The chase for hitters who hit the ball hard clearly supported by recent history
The Mariners have lacked bats with the 'hard-hit' gene.
The Seattle Mariners have prioritized offense in two of the last three acquisition cycles, including the current one which beganless than a month ago at the conclusion of the World Series. When speaking to the media, president of baseball operations and GM Justin Hollander have often mentioned a hitter’s ability to hit the ball hard. It’s a bit more complex than that, but it’s certainly not complicated. Generally speaking, the harder a ball is hit, the better chance it has to be a hit, and the better chance it has to be one of great value (extra-base knocks).
While there are multiple formulas for productive hitting — not all good hitters have high rates of hitting the ball hard, at least not the way pundits and clubs generally determine what is a ‘hard hit',’ which, by the way, is a ball off the bat at 95 mph or higher. Ty France, for example, ranks leabelow gue average for hard-hit rate, yet has been firmly 25% above average by Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+).
Exit velocity correlations to hitting successfully are supported by , suthe numbers ch as this chart via Pitcher List, using data from baseballsavant.com. This is from the 2020 season, but is representative of batted ball outcomes over the past five years or so:
The harder a ball is hit… see?
Hard-Hit Rate, a metric gathered and kept by Statcast which can be found at Baseball Savant and FanGraphs, is the most basic of ways to track this ability. In the bigger picture, wRC+ is an efforted catch-all to capture value of a batter’s performance, based on Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA), which attempts to assign proper value to each outcome; a single is more valuable than a double, etc.
Below, a small sample snapshot of the correlation between wRC+ and hard-hit rate from 2019-22:
Yes, it’s just five batters deep, but the results are the same if we go to 500. If you hit the ball hard a lot, chances are you’re a good hitter. If you’re among the elite in hard-hit rate — say, Top 25 — you’re probably at least a top 40-50 hitter overall, or somewhere reasonably close. There are anomalies in small samples, but chasing hard-hit rate as among the leading factors in evaluating hitters is a safe path to follow for clubs.
In addition to hard-hit rate being a decent-to-solid sign of offensive production for individual hitters, it’s also principally congruent with scoring runs at the team level.
The top teams in hard-hit rate in 2022: Blue Jays, Braves, Dodgers, Yakees, Twins. Those five clubs ranked, 4, 3, 1, 2, and 17 in runs scored. The Twins were the one deviation.
In 2022, the Mariners ranked No. 23 in baseball in hard-it rate, right behind the Colorado Rockies, and just ahead of the Detroit Tigers. Those two clubs combined for a winning percentage of .413. Both finished in last place.
Julio Rodriguez was the lone Mariners hitter to finish in the Top 40 in hard-hit rate this past season, and the club had just one other qualified batter, Eugenio Suarez, who ranked in the top 50. Carlos Santana, in 294 plate appearances, would rank top 50, and Cal Raleigh (415 PAs), would have finished in the top 100.
France ranked No. 96, and Jesse Winker No. 108. A year ago, Mitch Haniger’s 43.2% hard-hit rate ranked No. 43 among qualifed hitters, but he was unavailable for more than half of this past season.
Seattle simply needs more hitters who rake (and players who generally stay healthy). Teoscar Hernandez epitomizes this trait. In 2022, the outfielder ranked No. 8 in the league with a hard-hit rate just under 53%. In 2021, he finished at No. 22 with a 49% mark.
Here are the top five offenses in runs scored from 2022 and how many hitters of theirs finished above the league average (38.2%) in hard-hit rate (Min. 400 PAs):
LAD: 7
NYY: 7
ATL: 9
TOR: 6
STL: 6
Seattle had three. Three.
Note: Originally the above cited the Mariners with three players with an above-average Hard-Hit Rate, minimum 290 PAs — two without the abbreviated qualifier in order to get Carlos Santana in the mix. The Mariners had three, Santana would be four if the minimum was lowered from 400 PAs.
While we don’t know for sure which other hitters the Mariners are pursuing this winter, the reports and sensible speculation include at least two of the big four free-agent shortstops, outfielder Brandon Nimmo, Japanese outfielder Masataka Yoshida, and infielders Gleyber Torres and Kolten Wong.
We don’t have data on Yoshida, but his reputation and the scouting eye suggest he fits the bill. The rest, yeah, we have the numbers.
All seven above players have, in some way, been linked to the Mariners’ search for offense this winter. Every one of them have ranked in the Top 100 in hard-hit rate the two seasons combined, and only Kolten Wong ranked outside Top 100 — albeit barely — a year ago.
Michael Conforto, another player linked to Seattle, doesn’t have big hard-hit numbers, but has been generally average to above-average, aside from his injury-impacted 2021 season.
Cody Bellinger has had some big hard-hit numbers, but in 2022 he was about average in this category.
I’m not suggesting Dipoto and Hollander are living and dying by hard-hit rates. Clearly, they are not, or France may have been traded already, and one-dimensional hitters like Joc Pederson, Joey Gallo, and Gary Sanchez would probably all be Mariners by now. But there’s a reason we hear so much about the ability to hit the ball hard often, and that’s because the approach works.
The Phillies, for one example, signed Nick Castellanos and Kyle Schwarber prior to the 2022 season. Both players were darlings of the hard-hit stats in the seasons leading up this past one. Philly also added Brandon Marsh at the deadline.
The Phillies ranked No. 18 in hard-hit rate in 2021, and finished No. 6 this season. Most importantly, they went from No. 18 in runs scored to No. 7. The club’s hard-hit rate spiked over four percent, the biggest one-year jump in MLB from 2021 to 2022. Texas was 2nd, Pittsburgh 3rd, Atlanta 4th, Baltimore 5th. Seattle’s fell 0.6%.
There’s one more aspect to this we should consider, I think. This whole concept is rather elementary, but as I noted above, hitters with high hard-hit rates aren’t generally good hitters if they don’t make enough contact. The threshold bounces around from season to season and player to player as the game changes and all its variables do its thing. But there is a lot of evidence to support the combination of contact and hard-hit rates.
Gallo is a good example. He’s always had high rates of hard contact. But the metric, of course, is measured by balls in play. It’s not a rate of how many PAs end in a hard-hit ball.
When we check the top teams in the league at making contact, and cross that with those that hit the ball the hardest by rate of balls in play, we, again, find the best offenses in baseball: Astros, Blue Jays, Dodgers, Yankees, Phillies, et al.
There’s a balance, and that goes for teams as well as players.
Seattle finished No. 14 in strikeout rate a year ago — a more than acceptable rate in most circumstances. The Yankees finished one spot behind the Mariners. The Phillies finished No. 16, the Dodgers No. 20.
Why did those teams score so much more often, then? As my pops would say, I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.