Matt Olson Recentered Himself

Even if you’re not a Braves fan, you probably know the rough contours of what’s gone down for them this season. The preseason World Series favorites have had horrid injury luck all year. The reigning MVP, Ronald Acuña Jr., scuffled for 50 games before tearing his ACL. Spencer Strider blew out his elbow. Austin Riley broke his hand, Ozzie Albies and Sean Murphy each missed two months, Michael Harris II has been banged up; you’ve heard it all before. And the stars who have been around haven’t played up to their potential. Only Chris Sale and Marcell Ozuna, two past-their-prime retreads the Braves expected to be support pieces, have given the team a fighting chance.

That was a good description of the Braves for part of the season, but it doesn’t capture their recent form. Harris started the year in a horrendous slump; he has a 122 wRC+ since the All-Star break. Riley brought the power before his injury. Jorge Soler has been a nice addition. But perhaps most importantly, Matt Olson is back.

Olson put up the best season of his career in 2023, and it wasn’t particularly close. He launched 54 homers, got on base at a career-best rate, and played every game en route to a gaudy 6.6 WAR. He finished fourth in MVP voting, his first top-five finish, and led the majors in homers and RBI. Our projections thought he’d be one of the best hitters in baseball this year, and they weren’t alone.

The opposite happened, more or less. He came out of the gates slowly, with a 93 wRC+ in the first month. That’s hardly disqualifying – lots of great players have bad first months. Heck, Aaron Judge started slow this year, and he’s on his way to the best offensive season since Barry Bonds. But unlike Judge, Olson didn’t pull out of his slump with a few weeks of inspired play. Instead, the doldrums lingered. A tepid May dragged his line up to league average; the same remained true through June. He slumped hard heading into the All-Star break and then went 0-16 in his first four games out of it.

The worst part about this slump is that it felt all too explainable. How does Olson slump? Exactly how you’d expect him too – with too many strikeouts and not enough power. His game is about finding a pitch to hit and sending it into the seats. What’s the best pitch to do that on? A fastball right down the middle.

Wouldn’t you know it, in 2023 Olson absolutely feasted on fastballs down the middle. Nearly 80% of his contact on those fastballs was 95 mph or harder. He barreled up roughly 21% of them. His average – average! – exit velocity when he made contact with a fastball over the heart of the plate was 100.8 mph. I don’t always love average exit velocity as a stat, but three batters hit their middle-middle fastballs harder last year: Giancarlo Stanton, Judge, and Shohei Ohtani. I think there’s some signal in there.

In 2024, though, Olson’s bat seemingly fell asleep. It wasn’t in the most obvious of ways – his whiff rate on these crushable fastballs actually declined. But he hit fewer of them in the air, hit fewer of them hard, and got worse results. He launched 24 homers on middle-middle fastballs in 2023. At the All-Star break this year, he had seven. Meanwhile, his foul ball rate spiked above 50%, as compared to the low 40s and upper 30s he’d posted throughout his career previously. It’s reasonable to surmise that his timing was off.

If you want to be a good hitter, you have to take the easy wins. Plenty of the pitches that you see in every at-bat are going to be filthy, reality-warping sliders that slice off the outer edge, or 100 mph fastballs that hug the top of the zone. There’s no profit to be had in setting your sights on those pitches. Sure, good hitters do better on them, because good hitters are just better. But everyone is at their best when they get easier pitches to hit, and Olson was failing at that part of the job.

There’s a chain of failure that happens here. Fewer homers and more foul balls mean more early outs and also more deep counts. Those deep counts – and many of them disadvantageous, given that Olson was fouling off so many strikes instead of putting them in play – meant plenty of two-strike breaking balls. And wouldn’t you know it, Olson chased those at the highest rate of his career in the first half, a whopping 44.4%.

Sure, these are disadvantageous pitches for anyone – the league chase rate in that spot is 40% – but Olson used to win in these situations by taking often enough to keep pitchers honest, then hitting for power when they came back in the zone. The little edges matter; his whiff rate ticked up along with his chase rate, and suddenly two strike counts were bad for him instead of good.

That’s the easy story of what went wrong. A few little edges eroded, a few at-bats got prolonged and turned into strikeouts, and just like that, Olson was a below-average hitter. Easy come, easy go; maybe he just got too old. So now it’s time for the reveal: Olson has a 149 wRC+ since the All-Star break. He’s hit 16 homers in 61 games in that stretch, up from only 13 in his first 95. He’s striking out less and walking more. He’s barreling the ball up more frequently and generally looks like his fearsome 2023 self instead of the rickety 2024 version.

What’s changed? On the surface, it’s easy to say: Olson’s power is back. Everything else flows from that. It doesn’t have to be complicated; he had a .176 ISO before the break and has a .284 mark since. But how did he do it? He didn’t start swinging harder; his bat speed is actually down slightly in the second half. But I have a reasonable explanation, and it starts with those middle-middle fastballs.

Here’s a spray chart of where he hit them in 2023:

This is what you want from a guy with plus raw power. Olson’s swing is geared to torch those balls out to center field. Sometimes he lucked into an opposite field shot when he was late. He pulled a couple down the line. Mostly, though, his production on these most hittable pitches was all about hitting the ball hard and to center. In some of his other best years, his power came to the right field power alley, but it was always more or less up the middle. Contrast that with what happened in the first half of this year:

That doesn’t look like the same hitter. And while you might think this isn’t a big deal, I think it is. If you swing to hit a down-the-middle fastball out of the park to center, you’ll likely be out in front of breaking balls and offspeed pitches; they get to home plate more slowly, after all. What happens if you’re a little early from your dead center swing? You hit pull-side homers:

This whole chain wasn’t working early in the year. Even when he was hitting fastballs, he was mostly out front and pulling. That made his timing on everything else borderline unworkable. Look at his production on secondary pitches, with this year split out into halves. I took the liberty of highlighting the worst result in each column in red:

Now, that does make 2023 look like quite the outlier, but that’s fine; I didn’t expect Olson to be that good every year. But the first half of 2024 was a clear outlier in the opposite direction. He got away from the process that had worked so well, and his results took a hit across the board. But as you can see from his second-half numbers, he’s back to mashing breaking balls again. In a supremely unsurprising related development, his home runs on fastballs are headed out to center:

So that’s it, right? Olson started trying to pull the ball and got terrible, and then he went back to hitting fastballs up the middle and became great again. I mean, sure, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. One thing I left out on purpose: Olson was getting supremely unlucky early in the year. Take balls hit 100 mph or harder in the air, for example. In the last four years combined, he hit .748 with a 2.072 slug on those. He posted a 1.132 wOBA. In the first half, he was down to .626 with a 1.455 slug, good for a .859 wOBA. Way worse! But his xwOBA declined from 1.077 to .978, a far less severe drop. He lost about 300 points of wOBA and 100 of xwOBA.

Of course, xwOBA doesn’t take horizontal (“spray”) angle into account, only how hard the ball was hit and at what vertical angle. Could Olson have been consistently hitting the ball to the wrong part of the park, and thus “fooling” xwOBA? Not likely. If you’ll remember, he was pulling too many fastballs, which seemed to be the root of his issues. Pulled balls in the air tend to outperform xwOBA because the fences are closer in the corners. Olson just caught some bad breaks. In the first half of the season, Francisco Lindor led baseball in 100-mph-plus line drives that were caught by infielders, with six; Olson was second with five. They have two apiece since then. Sometimes you’re just snakebitten for a month or two.

The point of this is that the question of whether Olson was getting unlucky or slumping isn’t actually a binary. It was both. I can’t tell you exactly why Olson lost his timing. Hitting is incredibly complicated, and any number of adjustments or counter-adjustments could have knocked things off kilter. But combine that lost timing with a few scorched outs, and suddenly he’s putting up an average batting line. Correct the timing and even out the luck, and it’ll suddenly look like he went from unplayable back to elite. But it was almost the same Matt Olson the whole time. What a wild sport.