If I’ve learned anything from the new Statcast bat tracking data, it’s that bat speed alone isn’t sufficient to produce a high-quality major league hitter. Johnathan Rodriguez, Trey Cabbage, Zach Dezenzo, Jerar Encarnacion — all of these guys, at this early stage of their major league careers, swing hard but miss harder. Bat speed only matters when you make contact.
When you do hit the ball, however, it’s nice when your swing is as fast as possible. Swinging fast while making good contact most of the time — it’s hard to do, but if you can do it, you’re probably one of the best hitters in baseball.
The reason it’s rare is because these two variables — swinging hard and making solid contact — are negatively correlated. As some probably remember from when these stats originally dropped, Luis Arraez swings the slowest and squares up everything, while Giancarlo Stanton swings the fastest but seldom connects. A slow swing is a more precise swing, and so the group of hitters who can swing precisely while letting it rip are uncommon.
In order to determine who these rare hitters are, it is necessary to select some arbitrary cutoffs. I’ve picked hitters who have roughly 80th percentile bat speeds and 50th percentile squared-up per swing rates. (A “squared-up” swing is one where a hitter maximizes their exit velocity.) Here is the whole list of hitters who average over 74 mph of bat speed and have at least a league-average squared-up rate: Yordan Alvarez, Gunnar Henderson, Manny Machado, William Contreras, Juan Soto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and… Lawrence Butler???
Yes, Lawrence Butler, a guy who got sent down in mid-May after hitting .179/.281/.274 in his first 120 plate appearances, is a member of this exclusive list. Since returning to the majors on June 18, he’s been the seventh-best hitter in baseball, slashing .307/.341/.622 and posting a 169 wRC+ over his 270 plate appearances entering play Thursday. How is he doing this?
For the most part, it seems like Butler is dominating by fixating on the bottom of the zone. I don’t know if this is super uncommon, but Butler has zero hits on pitches at the very top of the zone this season. Nearly all of his damage is concentrated on pitches down the middle and at the knees.
The heat maps make this clear. Here is a map of Butler’s slugging per pitch by zone:
These location-based tendencies imply that Butler would have a massive uppercut swing, but my eyes (and the data) suggest otherwise. According to SwingGraphs, Butler’s average vertical bat angle of 28.6 degrees in August ranked in just the 25th percentile of steepness. (Aaron Judge, for comparison, was in the 98th percentile with an average VBA of 40.7.) As Esteban Rivera wrote in an excellent post on Jackson Merrill from last month, hitters generally need to “employ a flatter swing path at the top of the zone and a steeper one at the bottom.” But Butler is defying this principle, crushing line drives off low pitches with his flattish swing.
When Butler does connect, he generally shows an even spray tendency. His singles are distributed pretty evenly across the field, and his home runs are clustered in the right-center gap. He isn’t cheating for his power; instead, he’s leaning on his strength to hit balls out to the deepest parts of the park.
Butler’s level swing plane and all-fields approach may contribute to his ability to maximize quality contact while swinging hard. By keeping his bat relatively flat through the zone, Butler gives himself a better chance to make contact compared to a hitter with a steeper uppercut. And by looking to drive the ball through the middle of the field rather than seeking out pull power, he gets a little bit of extra time to decide whether to swing.
Whatever the reason, Butler’s numbers are pretty remarkable. Entering play Thursday, Butler is striking out just 19.6% of the time since returning to the majors in mid-June. Among his fellow hitters slugging at least .600 over that same timeframe, only three are striking out less often: Guerrero, Bobby Witt Jr., and Alvarez. Butler’s physical strength and refined approach over the last two and a half months are leading to results that suggest he can, at least for a stretch, hang with the best hitters in the game.
Of course, Butler is only 24 and spent large chunks of his season navigating the Pacific Coast League. (I happened to see him crush a home run just inside the left-field foul pole in Tacoma earlier this year, prompting questions about what he was doing there.) To some extent, he is a work in progress, and pitchers will make their inevitable adjustments. Throwing him pitches high in the zone is one obvious attack plan for any pitcher. For whatever reason, he hasn’t done much against pitches in that location.
Butler has also shown some weakness against certain pitch types. Against sinkers, he’s put up a -6 run value. He’s taken a bunch of them for called strikes from both righties and lefties, and when he makes contact, he’s generally pounding it straight into the ground. Perhaps this is a downside of a flat swing path — if Butler puts his four-seamer swing on a sinker, it sets him up perfectly to hit a ground ball. A lefty with a demonic sinker like Framber Valdez, in other words, is Butler’s nightmare matchup.
Changeups, meanwhile, appear to be the go-to pitch for pitchers looking to induce a swing-and-miss. Butler is whiffing on 40% of changeups he swings at, by far his highest whiff rate on any given pitch type. This tracks with Butler’s fixation on the middle and bottom of the zone. If he’s hunting low fastballs, for instance, a changeup is the perfect pitch to throw to get him off balance and out in front.
When pitchers inevitably adjust, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume he can counter. On softer velocity near the top of the zone, he has shown he’s capable of putting a Merrill-like uppercut swing to inflict damage. And I’ve seen swings where he shows the sort of bat path variability reflective of a player with a pretty good hit tool.
That pitch was pretty far outside, allowing Butler to extend his arms, but it hints at what a potential swing on high pitches might look like. Even though at this point in his career it doesn’t look comfortable, the relatively flat starting point means the adjustment might not be as difficult.
Butler’s weaknesses aren’t really worth dwelling on too much. Again, he was sent down in May of this year. And as recently as 2022, he was striking out 31.5% of the time in High-A. In June of 2023, Tess Taruskin expressed concern about Butler’s “in-zone swing-and-miss” issues and ability to play the outfield — but also saw the outline of a future Butler breakout in his early-season strikeout rate reductions.
“Assuming Butler stays healthy for all of 2023, his flirtation with a better approach shows promising signs of blossoming into a full-blown romance,” Tess wrote. Fast forward a year, and not only has Butler reduced his swing-and-miss enough to maintain an average strikeout rate, he’s even holding his own in right field, grading out as roughly average by Baseball Savant’s OAA metric.
It’s been a while since the A’s developed a quality position player, but to my eyes, it looks like Butler could be better than just quality. He’s 24 years old, playing a decent right field, and slugging like one of the best players in the game. At the very least, I think he’s pretty good.
