Enjoyable With Arbitrary Statistics | FanGraphs Baseball

There are quite a lot of nice statistics in baseball nowadays. They measure all the things! Swing path tilt? Contact level towards heart of mass? Exit velocity? Hard-hit price on reverse subject line drives? You can get a report on any of these issues on the wave of some fingers. Expected wOBA? Barrel price? There are acronyms and stat blends and projection aggregates for days. It’s evaluation paralysis; the exhausting half isn’t discovering stats to explain hitters, however determining which of them to not use.

I don’t have a foolproof methodology for seeing by all of the noise for you. But I do have a enjoyable experiment in find out how to work with statistics in such an awesome surroundings. I wish to recommend a technique that I name, These Things Are Good. Basically, it boils all the way down to this: Come up with some statistics that you simply suppose are good with out pre-determining which gamers you’re in search of, measure how good all the league is at your statistics in query, and see what shakes out.

How ought to we do that in follow? I began by saying that I believe pulling the ball while you hit it within the air is nice. That offers me the primary statistic I care about: air pull price. I turned that into customary deviations for each participant in baseball in order that we might evaluate apples to apples throughout a number of statistics, then began in search of who the standouts have been throughout all classes.

Air pull price is good, but it surely’s actually not the one statistic that I’m focused on. Next, I wished guys who hit the ball exhausting once they put it within the air. After all, exit velocity issues much more when batters can elevate. I did the identical factor and put that in z-score phrases through customary deviations. If you’re questioning what sorts of hitters these two classes establish, Kyle Schwarber, Griffin Conine, and Junior Caminero are the highest three.

I’d like energy, however I additionally hate grounders rolled over to the pull aspect, so my subsequent class was an inverse one: proportion of grounders that aren’t pulled. Schwarber, for instance, pulls his grounders at an enormous clip, 2.55 customary deviations greater than league common. Now Caminero exhibits up because the hitter who most exemplifies the abilities I’m in search of – great harm within the air, exhausting to shift towards on the bottom. Conine and Jorge Barrosa spherical out the rostrum amongst batters with 150 or extra plate appearances, for the document.

That coated all of the contact high quality I used to be focused on taking a look at, however I can’t in good conscience provide you with a filter for good hitters and ignore plate self-discipline. In maintaining with the statistics I’d picked up to now, all of which deal with course of as a substitute of outcomes, I added two extra course of plate self-discipline statistics. First, I checked out swing price on pitches over the guts of the plate. Corey Seager is the most effective hitter in baseball at this explicit talent – SEAGER and all. Jeff McNeil and Ozzie Albies are nice too. But for instance of why coronary heart swing price isn’t good, take into account Ezequiel Tovar. He measures out very effectively by coronary heart swing proportion – however that’s as a result of he swings at completely all the things.

Thus, I additionally added swing price on pitches nowhere close to the plate, within the chase and waste zones. I inverted this one as effectively; fewer swings at unhealthy pitches is best. Tovar, for instance, swings at pitches within the chase and waste zones 2.3 customary deviations extra typically than league common – abysmal. Seager swings at pitches within the chase and waste zones much less than common – masterful.

These 5 stats have been sufficient for me, so I first got down to see who’s above common in all of them. Bo Naylor and Max Schuemann have completed each in tiny samples. Four gamers have managed it in affordable taking part in time: Tim Tawa, Zack Gelof, Tyler Soderstrom, and Matt Olson.

That’s a wierd listing, and it exhibits one weak point of this primary means of taking a look at issues. If you simply ask for a binary sure/no, you’ll get guys who’re ever so barely above common in these abilities. But that’s probably not the mark of an amazing participant. Great gamers both do many issues at a well-above-average degree, or do quite a lot of issues OK and have one standout carrying device. Tawa, for instance, is an eighth of a typical deviation above common for air pull price, an eighth of a typical deviation above common for air exit velocity, and 0.03 customary deviations above common in unhealthy swing price (above right here being the great means). Technically, he’s above common at all the things. But in follow, he’s principally common at all the things, and people two issues aren’t the identical.

Gelof, Soderstrom, and Olson every have issues to suggest them. They all elevate and pull the ball with pressure, with higher numbers than Tawa there, they usually all even have strong plate self-discipline. But I would like my metric to point out how good gamers are at a talent, not simply whether or not they’re above common, so I made a decision so as to add up all the usual deviations in order that I might account for magnitude.

In doing so, I needed to decide about how closely to weight every talent. I don’t suppose it’s truthful to say that every is equally vital. Hitting the ball exhausting, for instance, is way more correlated with success than not pulling it on the bottom. So I made a number of commonsense changes to the weightings, like so:

The “Inverted?” column simply notes whether or not greater is best; “No” means the next z-score is best, “Yes” signifies that I flipped them earlier than utilizing them. Why these explicit weights? Eh, as a result of they make sense to me. But that’s not all that rigorous, so I additionally checked the correlation between this statistic and wRC+ for varied weights of every statistic. This mix is fairly good! It’s the most effective I might discover with out simply operating some sort of solver to maximise r-squared. But these weights clarify 25% of the variation in wRC+, which is fairly good, and in addition double the quantity of variation defined by equal weights, so I made a decision that these are adequate for me.

Here’s a fast rundown of how I picked these weights. I first decided that hitting the ball exhausting needed to be the largest weight and set that at 2.0. For me, not swinging at unhealthy pitches is second-most vital, so I made a decision that needed to be the one different weight above 1.0. I personally favor air-pull guys over tough-to-shift groundball sorts, so I made that the third-most-important weight, tied with coronary heart swing price, which additionally appeals to me. (An preliminary minimize of this had coronary heart swing price decrease. I’m not sure what’s finest, and once more, it is a very unscientific course of.) Finally, not hitting pulled grounders issues, but it surely doesn’t matter that a lot until you’re terrible at it, so I gave it the bottom weight.

The finest hitter in baseball based mostly on this very particular means of measuring issues? That’d be Munetaka Murakami. He does the 2 abilities I discover most vital – crushing the ball within the air and never swinging at unhealthy pitches – extraordinarily effectively, and whereas he’s not nice on the different three abilities I listed, he’s not killing himself there both:

That desk appears lonely, although. Let’s add the subsequent 9 gamers (min. 300 plate appearances right here, I used to be selecting minimums considerably arbitrarily all through the method):

There are quite a lot of superb hitters on this listing. In truth, it matches the traditional rule {that a} good statistic is 80% stuff you already knew and 20% surprises completely; this listing is seven 2026 All-Stars, Ronald Acuña Jr., after which two guys who you may not have thought of even as soon as this 12 months.

Plenty of ink has been spilled about Torkelson’s lengthy and winding main league profession. Suffice it to say that the abilities that made him the primary general draft decide in 2020 are just like the sorts of abilities that get you on this listing. I’m extra focused on Hernández, although, so the rest of this text is much less about this interesting-yet-fundamentally-unscientific methodology of discovering good gamers, and extra about one of many good gamers I discovered.

Hernández has been a participant of word since 2020, when he was traded from Texas to Tampa Bay within the Nathaniel Lowe deal. He was a Top 100 Prospect for us on the time, and after a convoluted path by the minors, he debuted for the Marlins in 2025 with a strong season, placing up 1.3 WAR and a 118 wRC+ in 87 video games. He scuffled to begin the 2026 season and briefly returned to Triple-A, however since returning, he’s performed his means into an on a regular basis position. He’s hitting .250/.314/.529 since his May 7 call-up, good for a 126 wRC+, and has been probably the greatest hitters on the Marlins as they’ve surged again into playoff rivalry after a tough 12-game skid final month.

It’s not exhausting to know why Hernández is succeeding this 12 months. As I’ve already specified by the premise of this text, he principally does all of the issues that I like hitters to do: He chases lower than common, swings at pitches within the zone greater than common, and does loads of harm when he connects.

You’ll in all probability discover that I left one key a part of hitting out when developing my method: Making contact. I did that as a result of I couldn’t consider an amazing contact quantity to make use of, and in addition as a result of I don’t suppose it’s notably correlated to general success after you’ve already managed for issues like making good swing choices and hitting the ball exhausting while you join. Hernández is an efficient instance of what I imply right here. He’s developing empty pretty typically when he provides; Baseball Savant has him within the sixth percentile for whiff price. But, effectively, Schwarber is within the fifth percentile for whiff price. Kurtz is within the first percentile. Plenty of the superb energy hitters recognized by this methodology swing and miss rather a lot; they only take good swings and hit the ball exhausting once they make contact.

Hernández is effectively on his technique to doing simply that. His persistence isn’t in query; he posted double-digit stroll charges in yearly of his minor league profession. But when he was putting out 30% of the time within the minors, it was straightforward to think about how this would possibly all fail. In 2022, he posted a 31.4% strikeout price in High-A; that’s not the sort of line that interprets effectively towards massive league opposition.

As it seems, although, a change in strategy was all he wanted. That model of Hernández was too passive; his 42% swing price was means under massive league common, and he posted numbers in that vary in 2021 and 2023 as effectively. Since then, he’s develop into much less selective, chasing extra but in addition getting extra high-value swings off. His swing price climbed to 46% in Triple-A in 2024, 45% within the majors in 2025, and 46% within the majors this 12 months.

There are good and unhealthy methods to extend your swing price, however Hernández did it the great means. He’s nonetheless fairly affected person outdoors the zone, however he’s swinging at strikes extra typically. He’s not making an unbelievable quantity of contact towards these strikes – his 78.6% zone contact price is eight proportion factors under common. But he’s swinging sufficient, and with sufficient pressure, that pitchers can’t simply chuck it down the center early within the depend after which spam secondaries late.

Another mind-set about it: You can’t management the place pitchers throw you the ball, however you’ll be able to actually give them incentives. Hernández’s outdated mixture of low contact and low in-zone swing charges made pitchers’ jobs comparatively straightforward; he wasn’t going to chase, however he in all probability additionally wasn’t going to take early swings at pitches within the strike zone. Now, although, the incentives are complicated. He swings greater than common at pitches over the guts of the plate, and even when he misses a number of, tossing cookies to a man with Eightieth-percentile bat pace and a penchant for lifting and pulling is a foul thought. On the opposite hand, he doesn’t chase rather a lot, and if he will get forward within the depend, he’ll particularly look to do harm. It’s a troublesome spot for opposing arms.

This isn’t a mode of hitting that simply anybody can undertake. Hitters with much less energy on contact would discover themselves overwhelmed by a stream of pitches within the strike zone. Hitters with out Hernández’s wonderful sense of the strike zone would drown in sliders under the zone. But he’s sitting in a contented medium proper now; the apparent options towards him principally aren’t working. Even along with his bottom-shelf contact price, he’s been wonderful since returning to the majors, and from my perspective, he is likely to be even higher than his outcomes. Neat discovering for a really foolish, very advert hoc statistic that I believe nonetheless captures quite a lot of the most effective hitters in baseball – a bunch that Heriberto Hernández is likely to be part of.