Crushing Heaters

Let’s talk about the hard stuff. Fastballs, that is. Because what was true 50 years ago, is still true today. But the splendid one put it best:

“You have to hit the fastball to play in the big leagues.”

– Ted Williams

If you want to have any chance against the whiffle ball cheese currently being thrown by the modern game’s spin-rate savants, you’ll first have to deal with the unprecedented amount of fire in the velocity game. Simply put, if you can’t smoke the heaters, good luck with all of the rest.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the batters having the most success against four-seamers and sinkers in 2021, and what it might mean for the rest of the season.

First Pulls

We’ll be looking at players who’ve seen at least 150 four-seamers or sinkers in 2021 but first let’s take a moment to glance at the rest. Or, at least, the players who’ve seen at least 50 pitches of either, just to check in on who has been burning their heaters early.

Among these small-sample stars, here are the top-20 run values (per 100 pitches) versus four-seamers and sinkers. Included are their percentile ranks (if they qualified) for ISO, SLG, wOBA, xwOBA, wOBA (on contact), and xwOBA (on contact):

 

Alex Kirilloff only has 70 PA in the big leagues entering Friday’s action but has already shown some of the pop in his bat, hitting four home runs and five doubles, with a .500 SLG and .258 ISO in his initial stint in the majors. If proving you can handle the heat is the first test a rookie takes, consider Kirilloff having valedictorian aspirations.

Facing 34% four-seamers so far, he’s posted a .500 ISO and .875 SLG, with a .518 wOBA and.630 wOBAcon, and if qualified, his 8.4 RV per 100 pitches would lead all hitters. Not that we expect the 23-year-old to keep up the pace of his initial small sample but to put in context the quality of his early rate, consider that Freddie Freeman and Marcell Ozuna tied for the lead in RV/100 against four-seamers in 2020, at 6.6 RV/100.

Kirilloff missed nearly three weeks with a wrist injury but has gotten right back to business since returning last week, slashing .292/.346 /375 over 26 PA. While he hasn’t gone yard, he does have two doubles and has collected multiple hits in three of his six games back. He’s been a top prospect for a while but seeing him come up smashing fastballs and hitting for power makes that pedigree seem all the more real. You’re not going to get him in dynasty without giving up a haul but those in redraft leagues may want to target him in a trade before he goes on another homer binge.

From one Twin to another. But first, can someone please tell me how much money these baseballs must owe Byron Buxton? Because the punishment he dished out on them (before hitting an inevitable IL stint) says they owe him something. If you have trouble finding Buxton on the above chart, just look for the 100’s across the board that represents a .640 ISO, 1.120 SLG, .675 wOBA, .602 xwOBA, .933 wOBAcon, and .819 xwOBAcon. Seriously, those are real numbers.

Since the start of 2020, Buxton has hit 22 home runs in 233 PA, or once every 10.6 PA (.094 HR/PA). Once again, small sample alert but would anyone have expected him to be king of this mountain?

 

Considering that teammate Nelson Cruz still only leads Buxton by one home run (even though Buxton has been out since May 6), I might have to dust this poll off and give everyone another chance to believe:

Who will hit more home runs in 2021?

— Nicklaus Gaut (@Nt_BurtReynolds) April 6, 2021

 

Well, we might as well go for the hat trick and make these Twins into triplets. Minnesota rookie Trevor Larnach’s line through his first 62 PA isn’t overly impressive, slashing .212/.339/.404 with two home runs and a .331 wOBA. But like his fellow Twinkies above, he’s brought some boom against four-seamers, with a .471 ISO, .941 SLG, .603 wOBA, and .589 xwOBA.

Like Kirilloff, we still have a long way to go before we can make definitive declarations but passing the early fastball test is enough to get a little geeked about the Larnach monster. However, living in Kirilloff’s prospect shadow gives him a name cache that isn’t as high and thus might make him easier to acquire in dynasty, as well as redraft.

 

Breaking the First Law

Of thermodynamics, that is, because these hitters are destroying any fastball energy that comes their way. Of the 214 batters who’ve seen at least 150 four-seamers or sinkers, here are the top-30 in RV/100:

 

I’m sure we all expected the Omar Narváez renaissance to lead this list of fastball beaters. It’s not just what Narváez is doing this season that makes his early performance special, it’s also the size of his improvement.

Unfortunately, the above four-seamer dominance hasn’t led to much fantasy success, even as Narváez has a .311 AVG that is the second among catchers. In 12-team, standard 5×5 leagues, Narváez is the 17th-best catcher (16th in NFBC two catcher leagues) according to the FanGraphs auction calculator, with his value dragged way down by only nine runs scored (24th among catchers) and 13 RBI (19th).

While Narváez’s spot in the middle of the order offers hope for more of those counting stats in the future, Milwaukee’s anemic offense does not. The Brewers are 26th in runs scored, only beating out Washington, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and your New York Mets.

If Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is still a baby, then he must be the viral one who was smoking 40 heaters a day. Because if you haven’t heard by now (where have you been?), Guerrero Jr. has started cashing the checks his prospect hype has been writing these past years, leading the majors with 16 HR, and leading the fantasy world in value.

I mean, lots of 22-year-olds hit 434-ft bombs to center field off of a fastball away from Max Scherzer, right?

His elite hit-tool is carving any fools throwing heat, with his real-world stats backed by the expected ones. Guerrero Jr. has a .535 wOBA (.501 xwOBA), .533 wOBAcon (.488 xwOBAcon), and .796 SLG (.732 xSLG) against four-seamers, putting up a +4.2 RV/100 that is up from -0.1 RV/100 in 2020, and +0.7 RV/100 in his 2019 rookie year. Those not willing to pay his draft price this year (*cough…me…cough*) have chosen…Poorly.

Time for an outlier because no one, and I mean no one, can pound a fastball into the ground quite like Yandy Diaz. Tampa Bay’s groundball hitting machine has a 3.8 RV/100 on sinkers but that run value is built upon a foundation of singles and walks, as attested to by the little to no power accompanying it. His .087 ISO is in the bottom quarter and while his .474 wOBA is in the 90th percentile, a .365 xwOBA is decidedly not (51st percentile).

Perhaps most telling is what Diaz is done on contact, with a .373 wOBAcon (47th percentile) that’s backed by a .181 xwOBAcon (1st percentile). He’s #1!… He’s #1! This not exactly unexpected considering he has an average launch angle of -16 degrees and a 90% GB% on sinkers that is up from 80% GB% in 2020. Those who perennially wish that this will be the year that Diaz learns to hit the ball in the air are looking at being disappointed yet again.

Adolis Garcia just won’t stop hitting home runs. The 28-year-old Ranger rookie’s 16 HR ties him for the major league lead with Guerrero Jr. and has yet to have any sort of prolonged power outage. Or any kind of outage, for that matter.

Garcia is looking like a legitimate late-blooming hitter, putting up fantasy and real-world value in spades. As a St. Louis resident, I won’t deny how happy I am about the bright future of the Cardinals outfield, with Garcia and Randy Arozarena set loose to goose the offense for years to come. Oh, wait…Sometimes I forget. I will now go sit in the corner and be a sa-aad panda.

Allow him to reintroduce himself. His name is Po. Zee. Be you to the S T. Hitting bombs like he’s back being twenty-three.

After two years of offensive decline, followed by sitting out the 2020 pandemic season, it was beginning to look like the start of Buster Posey’s fantasy funeral.

But not today, death! The future HOF catcher has come back to baseball with a vengeance in 2021, slashing .336/.412/.603 over 131 PA, with 9 HR, a .267 ISO, and .435 wOBA. He’s the number-one catcher in 12-team leagues, making (relatively) old men everywhere stand up and take notice; Buster is our totem.

Possibly more impressive is that Posey has been doing his mashing on the back of significant improvements versus the hard stuff, not some crafty veteran smoke-and-mirrors. The last we saw Posey pre-pandemic, he’d been a shell of his formerly powerful self (relative to his peers), hitting a combined 12 home runs in 2018-19 (one per 74 PA), after averaging 1 HR per 33 PA from 2009-2017. But now in our new dead-ball era, Posey is averaging 1 HR per 15 PA, hitting 9 HR in 131 PA, with four coming off of four-seamers.

Posey has faced 30.8% four-seamers in 2021 (his lowest rate since 2015), down from 36.5% in 2019. Considering his improvements since then, throwing him fewer is probably the right track. He has a .310 ISO (85th percentile) and .690 SLG (87th) that are up from a .140 ISO (23rd) and .427 SLG in 2019, with a .491 wOBA (94th) and .475 xwOBA (94th) that are up from a .334 wOBA (31st) and .323 xwOBA (21st).

And lest you think this is any sort of Yandy Diaz situation, his increase in damage on contact has been just as impressive. He’s posted a .533 wOBAcon (85th percentile) and .511 xwOBAcon (84th) that are up from a .344 wOBAcon (28th) and a .331 xwOBAcon (16th) in 2019.