Jeff McNeil is off to a great start but not for the reason you think

Jeff McNeil is off to a great start, as he’s slashing .360/.422/.520 after 83 PA. Obviously, a small sample and it’s easy to look good when you’ve got a .400 BABIP. Still, many have credited his good start to going back to hitting the ball to all fields after he was trying too hard last year to be a power hitter. Too bad that doesn’t have a shred of truth to it.

In 2021, when McNeil was allegedly looking to pull the ball for power, FanGraphs has him pulling the ball 35% of the time. Here’s what he did each year of his career previously:

2018 – 35.6%
2019 – 46.3%
2020 – 39.8%

Seems funny that he had the worst pull percentage in his career in the season that was ruined because he allegedly was abandoning his style of hitting to all fields in order to pull the ball. But it gets even crazier. This season, when he’s allegedly hitting to all fields, he’s pulling the ball more than he did last year. So far in 2022, McNeil has a 37.9 Pull%.

So, why do people think McNeil is abandoning what he did last year to return to hitting to all fields? Probably for the same reason that they thought Wilmer Flores was a great clutch hitter. You just can’t remember half a dozen plays where Flores drove in a run in a big situation – or McNeil hits a ball to left field – and then ignore everything else the player does.

There’s actually a name for this – it’s the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Wikipedia describes this fallacy as:

“when differences in data are ignored, but similarities are overemphasized. From this reasoning, a false conclusion is inferred.[1] This fallacy is the philosophical or rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which is the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist.”

If it’s not a return to hitting to all fields, what is the source of McNeil’s great start? We’ve already noted that the hits are falling in for McNeil with his .400 BABIP. That’s by far the primary reason for the great start. Last year was so poor because he had just a .280 BABIP, a drop of 62 points from his career rate from 2018-2020.

The next big thing is trading ground balls for line drives. Last year, McNeil had a career-high with a 46.6 GB% along with a career-worst 20.4 LD%. Anecdotally, last year seemed to be one weak groundout after another for McNeil. This year, he has a career-best 26.2 LD% along with a 41.5 GB%, the lowest since his first year in the league. As you probably already know, line drives are the batted balls most likely to result in a hit. Typically, batters hit in the neighborhood of .700 on line drives compared to the low .200s for a ground ball.

FG’s Ben Clemens wrote an article on McNeil last week where he talked about McNeil’s chase rate. In the piece, Clemens broke down the zones into multiple areas and pointed out that McNeil does a terrific job of swinging at pitches just outside of the strike zone, compared to ones which were far outside. It’s a distinction that makes last night’s check swing call against him even harder to justify – McNeil simply doesn’t swing at pitches like that.

At the time of Clemens’ article, McNeil had a 29.1 O-Swing% and it’s since gone up to 31.1%. Still, his career rate is 37.5% so he’s swinging at fewer pitches outside the strike zone. And his Z-Swing% is a career-best 87%. Finally, his Contact% is a career-high 86.1%. These career highs are not head-and-shoulders above what he did previously. But when you start adding one little advantage on top of another – well, it helps explain why things are going so well.

McNeil’s success this year doesn’t have anything to do with a return to a pre-2021 mindset nor does it have anything to do with his position in the batting order, as he’s hitting .345 when batting first or third. Instead, McNeil’s hot start is due to the hits falling in, improved swing selection and more line drives to go along with fewer ground balls.