usually turn into hits. But Turner is coming by those line drives differently than he ever has before. Since the beginning of the Statcast era, batters have pulled their line drives around 37% of the time. Turner was right around or slightly below that league-average pull rate. But now that he’s hitting more line drives, he’s also hitting them much softer and pulling them much more often.

A similar, though less extreme fate has befallen Turner’s fly balls.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to work, and I know that because I learned it from Justin Turner.

Coming into the season, the concern was whether Turner could still catch up to the fastball. His performance against them has been dropping for years now. So far this season, it’s dropped just a hair more, but a new problem has emerged. Turner has also been terrible against breaking balls. He’s whiffing against them more, popping them up at an alarming rate, and he has yet to barrel up a single one. Keep in mind that coming into the season, according to Statcast’s run values, Turner had been worth 79 runs against breaking pitches since 2015. That was the third-highest total in all of baseball, behind Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. This year, he’s been worth -5 runs against them.

The book on Turner hasn’t changed. Pitchers are still trying to counteract his catch-the-ball-in-front approach by working him away. However, while he used to look for that middle-away pitch, he’s now swinging at inside pitches much more often. Below are heat maps of his swing rates.

I watched a whole bunch of Turner’s pulled line drives from this season. They were full of balls hooked off the end of the bat or muscled over the infield. In other words, he’s swinging at that inside pitch more, and he’s making it work, but he’s not necessarily squaring the ball up. Turner’s flare/burner rate is at 31.8%, a career high and sixth highest among qualified players. That’s an extremely volatile stat; four of the five players ahead of him are also running a career-high rate. It’s hard to imagine that he’ll keep that going for an entire season.

We now have bat tracking data that shows Turner with one of the slowest and shortest swings in the league against just about every type of pitch. Players with slow swings need to offset their lack of power by squaring the ball up often. While Turner is also running his highest contact rate in years, the Stacast data is matching what I saw when I watched his film: He’s not squaring the ball up, and in the graph below, that puts him exactly where you don’t want to be.

Somehow, this power hitter who reshaped baseball in his attack-the-ball-out-front image is verging on Luis Arraez territory, but without the solid contact that makes that profile work. We don’t have any way of knowing how much slower or shorter Turner’s swing is now compared to recent years, but common sense tells us that it didn’t always look like this. There’s simply no way that the approach indicated in the graph above is how he turned himself into one of the best hitters in the game. You don’t put up ISOs in the .200s for four years in a row with a compact, contact-oriented swing. That’s just not how it works.

There is one indicator that Turner’s contact quality is due to improve. His contact rate on pitches outside the zone has skyrocketed to 78.7%, third highest among qualified players. At the same time, his contact rate on pitches inside the zone has fallen. That’s the sort of thing that tends to even out over time, but in the short term, it’s likely depressing Turner’s contact quality. If we look only at Turner’s contact inside the zone, his 89.1-mph average exit velocity, while still a career low, is at least a bit closer to his career average of 91.4. When Turner’s contact rates start to even out, he should start hitting the ball harder. Turner has also been on a hot streak for the last couple weeks. Since June 2, he’s raised his wRC+ from 87 to 106. However, while his results have improved, he’s actually been hitting the ball even softer this month.

I’m honestly not sure what to do with all this information. Maybe Turner really is starting his swing earlier like an aging slugger, which leaves him too far in front of breaking pitches. Or maybe he is actively going for a more contact-oriented approach. However, when I watch his film, I don’t see anything particularly different.

His stance isn’t quite as open as it was during his Dodgers heyday, and his leg kick is maybe a little higher, but he looks like he’s getting into his load and leg kick, then getting his foot down on roughly the same schedule. Maybe this is what it looks like for Turner when the bat speed is gone, but right now, he really does seem like an outlier. In today’s game, very few players can find lasting success by hitting flares over the infield. The safe bet is that something will have to give one way or another. Maybe he’s just caught in between right now, and his timing will come back. Either he’ll start hitting the ball harder, or his line drive rate will come back down to earth and the expected stats will start to line up more closely with the actual stats. For now, all I can say for certain is that Turner looks very different.