This is a comeback season for Yandy Díaz, and not in a good way. After two straight seasons with a wRC+ over 145, the Rays first base is 106 so far in 2024. When Jay Jaffe checked on him on June 13, Díaz had just come out of the dugout. On May 10, Díaz was sporting a wRC+ of just 77 with an average exit velocity of 90.9 mph. Since that day, he's 128, and his exit velocity has dropped to 93.7 mph. More importantly, he was using a 60.3% groundball rate on May 10, but has run a 53.3% groundball rate after that point. For the season, that still leaves him at 56.4%, the highest among all professional players, but for Díaz, those few percentage points have always been the difference between being a good hitter and being one of the best in baseball. The higher his groundball rate, the lower his wRC+, and vice versa. The relationship is evident:
MLB's new bat-tracking data has put the issue on a high note. Explosiveness is a combination of two metrics: swing speed and squared swing. The official definitions are there, but if you swing hard and lift the ball high, you'll end up banging. That's a good thing, because so far this season, the Blast has a .731 wOBA, and a 27.7% slugging percentage. For Díaz, however, those numbers are .423 and 16.0%. He is tied with Gunnar Henderson for fourth in baseball with 100 hits, but only five of those hits turned into home runs. Of the 260 players who have hit at least 25 blasts this season, that 5.0% home run rate ranks him 248th. Why? You know why. He has a 1-point launch angle on his shots, tied for 259-of-260. At left, with the dirt inside the area almost obscured by the dots, is Díaz's spray chart in the explosion. To the right, with a home run sprinkled liberally over the top, is Henderson's.
When it comes to explosive downs, Díaz came out on top with a healthy lead. Sixty hit blasts were ground balls. Henderson is second with 48. Most importantly, Díaz gets less production than you would expect from those balls because he really buries them. He has a -11 launch angle on that low ball blast. Of the 84 players who hit at least 20 ground ball blasts, that's the lowest. As a result, Díaz's .207 wOBA on groundball blasts is well below the league average of .377.
While these numbers are fresh and interesting, I'd guess I haven't told you anything you couldn't have discovered for yourself: Díaz hits the ball a lot, and if he can lift it, he's good, but that doesn't make it. it happens often. From now on, I'll leave behind his launch angle issues, because the bat tracking numbers show us something even more interesting. I'm not sure how to translate it, but I think it's worth sharing everything in common.
Among professional players, Díaz's 18.6% strikeout rate ranks fifth. Here are the top 10 in each strikeout among professional hitters, but check the column to the right. That's the fast-swing rate, the percentage of swings at which bat speed reaches 75 mph. One of these things is not like the others.
2024 Blast Masters
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
There is Díaz at no. five, but look at his fast swing rate compared to other people. It's miles behind theirs. Only two people are within 20 percent of Díaz! Here's what that looks like on a scatter plot.
Díaz swings hard more often than the rest of the league, but for someone who crushes the ball as often as he does, his fastball rate is pretty low. Let's go back to our top 10 list and add another column, rate-of-per-burst-quick-change. We just split the first column by the second column, but now it shows how much the batsmen tend to add to the ball when they swing hard. I don't think the data behind these numbers are perfect, but they're good enough to give us an idea of what's going on.
2024 Blast Masters Redux
| The player | Blast/Swing | Fast Swing % | Burst / Quick Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yandy Diaz | 18.6% | 31.8% | 58.5% |
| Carlos Correa | 18.6% | 48.9% | 38.0% |
| William Contreras | 17.8% | 50.5% | 35.2% |
| Vladimir Guerrero Jr. | 18.2% | 52.6% | 34.6% |
| Juan Soto | 20.0% | 59.9% | 33.4% |
| Shohei Ohtani | 19.0% | 57.3% | 33.2% |
| Jordan Alvarez | 18.0% | 56.6% | 31.8% |
| Gunnar Henderson | 17.7% | 61.5% | 28.8% |
| Aaron is the judge | 19.9% | 72.9% | 27.3% |
| Giancarlo Stanton | 18.9% | 98.1% | 19.3% |
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
With the exception of Díaz and Stanton, all hitters here increase their fastball about a third of the time. Stanton, who is constitutionally incapable of swinging anything less than high speed, is at 19.3%. Díaz is at 58.5%. Simply put, when Díaz swings hard, he doesn't miss. It's the same with him in general. Among professional players, his whiff rate of 12.4% is second only to Luis Arraez. Díaz is the best in this graph.
Knowing what we know about bat speed – that a hard swing results in more contact but more misses, while a softer swing results in softer contact but a better chance of rebounding – my first thought was that maybe Díaz has this all figured out. When he sees a pitch he can really crush, he just steps out of his shoes, and when he doesn't, he does the best of Arraez, going up and down and finding a way to put a barrel on the ball. But that is not what is happening. Using the data from the bat-tracking leaderboard, I went ahead and regressed Díaz's engineer's contact rate on more consistent swings. (Again, I don't think these numbers are perfect, but they're good enough to give us a general idea.) When Díaz swings hard, he raises the ball 58.5% of the time, but with swings under 75 mph. , he raises the ball 21.3% of the time. That's not bad, but it's just a little above average.
Like I said earlier, I'm not sure what's going on. I don't think it's a coincidence that Díaz made a contact rate a full 15 percent above his career rate in the same season when his exit velocity, strikeout rate, fly ball rate, and strikeout rate were all taken. to drop. He increased his contact rate by letting the ball go deep and by swinging at pitches that are difficult to lift and pull.
He's seeing more sinkers, and the pitches he's swinging from low and far outside. However, if we go back to our May 10 split line, we can see that Díaz has changed his approach. He is swinging at a lot of infields, and because the bat tends to move faster on infields due to the need to meet the ball forward, his swing rate went from 27% before that day to 35% after it.
Díaz has the most interesting skill set in all of baseball. He can hit the ball as hard as anyone in the game, while making more contact than anyone other than Luis Arraez. That's just not how things work. Whenever he can direct that power somewhere other than the dirt in front of home plate, he's one of the best hitters in the world. I wish we could compare all of these batting numbers to last season's runs. It would be interesting to see if he is still such a dominant player in terms of swing speed when he plays as a power hitter. For now, it's a happy fact, but hopefully we'll learn more about the relationship between these abilities when we have more than half a season's worth of data.
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