Now that we have surged beyond the season’s midway point, the statistical noise of the season’s early weeks has been washed away. For the most part, leaderboards look the way we expected them to. For example, the top six qualified hitters in Isolated Power or ISO (or the difference between slugging percentage and batting average) are Yordan Alvarez (.347), Byron Buxton (.335), Mike Trout (.332), Aaron Judge (.327), Kyle Schwarber (.305) and José Ramírez (.287). No big surprises there.
What would have surprised us back in March or April is the players who rise to the top if we lower the threshold for the ISO leaderboard to 150 plate appearances. Doing this allows us to account for players who spent time in the minors or on the IL, and it doesn’t push players like Salvador Perez, Seiya Suzuki or Nolan Gorman into the upper rung. The only players who would bump anyone out of the Top 6 are Isaac Paredes (.308) and William Contreras (.294). Despite being the Braves backup catcher and occasional DH, Contreras ranks as a Top 12 catcher in Roto value (per FanGraphs’ Auction Calculator and ESPN’s Player Rater), and he has backed up that standing by ranking just outside the Top 5 percent in average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives (96.8 mph) among hitters with at least 100 batted balls.
But what about Paredes? FanGraphs’ Auction Calculator ranks him in the Top 25 at both second and third base, even though he has just 161 plate appearances and is batting .240, due to an 11.9 percent line drive rate and .210 BABIP, both of which look certain to improve. Paredes’ value comes largely from his 13 home runs, which would have been hard to predict given that he had hit only two homers over 193 career plate appearances with the Tigers, who traded him to the Rays just three days before their season opener. His power spike is also mind-boggling, given that Paredes’ average exit velocity on flies and liners (EV FB/LD) is a merely decent 93.6 mph.
How has Paredes turned himself into a power hitter seemingly overnight? In the absence of overwhelming raw power, he has done it in the next-most obvious way: by hitting more fly balls and pulling more of the fly balls he hits. Paredes’ 45.8 percent fly-ball rate is more than nine percentage points higher than his career mark with the Tigers (36.7 percent), but it’s not extreme, ranking him outside the Top 10 percent among hitters with at least 150 plate appearances. It’s what Paredes has done with his fly balls that has made him one of this season’s most prolific power hitters. His 46.3 percent pull rate for fly balls is the highest of any hitter with at least 50 fly balls, and he ranks 10th in home run-to-fly-ball ratio (24.1 percent HR/FB, min. 150 plate appearances).
Is there a correlation between HR/FB and fly-ball pull rate, or is this just a coincidence?
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It’s hard to say, because over the past five seasons, almost no one has achieved home run power in the way that Paredes has been doing it. Since 2018, there have been 586 instances of a hitter making at least 250 plate appearances in a season and hitting at least 100 fly balls. Only four of them involve a hitter with a fly-ball pull rate above 43 percent. As you can see in the table below, three of the four hitters came nowhere close to Paredes’ current HR/FB, while Mike Zunino actually exceeded Paredes’ mark by more than five percentage points in 2021.
Hitter | Season | PA | HR/FB | ISO | FB Pull% | FB% | EV FB/LD (mph) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mike Zunino | 2021 | 375 | 29.40% | 0.342 | 49.50% | 54.00% | 100 |
Isaac Paredes | 2022 | 161 | 24.10% | 0.308 | 46.30% | 42.40% | 93.6 |
Willie Calhoun | 2019 | 337 | 17.50% | 0.256 | 47.40% | 44.20% | 92.9 |
Kurt Suzuki | 2019 | 309 | 16.00% | 0.221 | 47.20% | 42.90% | 90.4 |
José Ramírez | 2021 | 636 | 15.10% | 0.272 | 47.60% | 45.20% | 94.7 |
What Paredes does not have in common with these four hitters — or with the other 582 hitters in the sample — is a substantially larger number of plate appearances. It’s worth noting that Ramírez is the only player in this group of extreme pull hitters who put up such a high pull rate as an every-day player over the course of an entire season. It’s one thing to pull close to half of your fly balls for roughly 300 plate appearances and another thing to do it for another 300. Given that Paredes is more than doubling his fly-ball pull rate of 21.6 percent as a Tiger, we have even more reason to suspect that he has regression coming in that rate.
That could be a problem for Paredes, because fly-ball pull rate does make a difference in power output. In looking at the aforementioned 586 player-seasons between 2018 and 2022, there is a statistically-significant relationship between fly-ball pull rate and HR/FB. The chances of Paredes maintaining a substantially lower HR/FB of around 15.0 percent as his pull rate declines won’t be good unless he has a barrel rate above 11.0 percent. As of now, Paredes has barreled just 7.6 percent of his batted balls.
Not only does this finding give us reason to expect power regression from Paredes, but also for other hitters who have relied on a high fly-ball pull rate without benefit of a high barrel rate. Daulton Varsho (44.3 percent fly-ball pull rate, 9.2 percent barrel rate), Josh Donaldson (42.0 percent fly-ball pull rate, 10.3 percent barrel rate), Jonah Heim (41.9 percent fly-ball pull rate, 7.6 percent barrel rate), Travis d’Arnaud (41.3 percent fly-ball pull rate, 8.9 percent barrel rate) and Juan Yepez (41.0 percent fly-ball pull rate, 10.2 percent barrel rate) could all be due for less power in the second half. At a minimum, their fantasy managers should be prepared to replace them in 10- and 12-team leagues, and it would also be worthwhile to see what you might be able to get in return with a trade.
Note: Season-to-date stats are for all games played through Monday, July 11
Statistical credits: FanGraphs, Baseball Savant, Baseball-Reference, ESPN
(Top photo: Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports)
