Breakout candidates in the MLB: the young hitters who could make the leap in 2024 | Top Vip News

See the ball, hit it hard. When you say it like that, it sounds very easy. However, once you face the 90-degree heat in the big leagues, it seems much more difficult.

Young hitters often struggle when they first encounter the polish of a major league pitching staff. It doesn’t mean they can’t understand it, especially if they show some of the skills we want. Especially if they see the ball well and hit it hard.

There are many interesting ways to analyze a player’s ability to discern balls and strikes, but there is a simple one that is pretty solid. If you take how often a player swings at pitches in the strike zone and subtract how much he swings at pitches outside the zone, you get a metric that correlates with future power in a good way. It’s better than simply being super passive on all pitches (which can hurt a player’s power by affecting his ability to get the ball in front), or super aggressive on pitches outside the zone (which can hurt a player’s power). a player because he is hitting balls that generally provide suboptimal results).

Hitting the ball hard is a little easier to evaluate. barrel rate is a great predictor of future power, and maximum exit velocity is a good description of a player’s raw power. They’re also pretty useful stats even in small samples, so we can easily include them in this mix if we’re trying to find young players to break out before they do.

But hitting the ball hard also requires hitting it, so we should have some kind of contact metric in our special sauce. Swinging strike rate is not perfect, especially since it is related to aggression, and the same swinging strike rate can produce different strikeout rates depending on how often the hitter swings, but it gives us a way to take a look at a player’s hitting tool. .

Four metrics (zone minus out-of-zone swing rate, maximum exit velocity, barrel rate, and swing strike rate) in the blender. That should help us understand these young players in terms of their plate discipline, their raw power and play, and their hitting tool, to some extent.

Let’s look at all the players under the age of 25 from last season adding up their relative quality in these four statistics and then eliminate all the players who have already stood out. That’s the most subjective part of this exercise, but it also prevents us from looking at Juan Soto, Julio Rodríguez and Gunnar Henderson when looking for breakouts.

Here are those players, sorted by their combined score across all four stats (judged by z-scores). We’ve color-coded the stats so you can get an idea of ​​how they stack up against their peers.

Oh man. Tell your friends. Elly De La Cruz is a young player who could stand out this year. I heard it here first.

Jokes aside, there are still plenty of interesting young bats on this list. Let’s highlight some of them. Last year, this company allowed him to obtain Lars Nootbaar, Isaac Paredes and Riley Greene. Let’s hope this season is just as fortuitous.

After hitting 31 home runs and being about 7 percent better than league average with the stick last season, Torkelson at least announced himself as a regular power threat. As a former No. 1 overall pick, he also stayed off ignominious lists in the future. But to join the elite ranks at his position, he’ll need to take it a step further and add the ability to get on base more regularly (if not defend better early).

He walked 14 percent of the time in the minors and has an above-average zone swing rate and below-average chase rate. That’s a pretty pristine eye that should lead to a walk rate of over 9.8 percent, especially now that pitchers are starting to fear his power more. The big difference between his rookie and sophomore seasons was an improved ability to convert his raw power into playing power, which was primarily accomplished by shooting more (47.7 percent in 2023, 42.2 percent in 2022). but also hitting the ball in the air more (46.8 percent). in 2023, 40.7 percent in 2022). Fly balls are the most rewarded ball in play in the big leagues, so it’s a good move.

The only question is how much juice is left to squeeze. Hitters slugged .180 on pitches with a launch angle greater than 35 degrees, and only 12 hitters hit more balls at those angles than Torkelson last year. He slugged .200 on those pitches. Most likely, he shouldn’t try to aim higher. He was 17th in pull rate, so maybe he could make some incremental change there, but not much.

What if he just did what he did last year with more walks and better luck? He had a .269 batting average on balls in play and a .233 average. Statcast suggests that he could have posted a .251 batting average despite hitting so many balls in the air. However, his home park is difficult. Look at all those long outs in Detroit:

Torkelson was in the top ten in starts over 375 feet last season, and the park was a part of that. It’s fair to think that he might walk more and that he’ll get a few more hits, but it might also be fair to wonder if hitting .250 with 35 home runs is his ceiling.

The name of the game is consistency for Suwinski. His barrel rate was in the top ten among qualified hitters, his top exit velocity was in the top 30, and his hard hit rate was in the top 50, so he hits the ball hard. Despite his concerns about his strikeout rate, he was near average in zone swing rate while also showing a top-10 ability to avoid swinging at balls outside the zone. It’s all there except consistency: he had a .920 OPS in his best three months and a .680 OPS in the other three.

Maybe I should shoot the ball more? Among players with above-average power (judging by isolated slugging percentage), Suwinski served the ball at a below-average rate. Pulled hard contact outperforms opposing hard contact by a wide margin. And it seems like his overall production (blue) went up and down along with his pull rate (red), as this moving graph from FanGraphs seems to suggest.

“I want to stay tight and compact, and make a small, powerful turn with my engine,” Suwinksi told me late last season. “I want to keep a cool head so I can see the ball as much as I can and as well as I can. “I want to stay aggressive and combine my mental approach with my physical approach and the scouting report.”

That seems to speak to the difficulty of wanting to make more contact and be a complete player, while also wanting to be able to spin, burn and shoot for power. But, hidden within all the ebbs and flows of Suwinksi’s 2023 season was the fact that if he could make those game-to-game and month-to-month adjustments a little faster, he could avoid the lows that plagued his season. (and his batting average) to more modest levels.

At age 25, with 906 plate appearances in the rearview mirror, Suwinski could be ready to put it all together for an All-Star season.

There is no doubt that Álvarez has great power. He has more raw power as evidenced by his 114.1 mph, and last year he took advantage of that power with 25 home runs. When looking at his minor league numbers and the promise he showed as a prospect, the big questions are obvious. Can he reduce his strikeout rate? Can he show more patience? Is there another level to power?

The former questions are probably more important than the latter, since he hit more home runs than any catcher not named Cal Raleigh. Adding a little more patience and contact could make him one of the two or three best offensive catchers in the game, even with his demonstrated power, instead of a guy who hits a lot of home runs while hitting .209 with a suboptimal on-base percentage. . .

Viewed through the lens of swinging aggressively in the zone (just above league average) and not swinging at balls (just below average), he has a decent foundation. The next step is to let go of pitches that you don’t do much with. With a cursory glance at his FanGraphs heatmaps, an old question arises from his scouting reports. Do you have any gaps up in the area? Look at where he swings fastballs (left) and where he hurts (right), and it looks like there might be something here.

The good news is that Alvarez slugged 1.000 in September with pitches up and in and pitchers adjusted, instead of trying to hit high and middle and avoiding his nitro zone. That means Alvarez isn’t terrible all over the top of the zone, and pitchers have been forced to adopt a tougher approach. Given his good eye, this late-season adjustment by the 22-year-old receiver could be the key to reaching a positive answer to the three questions inspired by his good debut.

Aggression is a funny thing. Without it, it’s difficult to pull the ball, especially in the air, and both of these things lead to power. With too much, a player tends to strike out too much, not walk, and often hits the ball on the ground toward the shooting side. That’s why major league hitters talk about selective aggression all the time. It’s also a fine line that Morel walks regularly.

No hitter reached 400 plate appearances and got the ball out more than Morel last season. Only 16 batters struck out more than Morel. It seems like he is too aggressive right? But his swing rate was just third in the league, and his chase rate was close to league average. It seems like he is selectively aggressive and maybe just lacking some hitting skills.

But the month-to-month splits suggest there’s still another level for Morel to unlock when it comes to finding the right level of selective aggression.

What he was doing in June and September appears to be the most sustainable approach for him: modest, non-league-leading aggression that leads to good, but not league-leading, draw rates. The good news is that his swing rates for August (left) and September (right) show that he has some adjustability in his approach and is looking for the right strategy.

In August I was pulling everything because I was swinging at everything that was high and tight. In September, she moved that oscillating heat map to a really good place, with just a little weakness down and away. Experience will help you find the Goldilocks approach and reach the next level.

(Photo by Francisco Álvarez: Brad Penner / USA Today)