Swings and Takes: Big Swings, Better Takes

Stop me if you have heard this before, but scouting and player evaluation are very difficult. This is especially true in what could colloquially be called the Player Development Renaissance, in which players and organizations no longer accept player limitations in the way they used to. There are better tools and higher levels of human capital investments in improving performance than ever before. This landscape means that scouting reports on players expire faster than ever. This has been demonstrated on the pitching side recently by Paul Skenes. Skenes, the number one overall pick by the Pirates out of LSU, came into professional baseball with a lot of buildup but also some questions regarding his fastball shape/effectiveness. He has made those questions close to irrelevant by developing a “Splinker”, a 94 MPH hybrid between a sinker and splitter that has become the second best splitter in baseball so far by RV/100 pitches (4.4), only behind Nick Sandlin. Today we are diving deep into a hitter who has done his own about-face, defying a scouting report that he consistently validated throughout most of his career to date.

Ryan O'Barrels 

Ryan O'Hearn had a pretty simple scouting report when he first entered the Major Leagues with the Royals: plus-plus power, hit hard consistently, walked at an above-average rate, limited by lack of contact ability, platoon concerns, and lack of defensive or baserunning value. After a great debut, hitting .262/.353/.597 with a 153 wRC+ in 2018, O'Hearn spent the next 4 seasons looking like he may have a short MLB career, as his highest wRC+ from 2019-2022 was 71 in 2022. First basemen that produce 30-35 percent below league average offensively are not a hot commodity, and O'Hearn was DFA’d in the 2023 offseason by the Royals. 

It seemed like on the surface the right move after 4 years of non-performance, but the Orioles saw an opportunity, and were able to acquire him in January for cash considerations. O'Hearn did one thing consistently great: hit the ball hard. His hard-hit rate, even from 2019-2022, was always around 7 percent or better than league average, fluctuating between 43%-48% where the league average is around 36%, leading his xWOBACON (expected wOBA on contact) to always vastly outpace his wOBA. In a platoon role for the Orioles in 2023, O'Hearn’s results finally lived up to those expected numbers, as his hard-hit rate reached a career high (51.5%), right below Mike Trout on the leaderboards (51.9%), which along with a career low K rate (22.3%) lead to a .289/.322/.480 triple slash line. 

O'Hearn at this point was largely the same guy he had been for most of his career, with slight improvements across the board leading to career best performance, but 2024 has been a different animal: O'Hearn has kept his power while performing as one of the best contact hitters in all of baseball. O'Hearn’s strikeout rate, at 10.2%, is third best in baseball among all hitters with at least 200 PAs, only behind Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan and right ahead of Mookie Betts and Nico Hoerner. O’Hearn being on a contact list with those guys does not make sense within the context of the rest of his career, as he has always been a guy to strike out well above 20% of the time.

Often when a hitter makes a change this drastic in profile there is a noticeable swing change behind it, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. Here are two O’Hearn single swings, one from 2023 and one from 2024:

O’Hearn Swings

 

 

The order of the GIFs here is flipped, with the top swing being from 2024 and the bottom being from 2023. The point here is there is no drastic difference (at least that we noticed) that portends a guy cutting his strikeout rate by over half. With the swing being almost identical, it is time to dig into the approach, and O'Hearn has stacked some changes here together that have translated to transformative performance change.

The first thing we are looking at is O'Hearn’s overall plate discipline. Here is a table from Baseball Savant showing O'Hearn’s plate discipline numbers over his career:

 

O’Hearn Plate Discipline:

The first number that really stands out here is O'Hearn’s chase rate. After years of chasing over 30% of pitches outside the strike zone O’Hearn has been very disciplined in this regard in 2024. His 23.6 Chase% ranks in the 75^th percentile out of all hitters. He is trading some in-zone swings from 2023 to chase less outside the zone, although this is not dramatically out of line with the rest of his career. O'Hearn’s whiff rate has gone the way of his chase rate, cutting almost 5% from his 2023 rate, and this is likely very correlated with his chase rate; he is chasing less so he is whiffing less. We are about to dig a little deeper into this and break this down by pitch type to see where O'Hearn’s improvement has come from:

O’Hearn Results by Pitch:

O'Hearn subtly started this process in 2023 by cutting down his whiffs on breaking balls (down from 33% to 29.4%) but his 2024 K reduction has largely come from fastballs. O'Hearn has gone from a hitter who whiffed at roughly 19% of fastballs he swung at to 12% so far in 2024. O'Hearn saw a ton of four-seam fastballs in 2023, at 33.2%, compared to 10.5% sinkers, and that has generally stayed true in 2024, at 29.3% four-seam and 13.9% sinkers. This makes sense when you consider O'Hearn almost exclusively sees right-handed pitching, and the current data-backed trend in pitch usage in the 2020s is to throw four-seams to opposite handed hitters and sinkers to same-handed hitters. Thus O'Hearn cutting his whiff rate against four-seams from 17.4% to 9.3% is much more important than cutting his sinker whiff rate from 20.3% to 11.8%. That four-seam whiff rate cut is another trend that started in 2023 and continued to this season:

O’Hearn Fastball Whiff Rates by Year:

 

Along with pitch type, location is another factor to consider. This chart on O'Hearn chase rate by fastball type is the start of putting this puzzle together:

O’Hearn Fastball Chase Rate by Year:

We have gold here, as O'Hearn has cut his Four-seam chase rate from 31.9% to 18.1% from 2023-2024. To further confirm our hypothesis here, let’s look at all the fastballs O'Hearn swung and missed at from 2022-2023, and then 2024:

O’Hearn Fastball Swing and Miss Strike Zone Chart 2022-2023

 

O’Hearn Fastball Swing and Miss Strike Zone Chart 2024

 

This makes sense: O'Hearn was prone to chasing four-seams above the zone from 2022-2023, and when he did he usually missed them. O'Hearn has dialed this back in a massive way in 2024, not chasing up there and subsequently not missing nearly as often up above the zone. This is a case of renewed plate discipline leading to dramatically different results, as pitchers are no longer able to exploit the weak point that they had previously gone to before 2023.

Before we assume that this is entirely the new O'Hearn, we should share a chart from a different hitter who saw a similar dramatic decrease in strikeout rate in 2022, from 23.6% in 2022 to 11.4% in 2023, only to go back to 23.9% in 2024. This hitter also saw this whiff rate dramatically decrease largely through swinging and missing at less fastballs, especially up in the zone:

Ronald Acuna Whiff Rate by Fastball Type:

 

Ronald Acuna Chase Rate by Fastball Type:

 

Yes as some of you may have guessed this is the reigning MVP, Ronald Acuña, who won the MVP largely by refusing to strike out while maintaining his power, before unfortunately tearing his ACL this season. Before Acuña's injury, he was regressing back to his pre-2023 levels of swing and miss at fastballs. One key difference though, as you can see in the chase rate. Acuña's swing and miss changes were less driven by a plate discipline change than just a general change in contact ability. This may translate to O'Hearn’s whiff rate and strikeout rate change being slightly more sustainable than Acuña's. O'Hearn has made some real changes that could lead to better strikeout results moving forward, although it would be a better bet to expect some regression toward career norms for the rest of 2024 and moving forward.

Quick Hits:

• Christopher Morel has had a poor start to 2024 by results, as he is slashing .202/.304/.386 while fielding poorly enough to put his future infield eligibility into question. Under the hood, however, he has made some process improvements at the plate, making more contact in the zone (76.6% compared to 72.0% in 2023), chasing a good amount less (24.8% from 28.9%) and whiffing a lot less (29.5% from 37%) while continuing to swing at Meatballs (81.1% from 78.3%). Not everything has been good, as his barrel percentage has gone from elite to above average (76^th percentile from 95^th) and he is hitting a ton of popups (11.5% from 7.4%). In composite this looks like a hitter that is slightly off, timing wise, but is maturing in his third year and could have a big second half at the plate.
• Kyle Schwarber was a walking 3 true outcomes billboard from 2022-2023, leading all hitters in SOs (415), ranking second in HRs (93) and BBs (212). He is still largely that guy so far in 2024, tied for third in SOs (94) third in BBs (56), and tied for thirteenth in HRs (17), but his BA (.258) along with xBA (.254) are the best they have been since his best MLB season in 2021. Schwarber has made a few process changes: he has flattened out a little bit, taking his average LA down to 15.1 degrees compared to around 19 from 2022-2023, hit the ball hard more often than ever (54.7% hard hit rate), and ambushed both first pitches (27.0%) along with Meatballs (78.4% Meatball Swing%) more than he did from 2022-2023. Schwarber will never be confused with Steven Kwan, but any marginal gains in making his non-HR contact useful can exponentially increase his overall value given his entrenched ability to slug and walk.

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