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Eric Samulski identifies fantasy baseball draft sleepers based on contact rate improvement last season. These hitters could be great late-round values.
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, pull rate here, and chase rate here. Today, we are going to cover contact rate.
Why cover contact rates? Well, quite simply, you can't get hits unless you make contact with the ball. The more contact a hitter makes, the more likely he is to do something good with his at-bats. I know that seems like an overly simple observation, but sometimes we over-complicate our process by adding advanced metrics. Yes, they can certainly be helpful at times, but the "basic stats" can also be equally as important. We want hitters who can make consistent contact because it shows a strong approach, repeatable swing, and puts them in a better position for success. Hitters who see major jumps in contact rate often are hitters who've made changes to their swing (or were no longer injured) in order to change the bat path or plate coverage. These are good things to dig into.
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Contact Rate Gainers
Below you'll see leaderboards for contact-rate gainers between the 2021 and 2020 seasons. I'll then pick a few interesting names from the leaderboard and dig into the larger profile to see if these gains should excite or concern us.
All ADP figures in this article are using NFBC ADP for drafts from January 19th to February 16th.
I covered Bobby Dalbec here, Bryan Reynolds here, Jesse Winker here, and Miguel Sano here so click on those articles to read more detailed write-ups of my feelings on each player.
Andrew Benintendi, OF Kansas City Royals
NFBC ADP: 182
Benintendi has been written off by a large swath of people because he never really built on his 20 HR/20 SB campaign during his rookie season in 2017. However, that's unfair to the player who was never seen as a true power threat. Coming out of college, Benintendi was a "professional hitter" who made high-quality contact and could compete for a batting title. However, after that great rookie season and pretty strong second-year follow-up, we saw Benintendi seem to shift approach, raising his launch angle pretty drastically and seeing his strikeout rate go up and his average go down. It wasn't who he was as a hitter, but he may have started to find that again in 2021, going .276/.324/.442 with 17 home runs, 63 runs, 73 RBI, and eight stolen bases during his first season with the Royals.
A couple of things stand out to me, and the contact rate actually is not one of them. His 79.6% contact rate is a huge gain from the shortened 2020 season, but it's actually still below his 2017 and 2018 numbers. It's good to see him climbing back up, but what intrigues me is an overall approach change. Benintendi's O-Swing% in 2021 was a career-high 34.6%; however, his O-Contact% was also a career-high 71.8%. His overall swing rate was also a career-high, as was his pull rate. So Benintendi is becoming a more aggressive hitter but seems to be doing so on pitches he can handle. As a result, he posted a career-high barrel rate, average exit velocity, and hard-hit rate.
However, it's important to note that, even though the hard-hit rate has continued to improve, we are not quite back to 2018 Andrew Benintendi from a fantasy production perspective, and I'm not sure the .290 hitter is ever coming back. Benintendi is still lifting the ball quite a bit, even actually going from 51% fly balls and live drives (Air%) in the first half of 2021 to 61.2% in the second half.
Yet, he remains just above-average in terms of his quality of contact there, ranking in the 62nd-percentile on average exit velocity on balls in the air and the 36th-percentile in balls hit in the air over 100 mph. So, while he is hitting the ball in the air more, he doesn't really pack the punch to drive it out of the park consistently. Given that he also hits in one of the more pitcher-friendly ballparks, it's hard to see him pushing for much more than 20 home runs in a season, even with this adding loft to his swing. However, his more aggressive approach is leading to harder contact, which is leading to more consistent results, and I think he's likely to finish with a .270 average, 20 HR, and 10 SB in a fine but not great lineup, which is a boring but useful pick near 200.
Matt Olson, 1B Oakland Athletics
NFBC ADP: 41
Last season, Matt Olson's newfound contact rates helped him hit .271/.371/.540 with 39 home runs, 101 runs, and 111 RBI. He also cut his strikeout rate down from 25.2% in 2019 and 31.4% in 2020 to 16.8% in 2021. Only, projections don't seem to believe it, with most of them having him around a .255 batting average and a 21% strikeout rate. So should we fall in line with the projections?
Well, for starters, we should cover that this wasn't just a hot stretch for Olson. He had an 80.8% contact rate in the first half of the season and a 79.1% contact rate in the second half of the season. He also had a 9.9% swinging-strike rate (SwStr%) in the first half and a 10.2% mark in the second half. Given that the contact gains lasted for an entire season, it would seem to imply they were the result of a clear change in approach and not just "running hot" or "seeing the ball well."
That bears out when we look at his plate discipline metrics. What jumps out first is that Olson had the highest swing rate of his career. He not only raised his swing rate in the zone by 4.5% but also raised his O-Swing% by almost 5%. While raising an O-Swing% would normally be a cause for concern, Olson really just returned to his 2019 rates and also saw a 13% jump in O-Contact%, which was also back to 2019 rates, which tells us that his 2020 contact profile might actually be the outlier.
If the O-Swing metrics are closer to 2019 (when he hit .267) the biggest changes that impacted both his average and strikeout rate must have come in the zone. When compared to that 2019 season, Olson made 5.5% more contact in the zone in part because he raised his swing rate in the zone by over 6%. Yet, he also swung at the first pitch less and saw fewer pitches in the zone than he had at any point in this career. What that says to me is that pitchers were more cautious around Olson (which makes sense) but Olson was more patient early in the count, which led to more hittable pitches as he got ahead in the count, and he capitalized on those opportunities. We can see this play out since Olson had 306 plate appearances through 1-0 counts in 2021 (compared to 240 in 2019) and 130 plate appearances through 2-0 counts in 2021 (compared to 93 in 2019), which means that he put himself in more advantageous counts in around 80-90 more plate appearances in 2021. That's about 13% of his total plate appearances on the season, which is a big number.
There are other things to dig into with Olson, like his less pull-centric spraychart in order to beat the shift and some slight concern about his rising groundball rate, but I think the plate discipline gains seem to be the result of a clear shift in approach. That makes me confident that Olson is a .265 hitter (as he's been for two of the last three years) with 85th-percentile barrel rates and exit velocities that lead to 35+ home run power. I'm fully buying back in for 2021, and if he ends up being traded to more a hitter-friendly park, then watch out.
Harrison Bader, OF St. Louis Cardinals
NFBC ADP: 230
Bader finds himself climbing in ADP as people search for more players with power and speed, but whether you want to draft him where he's going is all about whether or not you believe in small samples. During the first half of the season, Bader hit .234/.308/.439 with six home runs, five stolen bases, and a walk rate of just over 9%. Granted, it was only 120 plate appearances, but it seemed like the Bader we've seen before, until you dug until the surface.
During that first half, Bader was swinging at the highest rate of his career, with a Swing% just over his 2018 previous high, and was also making contact at an 82.2% clip, which was in the 89th-percentile in the league and was more than 15% higher than his previous rates. He also only had a 15.8% strikeout rate, which would have been almost twice as good as his career average, so Bader was swinging more, making more contact, but only barrelling the ball 5.6% of the time and not seeing great results on the field. Something had to give.
In the second half, Bader began to see results, hitting .281/.331/.469 with ten home runs in 281 plate appearances. Those numbers were despite a 26- game cold stretch in August where he hit .152/.229/.192. If you remove those 109 plate appearances, then you're looking at just 172 plate appearances of plus production from Bader, which comes back to what we were talking about earlier in regards to the small sample size. Can we believe in the 92 hot plate appearances in July and 117 across September and October? I'm inclined to believe yes, to a degree.
See, in the second half of the season, Bader increased his swing rate even more, up to 48.1%, when he had hovered around 42% for the last two years. He also raised his O-Swing% and Z-Swing% to career-high rates, and even though his contact rate dipped to 74.6% in the second half, that was still in line with his previous career marks and his O-Contact% remained a career-high. It's clear from those numbers that Bader was being more aggressive at the plate, but was hunting pitches that he could put in play. He was also producing with this approach, registering a .892 OPS and .541 SLG on the first pitch, which helped compensate for the rise in SwStr%. Bader swung and missed more but struck out less since he was being aggressive early in the count as well. Yet, part of the reason I think we saw Bader have a big second half is because of one final adjustment.
Sometimes plate discipline approaches can take a few months to settle, so it's possible that Bader was always going to have a strong second half, but another thing I noticed was that a lot of Bader's rolling averages showed a clear spike around the middle of August.
His hard hit rate:
His xSLG:
And his xBA:
So did something change for Bader in the middle of August? One potential answer is that Bader's launch angle dropped from 15-degrees before this point to 11.3-degrees from August 14th on. That may not seem like a lot, but a four-degree change in swing path in the middle of the season likely signals a clear shift in approach and one that plays to Bader's strengths. Since Bader has 97th percentile sprint speed and had a .303 batting average on ground balls (the third season he's batted above .300 on grounders), keeping the ball out of the air is better for his average. He also only hits the ball in the air at an average exit velocity of 91.3 mph, which is just 17th-percentile in all of baseball, so he's not exactly benefiting from lifting the ball.
As a result, I think the newfound aggressive approach and hitting the ball low and hard could make his high batting average from that final stretch more believable. He also hit seven home runs during those 171 plate appearances, which is a third of his projected plate appearance total on the season, meaning that 15+ home runs doesn't seem out of the question even without the lift in his swing. This new version of Bader won't help you in OBP leagues, and he's likely to run hot-and-cold due to the swing-and-miss in his game, but I also think he could hit .260 with 15+ home runs and 15 stolen bases, which is a pretty solid value for where he's going.
Austin Meadows, OF Tampa Bay Rays
NFBC ADP: 133
It's interesting to see Austin Meadows on this list because he really didn't have a great year in 2021. Sure, he hit .234/.315/.458 with 27 home runs over 591 plate appearances, but that may only seem to be an improvement because he was so bad during the shortened 2020 campaign, posting a .667 OPS. However, when you dig under the surface on Meadows' numbers, you see that he had one strong stretch from the start of May to the start of June, hitting .275/.365/.625 with ten home runs over 126 plate appearances during that span. From then on, he hit .224/.290/.406 with 13 home runs over 352 plate appearances. That's not particularly good.
As many people have already pointed out, much of that might have to do with the way defenses are playing him. Teams shifted 75% of the time against him in 2021, resulting in a .304 wOBA against the shift as opposed to a .402 wOBA against normal defensive alignments. This may have caused him to try to go to the opposite field more, raising his oppo rate by over 5%. Only, that hasn't worked out for him given that he showed no overall improvement in production against the shift during the season
Also, despite making more contact, Meadows wasn't exactly making better contact. His slugging percentage, though better than 2020 was lower than both his 2018 and 2019 numbers, as was his OPS and wOBA, while his wOBA on contact was actually worse than 2020 as well. In 2021 he had a 37.9% hard-hit ball rate, which was good for 32nd-percentile in all of baseball. He had an 8.7% barrel rate (only 6.3% after that hot stretch) and had an average exit velocity on balls in the air of 91.9 mph, which was just 25th-percentile in the league. Altogether, that is not an enticing contact profile.
Part of it might be the swing path. His launch angle was up at 21.7-degrees in 2021, which was down from the 24.4-degree mark in 2020, but up from his 2018 and 2019 seasons. As a result, his FB% has climbed above 53% in each of the last two seasons, but his line drive rate (LD%) has plummeted to around 18%. Even during a stretch in September where his hard-hit rate spiked and his barrel rate climbed back up to 9.8%, he still had a 57% flyball rate, with 27.8% of those being pop-ups, according to Alex Chamberlain's Pitch Leaderboard. That's part of the reason he hit .222 with a .196 BABIP during that span despite his barrel rate and hard-hit metrics.
All of which makes me firmly out on Austin Meadows right now. I don't care if he's making more contact if the contact is poor. He seems to have shifted his approach to create more loft in his swing, but he's not hitting it in the air with much authority and is also trying to go oppo more to counteract the shift, which doesn't seem to jive with also trying to lift the ball. He could certainly change his swing back to his earlier mechanics and approach, but right now I see him as a .240 hitter who will hit 25+ home runs but might get platooned against lefties in Tampa Bay or traded away to a potentially worse lineup. I'll let somebody else take the chance on that profile at this point in drafts.
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