Noteworthy Hitting Leaders (Pull Rate) - Statcast Review for Fantasy Baseball

As the MLB and MLBPA keep working towards ending the lockout and getting baseball back into our lives, we've been keeping the offseason content going by digging into some 2021 stats. While we all obviously want the lockout to end, this is a useful time to do your research and have a better understanding of the player pool before drafts begin. So far this offseason, I've covered barrel rate with one article on gainers and another on fallers. Then I moved on to some x-stats, covering xBA here and xSLG here, before discussing exit velocity leaders here. Today, we're going to look at a relatively "old school" and simple stat, but one that I really like digging into: Pull rate.

Just to cover our bases, pull rate is the rate at which a hitter hits the ball to the pull side of the field, meaning from left-center and to the left-field foul line for right-handed batters and from right-center to the right-field foul line for left-handed batters. It's a simple stat but important because pulled baseballs can often equal power since the batter is able to get the full torque through his hips and use the rotational strength to help drive the ball. That's why roughly two-thirds of home runs are pulled. We often see players who have huge power surges also having large gains in pull rate. As a result, if we dig into the pull rate changes over multiple seasons, we can have a better chance of identifying whose power breakouts were for real and whose may be on the horizon.

However, as with most stats, we can't simply look at the pull rate (Pull%) alone and draw these conclusions. We also know that if a batter is fooled by a pitch and gets out in front and rolls over on a ground ball to their pull side, that also counts as a pulled ball. Only, those often do us no good in fantasy, so we need to dig into the larger context. Pulled groundballs can be fine because they are often hit hard, but rollovers or "topped" contact is usually never good. In this article, I have a list of the biggest gainers in Pull% from 2020 to 2021, and we'll dive into a few names that I think might provide more (or less) fantasy value than we are currently expecting.

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Pull Rate Gainers

Some quick-hitting thoughts first before we dive into the deeper analysis.

• Yandy Diaz is high on this list, but he really just reverted back to the metrics he posted in 2019, so this is not the Yandy breakout that people have been craving for about three years.
• Jose Altuve has been discussed a lot this offseason, but he traded speed and a little bit of average for a more power-focused approach and it worked. It's a legitimate change and not some fluke.
• Chris Taylor may be the starting shortstop for the Dodgers and made a conscious choice to hit more fly balls to the pull side. It didn't lead to that many more home runs because Taylor doesn't really hit the ball hard in the air (40th-percentile last season), but he paired 20 home runs with 13 stolen bases in a good lineup, which obviously has value. Just don't expect much more in the power department.
• Corey Dickerson and Alex Dickerson (not related) are both free agents, but I'd love to see them land in places where they can be on the strong side of a platoon against right-handed pitching. The power profiles are there.
• Much like the Dickersons, Tyler Naquin finally got a near full-time role and produced. He still struggles against lefties, but the barrel rates, exit velocities, and contact rates from the second half of the season all look pretty good. He did hit 51.6% groundballs during the second half, so you'd like to see that change.
• Raimel Tapia is fast, so you don't want him to be too focused on hitting the ball in the air, but he went way too far in the other direction in 2021. He had a -4.4-degree launch angle, which led to a 68% groundball rate and his lowest batting average and xBA since 2018. With the way teams shift now, you can't pull groundballs at that high a rate and expect to get hits. His line drive rate is going to need to come back up for me to buy in again.
• Jose Ramirez, Teoscar Hernandez, and Nolan Arenado are good hitters, and Arenado's new approach is showing that he can maintain power outside of Coors. I'm not sure why people don't seem to be buying into him in early drafts.
• I'll dive deeper into Luis Robert in future articles, but the increased pull rate, added to his increased line drive rate and strong barrel metrics, led to a mini-breakout in his short season. This approach may cap his home run upside slightly since he was peppering line drives all over the place, but it would lift up his average floor, so you're not really mad about that. You could be looking at a 27 HR / 15 SB season with a .290 average and that's just wonderful.

Jorge Polanco, 2B/SS Minnesota Twins

NFBC ADP: 86

The Jorge Polanco evolution is pretty interesting. The Twins' middle infielder seemed primed for a breakout after in 2017 season, where he hit .256 with 13 home runs and 13 stolen bases as a 23-year-old. However, he was suspended 80 games to start the 2018 season for testing positive for a performance-enhancing substance, so most people ignored his solid 77 games to finish that season and still considered him a "steroid guy" before the 2019 season. However, after hitting .295 with 22 home runs in 2019 and .269 with 33 home runs and 11 stolen bases last year, it's time to forget the suspension and take Polanco seriously.

For starters, he's always been a high contact rate player. He's never had a strikeout rate above 19% in his entire MLB career and his zone contact (Z-Contact%) always hovers around 90%, while his overall contact rate is often around the 80th-percentile. Historically speaking, he's been more of a patient hitter with a below-average overall swing rate, but in 2021 he became far more aggressive. His overall swing rate jumped up 6%, which put him in the 67th-percentile in the league and his swing rate at pitches out of the zone (O-Swing%) also jumped 6%. This change in approach hurt his ability to make contact outside of the zone; yet, given how patient he was coming into this season it only had a minor impact on his overall contact rate. He still put up a 9.1% swinging-strike rate, which is high for him but still a pretty strong number.

Polanco's shift to become more aggressive is pretty clearly connected to this rise in pull rate. Polanco has never had a Pull% over 44% but rocketed it up to 52.7% last year. He was hunting for pitches that he could drive to the pull side. As a result, a rise in barrel rate followed, since he was searching for pitches he could do damage on. His barrel rate jumped to 10.1% in 2021, which is a massive improvement from his career-high 6.3% rate in 2019. What's more, he was also hitting 60% of his contact in the air (fly balls or line drives) as opposed to 54.8% in 2020. So Polanco searched for pitches to drive, made harder contact, and made more of that contact in the air, which is exactly why his home run total jumped.

This is not a fluke. Polanco has always had max exit velocities around 109 mph and his max exit velocity in 2021 was 110 mph, so he's not showing new top-end power, he's simply getting closer to that top-end more often and doing so with clear changes to his approach.

His 15.8% HR/FB ratio is also not an unsustainable number seeing as how that ranked 60th in MLB behind Jose Altuve and Jonathan India. As a result, I'm not sure why projections see Polanco dropping down to 24 home runs. I think he could push for 30 home runs again while keeping the .260-.270 average that seems to be his new normal with his more aggressive approach. Add possibly ten stolen bases and 170 Runs+RBI to that total, and I'm taking Polanco ahead of 2B like Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Brandon Lowe, who are currently going ahead of Polanco's ADP of 86.

Michael Conforto, OF New York Mets

NFBC ADP: 188

Let's get the obvious part out of the way: we don't know where Conforto will be playing next year. Obviously, his home ballpark and surrounding lineup will have an impact on Conforto's production, but I wanted to discuss his 2021 season because it seems like we've forgotten that from 2017 to 2019 Conforto averaged 29 home runs, 80 runs, and 81 RBI with a .260 batting average. Then, in 2020 he hit .322 with 9 home runs, 40 Runs, and 31 RBI across 54 games in the shortened season.

In 2021, Conforto contracted COVID before the season started and then battled a hamstring injury through most of May and June. He struggled to round back into form in July but hit his stride in August. In the full 2nd half last season, he hit .252/.347/.445 with 11 home runs, 36 runs, and 35 RBI in 72 games. His Pull% went up almost 15% from 2020 but was in line with his numbers from all prior seasons. He also cut down on his strikeout rate and improved his barrel rate up to 9.8% in the second half, which is still below the 11.6% and 11% marks he had in 2020 and 2021 but is creeping back up.

The concern for me is that the rise in Pull% also coincided with a rise in his groundball rate (GB%). Statcast also shows that his topped contact (Topped%) increased by 5% from 2020, which seems to suggest that Conforto was pulling the ball more because he was rolling over on the ball more. His percentage of balls hit in the air was 8% lower than in 2020 and 2% lower than in 2019. Despite improving his GB% as the season went on, it was still higher than it had been since 2018, which is something we'd like to see him get back to.

However, Conforto was still hitting the ball relatively hard in the air with a 70th-percentile exit velocity on balls in the air during the second half of the season. To me, this is the case of a hitter trying to find his swing after injury and also lock in on what type of hitter he wants to be. In 2020, Conforto had the highest average of his career and did so with the lowest Pull% and highest line drive rate he's had. He worked the middle and opposite fields and hit for solid power but not like the numbers he showed in 2019. In 2021, he tried to pull the ball more and add back the lift to his swing, but it cost him some of the batting average and consistent hard contact.

We'd love to say that Conforto will find the happy medium between the two, and it's entirely possible he will, but without any Spring Training at-bats (or a team) we have to guess for now. Based on his underlying metrics from the second half of 2021, I see him returning closer to the hitter he was from 2017-2019, which means you could be getting a .250 hitter with 25+ home runs who will likely hit in the middle of the lineup for whatever team he signs with. I'd certainly take that over somebody like Ian Happ, who is going six picks before him, or even Andrew Benintendi, who is going just two picks ahead of Conforto.

Kolten Wong, 2B Milwaukee Brewers

NFBC ADP: 172

Sometimes an increased pull rate is not necessarily good for a player. I believe that to be the case with Kolten Wong. The veteran came to Milwaukee last year and had a good first season in his new hitter-friendly ballpark, batting .272/.335/.447 with 14 home runs 70 runs, 50 RBI, and 12 stolen bases. He's penciled in at the top of the lineup for 2022 and there's some optimism around another strong season for him, but I have some slight concern after I dug into the pull rates.

We can see from the above leaderboard that Wong is one of the biggest gainers in Pull% in the league; however, that growth was primarily in the second half of the season. During the first half of the season, Wong had a Pull% of 34.1%, which would have been an increase from 2020 but almost his exact rate from 2019. In the 2nd half of the season, Wong's Pull% jumped up to 40.8%. That 6.7% difference was well above-average across the league; yet, I'm not sure it actually helped him.

Wong's Pull% increase coincided with a 3-degree increase in launch angle as well, putting him up to a career-high 13.9-degree path. However, Wong is not a power hitter. Even though his max exit velocities have been fine in his career, he doesn't hit the ball particularly hard in the air. His 91.5 mph exit velocity on balls in the air in 2021 was in the 21st-percentile in the league, and he actually hit the ball 2 mph slower in the second half of the season when he upped that launch angle. You can see this also bearing out in his hard contact as the season went on as well.

In the second half of the season, Wong's barrel rate fell 2%, his HR/PA fell, the percentage of balls he hit over 100 mph fell, his SwStr% went up, and his batting average went down. In fact, almost everything about his second half was worse. He hit .291/.346/.485 in the first half with seven home runs in 52 games. In the second half, he hit .257/.327/.418 with seven home runs in 63 games.

Obviously the sample sizes are small, but it seems like Wong was trying to do too much as the season went on in his new hitter-friendly park. The drastic increases in pull rate and launch angle strike me as conscious changes and not the result of randomness over a small sample size. It makes me a little worried that it was either a shift from the coaching staff or that Wong was adjusting his approach based on his home park. Either way, I'll be watching his approach when Spring Training starts up because I'm not confident that this pull-centric approach is best for him as a player. His ADP isn't cost-prohibitive, but I am more in on other hitters going in that range (Hunter Renfroe, Anthony Rizzo, Alex Kirilloff, Justin Turner, Nelson Cruz, Benintendi, and Conforto), so I will likely not be ending up with too many shares of Wong.

Ryan Mountcastle, OF Baltimore Orioles

NFBC ADP: 111

Let's use Mountcastle's appearance here to talk about the Orioles' changes to their stadium. Baltimore will move the left-field wall at Camden Yards back 30 feet, while also raising the fence from seven feet to twelve feet. As Nathan Ruiz covered, "As of 2020, Camden Yards’ 333-foot distance from home plate to the left-field corner was about average for the 30 major league stadiums, though its 364-foot distance to left-center was one of the league’s most reachable for batters.

Oriole Park was one of only eight ballparks with a wall shorter than 8 feet in left and had the shortest wall in left-center field of any venue. A 12-foot left-field wall would be tied for the sixth-tallest in the majors."

If you are a visual learner, there's this:

Obviously, this is not good for right-handed pull power. You can talk all you want about how Mountcastle only pulled nine of his Camden Yards home runs last year, but we know that pulled home runs are easier to hit than home runs to center or the opposite field. Also, Mountcastle is on this list because he is starting to pull the ball more, which will undoubtedly no longer be as beneficial as it was with the old stadium dimensions.

That's not to say that Mountcastle can't hit home runs in this stadium, but it will be harder. In 2021, he hit 33 home runs. According to Statcast, he would have only hit 19 if he was in Kansas City, 21 if he was in Arizona, 25 in San Francisco, etc. This is obviously a crude way of projecting power, and we simply won't know how the stadium truly impacts batters until we see games played there, but it certainly will hurt power production since that's what it is specifically intended to do. Especially since Mountcastle had an average exit velocity on balls in the air of 92.5 mph last year, which was in the 35th-percentile in Major League baseball, so he's not exactly consistently crushing the balls he elevates.

If Mountcastle becomes a 25-27 home run hitter that would mean we're drafting him too high based on some other issues in his profile, like a 27.5% strikeout rate, 16.2% SwStr%, and 24th-percentile contact rate. If he is a 25 home run bat with a .250-.260 average, I'm not sure I see how he's much different from Conforto, who is going way later. I currently have Mountcastle ranked 162nd and likely won't be getting him anywhere as a result.

Jorge Alfaro, C/OF San Diego Padres

NFBC ADP: 385

Alfaro is likely only being rostered in two-catcher leagues, so I'll keep this short (well, I'll try), but there is something I noticed that I wanted to point out. Jorge Alfaro hits the ball damn hard! HIs 115.7 mph max exit velocity last year was in the top 4% in the league. His average exit velocity on balls in the air was 96.7 mph, which is in the 90th-percentile and equal to guys like Rowdy Tellez and Luke Voit. His 8.2% barrel rate is down from his career peak but was still good for 15th last year amongst catchers with over 300 plate appearances.

However, his increased pull rate last year simply led to way too many rollover ground balls. In the second half of the season, his Pull% jumped 8% to 30.6% but his groundball rate skyrocketed to 62.2% and his launch angle in the second half of the season was -2.3-degrees. Yes, negative. So even though his batting average went up, his xBA was only slightly better than the first half of the season and his quality of contact dropped significantly.

So why am I interested and taking him as my 3rd or 4th catcher in draft-and-holds? Because that quality of contact is no joke. Remember that Alfaro hit 18 home runs in 2018 and also stole eight bases last year, so there is some legitimate hope for a 10 HR/10 SB or 15/10 season out of the catcher spot. Alfaro is a free swinger, but his strikeout rate and SwStr% continue to improve each year, and his first-half groundball rates and barrel rates from 2021 were not far off from his 2018 numbers. The Padres traded for him in November, which means there is a reason that they wanted him with their club.

Petco is a slightly better home run park for right-handed hitters than Loan Depot Park in Miami, so if the Padres can iron out Alfaro's approach a little bit to get him to drive through the ball to the pull side and not hammer it into the ground, there is a decent amount of upside here waiting to be unlocked. To me, that's incredibly valuable when you are taking reserve catchers in those deeper formats.

Yasmani Grandal, C/1B Chicago White Sox

NFBC ADP: 108

Sami and I covered Grandal in detail on our latest episode of Catcher's Corner, so I won't go into too much detail, but I would not be taking Daulton Varsho over Grandal in drafts. We've been focusing a lot on Grandal's absurd walk rate this season, but the dude has been crushing the ball for years now. Plus, he often works into the lineup on days when he's not catching too.

Marcus Semien, 2B/SS Texas Rangers

NFBC ADP: 41

We're going to end with a write-up that might be a little controversial. I've always been a Marcus Semien fan, but I am finding it hard to get on board at that price. If we look at the baseline stats, Semien was similar to the hitter he's been for years in a lot of ways. His .265 average is just north of his .256 career mark. His strikeout rate hovered around 20% and walk rate hovered around 9%, much like his career numbers. His SwStr% was down from his early career highs, but in line with the player he's been over the last four years and almost all of his contact metrics (O-Swing%, Z-Contact%, Contact%, etc.) are in line with career norms. Obviously, the big difference is that he hit 45 home runs, scored 115 runs, and drove in another 102, all while swiping 15 bags. It was a great season.

Unfortunately, now he's in Texas, and we simply can't ignore that. For starters, Semien's 18.4% HR/FB rate was the highest of his career by quite a bit, so we would have likely expected some regression to begin with. Also, the Blue Jays played a large portion of their season last year in Dunedin and Buffalo, both of which were in the top-8 most HR-friendly stadiums in baseball based on park factors. The Rogers Centre, where the Blue Jays actually play their home games in Toronto, ranked 13th (which is 11th for 2022 if you remove the two other Blue Jays stadiums from 2021 that aren't MLB parks anymore), so Semien found himself in a tremendous hitting environment all season long. According to Statcast, Semien's expected home run total overall was 41; however, based on park measurements, he would have hit only 27 in Kansas City, 32 in Pittsburgh, 33 in Arizona, and, perhaps most importantly, 32 at Globe Life Field in Texas, his new home stadium, which ranks 22nd in park factors for right-handed power.

Now, this isn't to say I am out on Marcus Semien. I still like him as a player and think he is talented. His 9.8% barrel rate last year was in the 69th-percentile, his rate of barrels hit over 100 mph was in the 67th-percentile, and his wOBAcon was in the 85th-percentile, so he showed real growth in his quality of contact. However, I simply think it was both a little bit unsustainable and also aided by his ballpark, as he benefited from a 95th-percentile HR/PA rate that far outpaces anything he's ever done.

What's more, his quality of contact is solid but not something that would produce power at the level we saw last year. His average exit velocity on balls in the air is 93.9 mph (62nd-percentile) and the rate of balls he hits in the air over 100 mph is in the 48th-percentile. Put that together with his 69th-percentile barrels rates and you have a strong hitter but not an elite power threat. It's actually not too different a profile from Andrew McCutchen, with the clear caveat that Semien hit the ball in the air more often:

At the end of the day, I think Semien's more pull-centric approach with a higher launch angle was perfect for his home park(s) last year, but I don't believe it will be as successful in his new environment. That said, he is a veteran and a smart hitter, so I expect him to be able to revert back to an approach that works for a more pitcher-friendly park, like the one he played in with Oakland for his entire pre-2021 career. That's exactly why I am valuing Semien based on the player he's been throughout most of his career and not the flash he showed last year.

I'm expecting something close to a .260 average with 27+ home runs and 170 Runs+RBI in an improving lineup but one that's nowhere close to as strong as what he hit in last year. Throw in 10 stolen bases on top of that and you have a really solid player, but likely not one I'm taking at the start of the 4th round in 12-team leagues. I'd rather wait for a couple of rounds and take Jose Altuve (ADP of 81) who I think might hit slightly fewer home runs and swipe a few fewer bags but will give me a better average and more Runs+RBI in a much better lineup.

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