Wednesday catch-all thread (8/7/24)

Everyone talks about how Jeff McNeil has done here since the All-Star break. And looking at things from that point maximizes his OPS. But McNeil’s turnaround started before that. He’s stated that he’s looking to hit the ball hard and no longer trying to guide it to an open spot for a hit. Hallelujah! It’s been obvious to me since the end of the 2019 season that was the path that McNeil should be on. Sometimes athletes are the last ones to know what makes them good. Earlier this year, broadcaster Keith Hernandez relayed that McNeil felt like the way to break out of his slump was to hit more ground balls. Oy!

Anyway, since the break, McNeil has a 1.139 OPS. But he had already started to focus on hitting the ball hard before that. If we go back to July 4, McNeil has a .321/.366/.643 slash line in 93 PA with a .304 BABIP. And while that’s .130 points below his OPS since the break, we see what types of numbers he can produce with a “normal” BABIP when he focuses on hitting the ball hard.

Sadly, McNeil has teased us with this type of production before. There was his closing stretch in 2019, where in his final 187 PA, he notched a .279/.358/.582 line. That .940 OPS was achieved despite a .258 BABIP. Then there was last season, where after posting a .648 OPS with an .074 ISO in his first 100 games, McNeil closed the year with an .815 OPS and a .161 ISO in his final 240 PA. He turned on the ball in both of those stretches, yet went back to his slap-hitting ways later.

Will this time be different?

Let’s hope so. Perhaps the light bulb has finally gone on for McNeil. Here’s what he told reporters after his 2-HR game on July 19: “Your swing gets a little messed up when you try to guide the ball. Lately, I’ve been trying to hit the ball wherever it’s pitched and hit it hard.”

McNeil’s not as strong as some of his teammates, so his Exit Velocities won’t overwhelm you. But Statcast has a new metric this year called, “Squared-Up %” and McNeil is in the 84th percentile in that category. Here’s the Squared-Up definition:

A swing’s squared-up rate tells us how much of the highest possible exit velocity available (based on the physics related to the swing speed and pitch speed) a batter was able to obtain – it is, at its simplest, how much exit velocity did you get as a share of how much exit velocity was possible based on your swing speed and the speed of the pitch. A swing that is 60% squared up, for example, tells you that the batter attained 60% of the maximum possible exit velocity available to him, again based on the speed of the swing and pitch.

Data observation has told us that it’s only possible to attain that maximum possible exit velocity when a ball hits the sweet spot of the bat, approximately 4 to 9 inches from the head of the bat. Therefore, comparing the exit velocity observed with the exit velocity theoretically possible can tell us a great deal about how well the batter squared the ball up. Any particular swing can range from 0% squared up to 100% squared up.

For Statcast purposes, any swing that is at least 80% squared up is considered to have been “a squared-up swing.”

Since July 4, McNeil has 49 squared-up swings, just one fewer than Shohei Ohtani – despite having 30 fewer PA in this stretch – and the 41st-most in the majors. In the first month of 2024, here’s what batters did when they squared-up the ball: .371 BA // .656 SLG // .438 wOBA // 60% hard-hit rate // +11.4 run value per 100.

We know that some players are very receptive to advanced metrics and others aren’t. My hope is that McNeil is open to getting this type of data. Because if he is, he’ll never go back to being a slap hitter.