Potential Breakout Hitters for Fantasy Baseball - 2023 Exit Velocity Gainers

May 4, 2023

Eric looks for 2023 fantasy baseball hitter breakouts. These hitters have improved exit velocity in 2023 and may be fantasy baseball sleepers and trade targets.

We're now a month into the season, which means that some of these hot starts aren't just hot starts but legitimate gains and breakouts. As stats begin to stabilize, we can get a sense of which players have truly changed something about who they are as a hitter and separate them from the players who are just getting bounces to go their way.

Last week, I dove into leaders in key plate discipline metrics as those were the first to stabilize, but now we can have a little fun with guys who are hitting the ball hard.

Exit velocity on batted balls begins to stabilize after about 16 games, so we're well within the range there; however, launch angle takes a bit longer to become stable so any hard hit stat that also factors in launch angle, like barrels, is a bit less sticky right now than just using exit velocity.

Exit Velocity Gainers for Fantasy Baseball

In this article, we're going to look at the 15 hitters who have most improved their average exit velocity from 2022 to this year. I'll paste the whole leaderboard below and then dive into a few names underneath that I think might be sneaky pick-ups or players who you can buy low on based on public perception.

All of these stats are as of Tuesday, May 2nd

A few players I won't cover, but you know Ronald Acuña and Paul Goldschmidt are very good. Matt Chapman has been written about so much already, and I loved him coming into the season, I fully believe in what he's doing. Hitting the ball hard was never an issue for Joey Gallo, and Jonathan India was not healthy last year, so seeing him on this list makes sense now that he's back.

Connor Joe - 1B/OF, Pittsburgh Pirates

After Connor Joe burst onto the scene in Colorado last year, many people wrote him off as a product of Coors Field. However, the 30-year-old has become an everyday player in Pittsburgh, shuffling between left field, right field, and first base. He's hitting .288 with four home runs, 11 RBI, and 18 runs, but this is a clear selling opportunity for me if you can.

Let's look under the surface and see if there is any reason Joe has produced this well besides the increased average exit velocity, which also, for starters, comes with a lower max exit velocity than last year. So he's not really hitting the ball harder, he's just getting harder contact more consistently.

Part of that has to do with him chasing out of the zone less often (his O-Swing% dropped 8%) and swinging more in the zone (his zone swing% is up 3%). That's certainly appealing; however, that's kind of where the appeal ends.

Joe is making less contact overall while pulling the ball the exact same amount, hitting it in the air the exact same amount, and striking out 4% more. Even though the launch angle hasn't stabilized, he has the exact same launch angle as last year. So, yes, Joe is making more solid contact than last year, but right now the positive results seem to be coming from more batted balls that are line drives this year that were groundballs last year, and there's really a fine line there if there is no noticeable difference in swing changes.

Right now the 21.1% HR/FB rate and .358 BABIP stick out like sore thumbs. I don't think there is any approach change here or anything other than Joe making the most of the contact he's making in the zone right now. I just can't see that hard-hit rate and barrel rate continuing at this level.

Jack Suwinski - OF, Pittsburgh Pirates

While I'm not a believer in what Connor Joe is doing, I am a believer in Suwinski and am trying to get him where I can. The 24-year-old came up last year and showed legit pop and that has only continued this year with a 22.2% barrel rate, 51.1% hard-hit rate, and 98 mph exit velocity on fly balls and line drives, which is good for 18th in all of baseball. Considering he also pulls the ball 49% of the time and hits it in the air 52.3% of the time, it's no surprise that he has good home run numbers.

However, he also matches that strong power with strong plate discipline. He has just an 18.1% O-Swing% and we talked earlier about how those marks stabilize early. Now, his strikeout rate remains pretty high at 29% and his zone contact rate is actually down this year despite not chasing as many pitches out of the zone, but a hitter with this much legit power is also going to swing and miss and you're OK with it. Suwinski will likely only hit .230-.240 when all is said and done, but he could push 25-20 home runs in the process.

The cherry on top is that he has 89th-percentile sprint speed and is running, stealing five bases in six attempts. The Pirates have a bit of "F it" about them this season, so I think they'll keep running Suwinski, and he could end up hitting .240 with 28 HRs, and 12 SBs on the season with about 150 Runs+RBI. That's a pretty solid line in all leagues.

Jorge Mateo - SS, Baltimore Orioles

From one breakout candidate to an even bigger one. Coming into the year, everybody knew that Jorge Mateo had elite speed, but many people were suggesting that he wouldn't hit enough to remain in the Orioles' lineup. Considering he had just an 82 wRC+ last season, that's not too far-fetched. However, Mateo has become an entirely different hitter this year and not enough people are talking about it.

The first thing that stands out is that Mateo is hitting the ball on the ground much more, cutting his launch angle in half and raising his ground ball rate by almost 10%. While he's not chopping balls into the dirt and can still elevate pitches up in the strike zone, he's focused more on hard ground balls and line drives, which is great for such a speedy player, especially with the new shift rules in play.

Taking some of the loft out of his swing has also enabled him to hit the ball harder and find the barrel more often. Mateo has also dialed back the aggressive plate approach a bit, cutting his O-swing% by 7% and his overall swing rate by 5%. That has enabled him to make more contact in the zone. As a result, Mateo has seen his strikeout rate plummet from 27.9% to 15.9%.

So that leaves us with a player with game-breaking speed, whose making more contact and harder contact and not trying to lift the ball like a power hitter, but keeping the ball low and hard and using his speed. All of that strikes me as an ideal approach that could maybe push Mateo to a .270-.280 average with 30+ stolen bases.

DJ LeMahieu - INF, New York Yankees

I wanted to write a blurb about LeMahieu because while his average exit velocity is up, I don't really like anything that's going on here.

His walk rate is the lowest it's been since 2019, and his strikeout rate has ballooned to a ridiculous 29.9%, which is over 10% higher than any season in his career. There's no discernible change to his swing path that would suggest he's trying to sell out for power, so it's possible that, at 34 years old, all the injuries have caught up to him.

LeMahieu's zone contact rate is still elite, but his overall contact rate has plummeted to the lowest it's been since his rookie year in 2011. His O-contact% is down 20%, but he's swinging out of the zone less, which tells me that he's unable to get to, and handle, pitches he's used to getting the bat on. His batting average against breaking balls has dropped from .271 last year to .148 this year, and while it's too small of a sample size to really say he forgot how to hit a breaking ball, that's not a great sign. Especially since his whiff rate on breaking balls is also up almost 10%.

So, yes, LeMahieu is making hard contact than he has in years, but he has just a 3-degree launch angle, so no power breakout is coming from that, and he's clearly not the same hitter he was with a much smaller contact zone than in year's past. He's hitting in a Yankee lineup that is really struggling and batting .260 while sporting a .355 BABIP.

I would be trying to get out of the LeMahieu business.

Alek Thomas - OF, Arizona Diamondbacks

If you look at players who are underperforming their expected metrics, Alek Thomas comes up on almost every list. He's hitting .186 with a .264 xBA. He's slugging .326 with a .425 xSLG. He has a .261 wOBA with a .322 xwOBA. Now, none of the metrics he's "earning" are eye-popping, but he should be producing better than he is, so let's see why.

For starters, Thomas has a .219 BABIP, which is certainly low. He's also raised his fly ball rate by 7% but has a 5.3% increase in infield fly balls, so he clearly hasn't gained consistency with a swing that now has an 8.5-degree launch angle, up from 2.6 degrees last year. However, a lot of the stuff under the hood looks good...but perhaps not necessarily good for a hitter like Alek Thomas.

By elevating the ball a little more, he's able to get more barrels since a barrel "requires an exit velocity of at least 98 mph with a launch angle between 26-30 degrees." He's also increased his hard-hit rate by just under 13% up to 47%, which is eye-catching. His pull rate is up 12.5% up to 48.5%, so he's hitting the ball hard, adding lift, and hitting to his pull side. All of that should lead to an increase in power, but Thomas has just two home runs. So why isn't it working?

For starters, Chase Field ranks 25th in park factor for left-handed pull power over the last three years. Alek Thomas has also never hit more than 18 home runs in a year and has a scouting report that suggests Thomas has solid power for his size but not elite power and "the sheer effort and explosion in [his] swing does lead to some swing-and-miss."

His 92.2 mph average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives is 165th in MLB which isn't great but also isn't bad. It's the same as Daulton Varsho and Yasmani Grandal for a frame of reference.

Thomas came up through the minors as an elite contact hitter who now has the underlying numbers to suggest a player trying to sell out for more power. Perhaps there's a happy middle ground?

Thomas has cut his O-swing% from his rookie season and his overall contact rate and SwStr% are pretty consistent, so he still has the makings of a strong bat-to-ball hitter. We can also see that he's capable of hitting the ball hard and has the speed to beat out ground balls and steal bases once he's on. He should improve on his current numbers just based on the quality of his current contact, but I think there's potentially more growth here if he can rectify the issues with the loft in his swing.

Perhaps he needs to take more of an all-fields approach or have more of a groundball-focused swing like Mateo. I don't have the specific answer from just looking at numbers and re-watching his at-bats, but I will say that it's never bad to gamble on a player with this type of contact skill who is showing the ability to make meaningfully hard contact. You may have to sit him on your bench for a couple of weeks while he figures it out, but I think he might.

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