Whomps per Whiff Is a Real Stat Now

A few articles ago, I was engaging in one of my favorite pastimes: making up the names of non-existent statistics. What can I say? I got into writing because I like lining words up in funny ways. I got into baseball writing because I love baseball. But when the two things I like line up, then we’re really cooking with gas.

The fake statistic in question? Whomps per whiff. You can grasp what it is right away: how often you absolutely whomp the ball, as compared to how often your swing results in nothing but a tiny gust of air and perhaps an emphatic umpire reaction. Is this a predictive statistic? I have no idea whatsoever, but I thought I’d try to see who’s good at it.

The good news: The good players are good. I defined a whomp as a barrel, a whiff as a whiff, and then limited it to players who saw at least 500 pitches in 2023. The best in baseball at it? Ronald Acuña Jr., who just put up an all-time offensive season. Neat! Second best? Mookie Betts, who finished second in MVP voting behind Acuña. Maybe we’re on to something here. Here’s the top 10 by that metric:

One thing that I love about this statistic is that it isn’t secretly ranking players based on their plate discipline. Betts doesn’t swing much, so he doesn’t whiff much. Seager is aggressive but selectively so. Luis Arraez is 12th. Lars Nootbaar is 13th. Those two are polar opposites who nonetheless are both good hitters.

As an added benefit, the raw numbers look reasonable despite basically being nonsense. There’s no reasoning behind the scale on whomps per whiff whatsoever; it’s just one thing that I divided by another thing. But I’ve already come up with some easy rules of thumb for individual seasons just by looking at this list. Above .300 is incredible. Above .200 is still elite; only 23 players in baseball were at .200 or higher in 2023. League average is in the .115-.120 range, and below .100 is pretty bad. Austin Hedges checked in at .009, worst in baseball among players who barreled up at least one batted ball.

This isn’t a one-year phenomenon. Here are the top 15 hitters of the Statcast era when it comes to whomps per whiff, minimum 2,000 pitches seen:

Yeah, this list will most definitely do. It has Alvarez, perhaps the most dangerous hitter in baseball. It has Ortiz, who might have held that crown before he retired. There are selective and powerful types. There are guys like Judge and Alonso who obliterate the ball on contact. Ramírez and Betts are time-traveling sorcerers capable of barreling the ball up without raw power. Nootbaar is great and I try to get him on every list that I can.

This statistic isn’t a straight list of the best hitters – Nootbaar’s on there, for example, and he’s only one of the best hitters in baseball in my imagination. But I think it’s a good way of looking at interesting players, such as Vinnie Pasquantino. He was on the verge of a breakout before getting hurt last year, and he would have been a huge story coming into 2024 if the Royals had a better team around him.

More good news: If you’re whomping a lot for every whiff in one year, you’re likely to do it again in the future. More specifically, there’s a pretty strong r-squared between year one whomps per whiff and year two whomps per whiff: 0.368, to be precise. For comparison’s sake, wRC+ checks in at around 0.18.

Even more promising: Similar to how FIP is more correlated with future ERA than ERA is with future ERA, whomps per whiff is more correlated with wRC+ from one year to the next than wRC+ is with itself. It’s not by a lot, and frankly, I feel like it should be by less, because this statistic is definitely not capturing everything there is to know about hitting. It’s not adjusting for anything at all, and it’s ignoring a huge amount of data. Acuña saw nearly 2,800 pitches in 2023, and I only used 327 of them to come up with this statistic.

Could you do better by adding a lot of bells and whistles? Almost certainly. I have to imagine that the granular barrel cutoff is good but not great; you could come up with some other way of defining whomps that would get at more good contact. There’s nothing about taking bad pitches in here, either. But I like that this statistic is ludicrously simple. It’s not trying to be DRC+ or xwOBA or predictive this or that. It’s how many times you whomp for every time that you whiff. More whomps are great. More whiffs are bad. End of story.

OK, fine, not quite end of story. I used whomps per whiff to suggest some interesting players for 2024 who you might have overlooked. First, we’ve got Nelson Velázquez, who hit the snot out of the ball for the Royals in a cameo in 2023. The flaws in his game are obvious: He strikes out too much. But it’s less disastrous than it looks at first blush. His pitch recognition isn’t particularly bad, but he misses fairly often when he swings. And those misses aren’t happening in a vacuum; they’re happening because he’s swinging really hard and trying to pummel the ball. I like those kinds of players, and think that the chances of Velázquez turning in a great 2024 are sneakily high.

Max Kepler is kind of a reverse Velázquez. He’s often overlooked because he’s been around for a long time, not because he’s still breaking in. He’s boring, I get it. A career 103 wRC+ over 3,800 plate appearances is the statistical equivalent of a sleeping emoji. But he’s got some interesting stuff going on under the hood, had a great 2023, and did it by whomping the ball while maintaining his customary excellent plate discipline. Yeah, his BABIP is disappointing every year, but consider me a Kepler believer.

Pasquantino doesn’t quite count as an overlooked player, because he’s drawn hype from FanGraphs and other numbers-y sources for a while now. But how about Dominic Canzone? He had a desultory 2023 debut in Seattle, but he did so with some impressive peripherals. He’s a power monster with questionable swing decisions; he wants to hit everything to Jupiter — the planet, that is, not the spring training home of the Cardinals and Marlins in Florida. But he makes pretty good contact for someone who bops as hard as he does, and I’m interested in seeing a full season of him.

A quick speed round of other interesting names, such as this group of catchers at the top. Sean Murphy did well here despite running out of gas in the second half. Hot free agents Mitch Garver and Gary Sánchez both graded out well. Keibert Ruiz is a post-hype sleeper at this point, and if his defense is as bad as it graded out in 2023, this list won’t save him. But he has outrageous bat control and could sneak onto this list in Michael Brantley/Luis Arraez style if he plays well enough behind the plate to continue catching, and I think that’s interesting for a Nats team that really needs the help.

Last but not least, I think that this statistic does a great job of explaining some of my player crushes from recent years, and I think several of those guys are better than their reputations would suggest. Tommy Pham, LaMonte Wade Jr., and Wilmer Flores are players so boring that you’d swear they were made in a lab to play on the current iteration of the Giants. Two of them already do, and admit it, you wouldn’t be surprised if Pham ends up by the bay. Actual new Giant Jorge Soler whomps pretty well per whiff, too. Maybe the Giants have some clever internal name for this exact statistic.

I’ll leave you to experiment with it from there. But as is normally the case when I take existing stats and contort them past a place where you can easily find them on a FanGraphs leaderboard, I’ve made my own. If you want to see a list of whomps per whiff leaders both for 2023 and for the Statcast era, you can simply click here. Have a fun time exploring the joke statistic that actually seems to be great, and I’ll talk to you again soon.