This season, he is making contact on 80.9% of his swings, right in line with his career-high mark last year, helping him stay above-average in both walk rate and strikeout rate.Īnd not only is Joe making good contact, but most of it is also coming in the zone. And while there’s a fair bit of swing-and-miss in Suwinski’s approach, Joe hits most of what he swings at. He has laid off bad pitches with the best of them, rebuffing offspeed and breaking pitches particularly efficiently he’s swung at just eight of 54 balls out of the zone so far. 340/.421/.640 and garnering praise from the Pirates’ front office.įor Joe, too, his batted ball abilities and pitch selection have put him in good position to stick in Pittsburgh’s lineup. But an injury to Choi and Joe’s play have earned him a spot in the lineup nearly every day, where he’s slashing. It wasn’t immediately clear how much the 30-year-old ex-Rockie would factor into the Pirates’ crowded outfield picture after a down year in 2022. Next to Suwinski near the top of the chase-rate leaderboards is newcomer Connor Joe, who has dropped his chase percentage from an already-strong 21.7% last year to 13.7% so far in 2023 - from the 87th percentile to the 99th. The 24 batted balls, meanwhile, have resulted in 10 hits, five homers, and a. Twenty-five of his 28 batted balls would have been no-doubter strikes, with the only three exceptions being a just-high-and-out Michael Kopech fastball he drove at 103.7 mph for a go-ahead sac fly, and a pair of groundouts. Letting those go has meant not only an increase in Suwinski’s walk rate and a decrease in his strikeout rate, but also that the pitches that he is putting into play are better pitches to hit, leading to better contact. This year, that rate is down to 12.8% - just six swings in 47 opportunities, and an xwOBA of. Suwinski swung at 20.8% of outside pitches in the shadow and chase zones in 2022, resulting in a. He’s done a particularly good job laying off of pitches placed out of the strike zone off the outer half of the plate, where pitchers have targeted him frequently. Just look at this map of every pitch he’s seen: A characteristically patient hitter, Suwinski has been much more selective so far in 2023, registering a 14.0% chase percentage compared to last year’s 24.5% mark - the difference between the 75th percentile and the 99th. And he owes some of that success to his pitch selection. He owes a lot of his success to his ability to hit the ball hard his 95.5 mph average exit velocity is in the 97th percentile, his 57.1% hard-hit rate is in the 95th, and his 28.6% barrel rate is in the 100th. 480 xwOBA to show for it, the third-highest in the majors. This makes plate discipline and pitch selection a good area to explore looking for answers in April.Ĭenterfielder Jack Suwinski has been among the most pleasant surprises in Pittsburgh, with a beautifully unsustainable. As Russell Carleton wrote in this 2011 piece, “The way to increase reliability of a measure is to have more observations in the data set.” This early in the season, we can often learn more reliably from statistics that are based on every pitch a hitter sees or every swing he takes - something like swing rate or contact rate - than metrics with at-bats or plate appearances in the denominator. But when looking for answers this early in the season, I like to follow a general rule of thumb: the more granular the data, the better. We’re already getting to the appropriate time in this piece to repeat FanGraphs’ April refrain: it’s early. Pirates pitching has handled their side of business well enough - their 12th-ranked 4.03 ERA represents a significant improvement from 2022 but looks a little cleaner than their 17th-ranked 4.30 FIP and 22nd-ranked 4.55 xFIP - but the real bright light has been that offense. They’ve managed to limit strikeouts - they’re seventh among major league teams with a 20.6% strikeout rate – and have improved their walk rate by two percentage points since last year. 446 team slugging percentage and eighth with a. At the close of play on Thursday, after scoring 37 runs over a four-game stretch, they rank second in the National League with 103 runs scored, are tied for fourth in the majors with 27 home runs, and are third with a. The Pirates are off to a surprisingly hot 13–7 start, tied for the fifth-best record in the majors, and they have a burgeoning offense to thank.
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