Good luck pitching to Bobby Witt Jr.

There are almost no more holes in Bobby Witt Jr.’s swing

If you follow baseball, you hear about pitchers exploiting holes in a player's swing quite often. Pitchers don’t have perfect command and cannot hit those spots every time, but you can see in how they attack a player where the holes (or perceived holes) are.

Last season Bobby Witt Jr. seemed to struggle with fastballs up the most. If you look at his Fangraphs heat map for ISO per pitch for 2023, it shows this weakness clearly. Remember that the image is from the catcher's perspective so right-handed batters are on the left side here.

He did well lower in the zone and if it was over the heart of the plate and up he could still do some work, but anything up and in or up and out was a struggle for him. You can tell how comfortable he is with anything down and in here too, including things too low or too inside where he was still able to do damage on out-of-the-zone pitches. Now take a look at the same map for this year.

If you can get it in the extreme up and in part of the zone, then he still struggles a little, but anything up or up and away he is now hitting with authority. All of this has the small sample size caveat, like the .020 average in the middle of the zone is unlikely to actually be a trouble spot and is just a function of not getting many pitches in that spot. The only place, broadly, that he seems to be really struggling in the zone is the extreme down and away. If you stay out of the zone, the inside is a good spot for a pitcher as long as you don’t pitch it low, and the flip outside where you don’t want to be way up if you are just off the plate. He is covering the vast majority of spots a pitcher can throw it without the pitch being an obvious ball.

I set up those two maps and took the 2024 values minus the 2023 values to build the same map, but with differences from year to year.

He is doing better in 56.3% of locations, the same in 6.3%, worse in 35.9%, and one has no data yet. The positive differences are also quite a bit larger than the negative differences, so it is clear he is really handling most pitch locations better than before.

I wrote last year that Bobby was impressing me with how he fixed issues in the way that it always seemed Mike Trout did. In year one his defense was bad, and we were questioning if he needed to be moved to third. In year two he should have won a Gold Glove at short. Now, in year three, he is showing he has seemingly fixed one of the main critiques of his game from year two. Some of the extreme values on that heat map are going to come back a lot as the data settles in, so I may need to revisit this in a month or two, but watching him backs up the statistics. He is going to hit fastballs up hard from what I have seen. Actually, he hits almost everything hard now.

Bobby’s Baseball Savant page is showing just how much quality contact he is making in the early part of 2024. He is 99th or 100th percentile in average exit velocity, barrel%, hard hit rate xWOBA, and xSLG. That seems good. No one is better than him at any of those things so far. His expected slug is .757!! That’s peak Barry Bonds territory.

I expect his BABIP comes back a little and he doesn’t reach those heights, but shortstops who have even slugged .700 in a qualified season are not a thing. It has never happened. Right now Mookie Betts is right on .700, but he has never done that over a full season before, and he has never been a shortstop in the pros for a full season before. If this weren’t a Royals blog I might spend a lot more time talking about that freakshow.

I do not know where Bobby will end up this season, but I know for sure that I am enjoying the ride so far. What he can be, as far as a peak season, is now something I would put almost no upper limit on (within reason). There is a chance that he is a generational talent in a way that we have not seen in Kansas City since George Brett. I do not know if he will get there, or stay healthy, or all the other things that need to go right for such a thing to happen, but just that possibility is incredibly exciting.