I have a secret to tell you, which may surprise you. I think baseball analysis is very complicated. I can't keep track of everything. There are too many numbers, too many approaches, too many parts of the game that can be good in one situation, bad in another, and neutral in a third. My entire job is to analyze baseball, and yet I find myself drowning in data more often than managing it. My solution is to simplify. I look at players' greatest strengths – management tools, in baseball parlance. Aaron Judge is power personified, and his entire game flows from that. José Ramírez is an excellent host. Mookie Betts is the most versatile man alive. Luis Arraez can hit otherwise soft lines in his sleep. These shortcuts help me imagine how the player's entire game fits. But I have a problem: I'm trying to analyze Jackson Chourio, and I can't figure out what his greatest strength is.
You might think it's his speed. You wouldn't be wrong, really. He's one of the fastest players in baseball, and he uses that to his advantage everywhere. He is a great player and defender. He eats down the field with big strides, which is the kind of speed you realize after the fact. I watch him and I think he's an above-average center fielder. The Brewers have only played him in the corners this year, as they are loaded with good defensive players and Chourio has little experience, but he is so good that if he ends up there, he could be a big Jason Heyward there.
I guess we could stop the article there, but speed isn't a major strength for most top players. Indeed, Bobby Witt Jr. and Elly De La Cruz are the current kings of the run, but you don't look at their games and say, “Oh, the thing about them is that they're fast.” That's the place for Billy Hamilton or Victor Scott II, and those guys just aren't the stars that I think Chourio will be. I look for an offensive weapon that makes everything work for him, which explains how he hits the big leagues at 20 years old.
Is it power? Chourio is quite powerful. He hit 22 homers in Double-A at age 19, and is tracking a 20-bomb season in the majors in his first year. But if you ignore the name and look at his stats, we're not really talking about super power here. The hardest ball he hit this year clocked in at less than 110 mph. His 90th percentile exit velocity, 104.1 mph, is about the same as the death rate. His hard hitting rate is much better than that, but his barrel rate is worse. If you were just looking at the Baseball Savant percentile bars, you would come to the conclusion that his power is average to below average. It's amazing!
I would argue that this is an area where season averages don't tell the full story, though. In April and May, Chourio's 90th percentile exit velocity was lacking – 103.5 mph, in the 38th percentile league wide. Since then, it has increased to 106 mph, the 72nd percentile. His hit rate rose from 42%, the 65th percentile, to 46.4%, the 83rd percentile. His groundball rate dropped from 52% to 48%, and has dropped to 45% since the start of July. That's still higher than the league average of 43%, but we're heading in the right direction. In other words, he both hits the ball hard and puts it in the air more often. It won't surprise you that his solo power is trending upward:
Still, I'm not ready to say that's the answer. Being in the 72nd percentile for power is great, but it means that 28% of major leaguers were hitting the ball hard or hard. Superman is not stronger than 72% of the world – he is super powerful. Let's keep digging to see if we can find something more satisfying.
A quick interlode: One thing's for sure this is not the case Chourio's biggest strength is voice recognition. I'm partial to the swing/take charts you can find on Baseball Savant for explaining this. Here, for example, is a player that I would say has exceptional voice recognition:
Juan Soto knows what he's doing there. On pitches thrown to the heart of the plate, he swings about average. In the worst places, you swing away below average. You can't fool him by chasing him out of nowhere, but he doesn't do anything if you follow him. Here's another way voice recognition can be seen:
Corey Seager wants to swing, so when hitters throw him hitable pitches, he does just that. If the pitchers avoid him, he knows how to hold back. I'm not making a judgment about whether Soto's plan is better than Seager's, or vice versa. Apparently they have the same ability, though. Chourio does not:
He swings as often as Soto when he sees pitches down the pipe. He chases about three times. The comparison to Seager is even more surprising. The best place to be, all things being equal, swing more than average in the fairways and less than average out of bounds. Chourio does the opposite.
However, here too I have good news. And by splitting the season roughly in half on June 1, Chourio's anger in the area has improved; he has reached about 75% of heart sites since then, up from 68%. Meanwhile, his pass rush rate dropped slightly, from 32.7% to 31.5%.
Most encouragingly, he was much better at identifying the edges of the area. I define that in local terms; the place I'm looking at is at the edge of the plate, in the shadow zone but outside the rulebook strike zone. These are the hardest pitches to give up, which is why they work so well. Hitters swing at them 44% of the time, and when they do, the results are incredibly bad. In terms of starting value, pitching pitches result in swings worth 4.7 runs more than average per 100 pitcher pitches. That's the equivalent of a Clay Holmes slider, and more effective than any pitch thrown by a starter. On the other hand, taking those fields is good; balls after all. Take a pitch at the plate, then change the pitch from a Holmes slider to a Ross Stripling slider (-3.5 runs/100 pitches).
Chourio was eaten alive by dogs earlier in the season. He threw at 55% of them in the first two months. He has seen 126 of them since June 1 and is only up 51, a 40.5% rate. That change came with a few more changes to the ends of the plate, but hey, that sounds like a good change to make anyway, and we already know he throws more pitches up the middle.
Put another way, Chourio was in the bottom 10% of all hitters when it came to swings in his first few big league months. He is now in the 35% group. He did it without sacrificing good changeups, meaning his improvement in power production could be attributed to getting better pitches. When you both hit pitches on the edge again letting the meatballs pass, it's hard to put up good power numbers.
Could Chourio's carry tool punish breaking balls? He hit sliders, curveballs, and cutters very well this year. He actually chases four-seamers as often as sliders, and when pitchers leave the slider in the strike zone, he's incredibly aggressive. He has hit seven homers, half of his total, on breaking balls this year. All seven were in the strike zone. Even curveball maven Charlie Morton tagged along:
So maybe this is it. He's on board with a plan to send wrecking balls into orbit. You might think that all that desire to throw to curveballs means that those home runs come more aggressively out of the zone. You would be wrong. Five of those seven homers (I'd say bombs, but one was internal-the-parker) have come in the last two months. It turns out that if you can set pitches out of the zone, pitchers will come after you on your terms more often.
Ultimately, I'm not sure any of these skills are what I'll think of first when looking at Chourio. Sure, he's fast and strong. Of course, you try to blow up broken balls. He's successful, too: He's 12th in baseball in slugging percentage on contact when pitchers throw breaking balls down the middle, and 14th in xSLG. That's not a cherry-picked number that doesn't reflect real power, either: Aaron Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Teoscar Hernández, and Seager are the top four in that number. Real talent – I'm not sure it's his best.
No, Chourio's power was staring me in the face all the time. Matt Trueblood even tried to tell me about it. It included all those changes he made in the last two months. His defining characteristic is youth. This guy is 20! Only 20 20-year-olds (a fun combination there) have managed 300 major league plate appearances in a season since the turn of the century. There are only 18, actually, because two of them are Soto and two are Bryce Harper, but I liked the round numbers. Chourio has held his own in an age when people don't.
A dramatic improvement in his results as the year went on? It probably has to do with the fact that he's practicing big league competition at an incredible rate. This time three years ago, he was in the Dominican Summer League. Last year, he was used to life as a Biloxi Shucker, about five years younger than the average Southern League player. He got a cup of coffee at Triple-A Nashville (7.3 years younger than league average) at the end of the season, but for the most part, it's all earned as he goes.
As of July 1st – just so you know, I don't use one end, I do two — Chourio is hitting .331/.378/.517, good for a 150 wRC+. He is tied with Seager with 1.5 WAR, in the top 25 among position players at the time. He hits low and still hits hard. He is 11th in the majors in steals, too. You hit the bullpen on a playoff team and head home there.
I'll say it again: This is not normal. Players are not good like this. Baseball at this level is a game for adults. Batsmen need time to develop; even the guys we think of as phenoms, most of them didn't hit the mark before 21. Next season, we'll have a better idea of what Chourio's best skill is. For now, it's enough to be surprised at how quickly you solve everything.
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