On Kris Bryant’s Improving Contact%

In 2015, Kris Bryant put together one of the better rookie campaigns in recent memory. He served as a catalyst for an upstart Chicago Cubs team that reached the National League Championship Series, while taking home National League Rookie of the Year honors. The numbers for a then-23-year-old were remarkable for a player pressed into his first big league action.

Bryant posted a slash of .275/.369/.500/.877, with 26 home runs, 99 runs knocked in, a .213 ISO, and a wRC+ of 136. He maintained a quality approach throughout the year, generating a walk at the plate 11.8% of the time. Of course, there were those who pointed to his outlandish .378 BABIP and frighteningly high 30.6% strikeout rate as potential cause for concern, or at least cause for something of a regression, heading into the 2016 campaign. But having established himself as one of the elite third basemen in baseball already, both in the fantasy realm and otherwise, Kris Bryant hasn’t done anything to scare off owners thus far in 2016.

And it’s thanks to some adjustments that were made over the course of the winter.

Bryant’s numbers early on in the season are impressive on their own. He’s hitting .295, reaching base at a .377 clip, while posting a 134 wRC+. His walk rate is still solid, at 10.1%, and he’s making a ton of hard contact (40.2%) to the point where he’s still maintaining a high BABIP, at .356. But there’s one very notable change in Bryant’s game that should lead to these improved numbers becoming quite sustainable: his ability to make regular contact. With an improved eye at the plate and a tweak in his swing, Kris Bryant’s stock is pointing way up as we continue to move through this 2016 season.

Say what you want about sample size and all that, we’re reaching a point where that becomes something of an invalid claim. We have enough to work with to declare a player dead or alive and enough to work with to where early season trends become more of a pattern than anything. In the case of Bryant, his ability to make contact regularly and cut down on that K-rate are things that he worked on heavily throughtout the offseason.

What was already a quality approach, especially in the context of a rookie season, has certainly appeared to improve significantly, as Bryant is swinging more at fastballs than breaking or offspeed, as illustrated below (via BrooksBaseball).

Seeing that percentage dip in relation to breaking balls is especially satisfying, as it should certainly indicate a decline in strikeouts on its own. Subsequently, his whiffs have dropped as well, across the board (of course, this isn’t true in relation to offspeed, but he also sees offspeed significantly less than the other two, at barely over nine percent of the time).

That approach alone draws up some significantly improved numbers for Bryant, as far as his swings-and-misses and overall strikeouts are concerned. In 2015, Bryant was swinging and missing at pitches 16.5% of the time, a number which he’s cut down to 12.9% thus far in 2016. His overall K-rate has experienced a drop of almost a full nine percent, from that 30.6% figure that he posted in 2015 to just 21.7% to this point in the 2016 campaign. It’s not that he’s swinging at less pitches, because his pitches per plate appearance is actually down a touch from last year, it’s just that he’s swinging at better pitches.

And with the declining swinging and missing, it can be relatively easily inferred that his Contact% has come along with it. Which has absolutely been the case, as Bryant has evolved from, what some would have considered, primarily a power hitter to an all-around threat at the plate. That ability to make contact is not only the result of that improved eye and swinging at better pitches, but the change in his swing overall. Bryant tinkered with his swing over the winter, adjusting it to a flatter motion through the zone, rather than taking hacks in more of a downward motion. As such, he’s getting the bat to the ball quicker, and this is the result.

His contact on pitches both inside and out of the zone have each risen, with the out of zone contact leaping from 49.2% to 57.3% and zone contact moving from 75.8% to 80.1%. His overall contact rate is up seven percent, moving from 66.3% last year to 73.3% in 2016. With that new-and-improved swing, he’s not only making more contact, but he’s making better contact as well.

That’s not an especially crowded graphic early on in the season (courtesy of Baseball Savant), but that’s quite a few different shades of red. Nonetheless, his exit velocity is certainly indicative of a guy who is demonstrating an improved approach at the plate. His linedrive rate has leapt up almost a full seven percent, from 20.5% a year ago, to 27.2% now. His overall hard rate, as indicated earlier, is up over 40%, which is about a three percent increase from where he was last year. When you talk about things like BABIP, making that type of contact absolutely allows him to maintain a higher figure in that regard, even if .350+ seems quite high.

(For what it’s worth, my guy Luis Medina has a strong writeup on Bryant’s contact with a few more tidbits over at Bleacher Nation.)

From a fantasy perspective, this all culminates in Kris Bryant becoming an overall elite third baseman, in mentioned in the same breathe as the likes of Josh Donaldson, Nolan Arenado, or Manny Machado. Whereas before he may have reached base at a solid clip and provided outstanding power, there was also the lingering cloud of astronomical strikeout numbers and a tendency to slump because of it. Not that those aspects were a deterrent, because he was still a top four or five guy at the position coming into the year. But what the improved approach, tweaked swing, and higher contact numbers culminate in is the ability for us, as outside observers, to slap the “elite” tag on Kris Bryant at the hot corner.

With those questions regarding Bryant’s approach at the plate becoming all but solved, our next question transitions to how much longer we’ll be able to talk about Kris Bryant in the context of third base, as Javier Baez heats up and Bryant patrols the outfield on the North Side. For now, though, we’ll continue to watch and enjoy Bryant’s continued development and subsequent improvement, which is substantial just over a month into this still-young 2016 campaign.