Swings and Takes: The Foul Pole Paredes

The 2024 trade deadline was considered disappointing by some fans, as even though a lot of trades were made, no true stars were moved. Arguably the best pitcher moved at the trade deadline in terms of 2024 performance to date was Jack Flaherty, traded from the Detroit Tigers to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who posted a 4.99 ERA across 144.1 innings in 2023. On the hitter side, arguably the best hitter moved at the deadline was Isaac Paredes, who has the best wRC+ among qualified hitters traded at the deadline from 2023-2024 (ranks 2nd at 131, between Christian Yelich and Seiya Suzuki). This week we want to dive into Paredes, as he is arguably the most interesting hitter in baseball right now. Despite his massive production over the last two years that has him ranked among the best hitters in baseball, Statcast's expected statistics tell another story. Understanding what Paredes is doing, and trying to understand how that will translate to his new North Side digs, may teach us something about hitting that we have been overlooking. 

 

The Foul Pole Paredes

To understand the basic conundrum that Paredes presents for baseball analysts, here is a table that shows some of Paredes’ production statistics (what he has done) versus his expected stats (based largely on batted ball data as well as batted ball frequency):

Paredes Production vs. Expected Stats 2023-2024

The numbers here are staggering: Paredes does not hit the ball hard (2^nd percentile among qualified hitters in 2024), he swings slow (8^th percentile) and does not compensate for that lack of bat speed with a direct path to the ball (4^th percentile). Yet Paredes has succeeded, and succeeded as a power hitter. It is one thing if we are talking about Luis Arraez here, who succeeds despite not hitting the ball hard in a way that is easy to grasp, as he never strikes out, sprays the ball to gaps, and generally is a profile type we have seen before as a high average/no power hitter who is very good at hitting. 

Paredes is something else because despite not doing things that other power hitters do, he succeeds as a power hitter, hitting 47 HRs over the past two seasons to date (with 2 months of season remaining) and slugging .459, in line with Adolis García and right above Teoscar Hernández (.456). One thing you may notice is that Paredes’ power has generally gone in the direction of his expected metrics this season, as his slugging percentage is down 61 points along with his exit velocity being down 2.1 MPH on average and Barrel/PA being down 0.4%, but he is still far outperforming his expected slugging and xwOBA numbers. 

The first step into investigating why Paredes to date has been such an outlier is to understand how these expected stats are calculated in the first place. When we reference expected stats, these statistics (such as xOBA, xBA) are calculated largely through using combinations of launch angle, exit velocity and sprint speed to predict the outcomes of individual batted balls. These individual play predictions are then combined into larger production predictions put onto the same scale as statistics we are familiar with (such as batting average and slugging percentage) for easy comparison. These statistics, as we can see from the MLB glossary on xOBA for example, are more predictive of future production than actual production numbers (such as BA and wOBA) because they strip a lot of the batted ball variance out of the equation for measuring hitter skill. 

Now that we have an understanding of the metrics we are evaluating Paredes with, the next step is to look at what kind of hitter Paredes is and why he may be defying his expected metrics in ways that other hitters do not. Paredes at the plate does four things exceptionally well: make contact, draw walks, elevate the ball, and pull the ball.

On the plate discipline end, Paredes is truly one of the best in baseball: his strikeout rate over the past 2 years has sat between the 74^th percentile and 82nd percentile, while his walk rate has been between the 72^nd percentile in 2023 and 88^th percentile so far in 2024. He chases outside the strike zone at about an average rate and swings in the zone at about an average rate, but because he very rarely swings and misses (88^th percentile whiff rate) and fouls off an above-average rate of pitches (21.3% foul strike rate in 2024 compared to 18.2% MLB average) he can turn most PAs into batted balls or walks. 

When Paredes does put the ball in play, it is almost always in the air: his ground ball rate has fluctuated between roughly 29-31% over the past two seasons, and his 30.7% rate is the second lowest among all qualified hitters from 2023-2024, only behind Mookie Betts (27.6%) and right ahead of Aaron Judge (30.8%). That air contact is also generally the most valuable kind of air contact: pulled. Over the same period Paredes has the highest pull rate in baseball (54.2%). 

Just saying that Paredes pulls a lot of balls in the air does not quite tell the story however, as even with pulled fly balls you generally must hit them hard to get them out of the park. Paredes does not hit his fly balls particularly hard, as you may guess from his overall batted ball data, as his pulled fly ball exit velocity has gone from 1.6 MPH below league-average in 2023 to 3.7 MPH below league-average in 2024. These are not marks that portray a power hitter, as for example Paredes' average EV in 2024 is in line with Brayan Rocchio and Jacob Young, who have a combined 5 HRs in 2024 to date. The best way to illustrate how Paredes is truly doing this is through an extra base hits spray chart over the past two years (with Tropicana Field as the park represented):

Now we are getting somewhere: out of Paredes’ 93 extra base hits over the past 2 seasons, 5 doubles represent the only ones that are to the right of second base. More importantly, it is instructive to see how tightly bunched his HRs (pink dots) are to the left field line. Paredes is not just trying to pull the ball: he is ideally trying to pull the ball as close to the left field line as possible, where the distance to hit a ball out of the park is shorter. 

Jarrett Seidler of Baseball Prospectus is one of the prominent public analysts who believe that Paredes represents a flaw in how MLBAM calculates expected statistics, where they do not account for horizontal spray angle (where the ball is headed from left to right), only how high and how hard. Tom Tango, the head architect of these statistics for MLB, has consistently argued that adding spray angle does not improve the predictive power of expected statistics. It is possible Tango is right on the aggregate that adding horizontal spray angle does not generally improve the predictive accuracy of expected metrics and that Seidler is right on horizontal spray angle mattering in edge cases, such as Paredes. Paredes is an outlier because of how extreme he is in pulling the ball down the line, and this is possibly why he breaks expected statistics from Statcast. This HR on 4/14 against Kai-Wei Teng of the Giants on 4/14 is the platonic ideal of an Isaac Paredes swing:

Here is the rub for Paredes now: in being traded to the Cubs, his home park is now the field with the longest distances to the lines (355 ft) in baseball, compared to the @Paredes Friendly Confines at Tropicana Field (Isaac did not stick around in TB long enough to get that trademarked) of 315 ft down the line. Here is a similar extra base hit chart to the one above, but superimposed onto Wrigley instead:

As we can see from the chart, Wrigley should dampen Paredes’ super powers to some extent on the HRs directly down the left field. By xHRs, if Paredes played every one of his games at Wrigley over the past two seasons, he would be expected to hit 36 HRs, compared to the 47 he has actually hit. In contrast, if the Rays played an all-home schedule, Paredes would have been expected to hit 51 HRs over the past two seasons. These are massive differences and serve to illustrate the challenges Paredes may face at Wrigley. 

The possible negative impact of Wrigley's dimensions on Paredes' foul pole scrapping HRs, combined with the fact that Paredes’ power is already down by expected and production metrics in 2024 compared to 2023, may cause us to lower our expectations for Paredes’ power production moving forward. He may end up as a 15-20 HR guy by 2025, as opposed to the 31 he hit in 2023 and the roughly 25 he is on pace for so far in 2024. 

It is possible that Paredes makes an adjustment to his new park to be more of a hitter to gun for BA at the expense of power, but the downside of having a profile like Paredes, focused narrowly on maximizing one skill, is that it makes it harder to pivot. Paredes likely is not going to magically start hitting the ball significantly harder or gain significant bat speed (although that is more possible than ever these days with hitting laboratories), so his pathways to power production are very narrow. 

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