Six weeks after the Angels drafted Nolan Schanuel last summer, they promoted him to the majors. It was the fastest promotion for a position player in 45 years. The results have been mixed and raised interesting questions of whether he was rushed, whether he’s good, etc.
You probably have a mental model for how a player who essentially skips all the minors leagues would fail. This guy would be flailing at breaking balls outside the zone, probably late on quality fastballs, he’d be making bad swing decisions, with too many strikeouts and not enough walks. That’s not Schanuel. His chase rate is one of the league’s lowest, his contact rate is among the league’s highest, SEAGER loves him, and according to MLB’s newest bat-tracking stats he squares up baseballs more often than almost any hitter in the game. We’re talking truly exceptional here: Schanuel has the league’s second-highest “squared-up” rate on swings, a spot behind Luis Arráez, a spot ahead of Juan Soto.
Schanuel just doesn’t hit the ball hard. Despite being 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds, despite playing a position (first base) that typically demands power hitting, despite squaring up baseballs at elite rates, Schanuel produces less force than essentially any hitter in the league. In the past two years, only 18 batters have failed to hit at least one baseball 107 mph. Only six have failed to hit a ball 106 mph. Only three have failed to hit a ball 105. Schanuel has never hit a ball 104. It’s possible he can’t?
I’m not going to try to solve the riddle of Schanuel here, or tell you what to think of him. This just sparked my curiosity on a Schanuel-relevant question: How much is strength worth? What if you took a hitter with a great approach, like Schanuel, and made him exactly 2 mph stronger? On the day that I did all the querying that follows, Schanuel was hitting .237/.315/.333, despite all sorts of excellent hitting technique. What, according to Statcast, would he have been hitting if he were physically stronger? That was my question.
So I got every batted ball Schanuel had hit—there were 94 at that point—along with Statcast’s expected batting average (xBA) and expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA, an all-in-one offensive value measure). These are based on launch angle (hit how high?) and exit velocity (hit how fast?) but not direction (hit where?). (You can read more explanation of how the expected stats are calculated here.)
Then I got the xBA and the xwOBAs for balls hit at exactly that launch angle and 2 mph harder.
So, consider this fly ball that Nolan Schanuel hit:
That has an expected batting average of .260 and an expected wOBA of .334. It’s not terrible contact, but it has to be hit down the line, or in an extreme hitter’s park, or on an extreme hitter’s day, to get over the outfielder’s head. Otherwise, as when Schanuel hit it this year, it’s routine.
But if you add just 2 mph, like in this otherwise identical fly ball hit by Jared Walsh in the same ballpark one year earlier,
now it’s a home run! That one was, at least. In the aggregate, that launch angle with [Schanuel + 2 mph] exit velocity has an expected batting average of .417, and an expected wOBA of .601. Hit that ball at that launch angle on every at-bat and you’ll end up with a better wOBA than Barry Bonds ever had. Over the past four years, batters who’ve hit the Schanuel fly ball have slugged .694; batters who’ve hit the [Schanuel + 2 mph] fly ball have slugged 1.188.
From that you’d conclude that 2 mph makes a huge difference, and on precisely that fly ball it does. But I’ve set you up. It turns out that 2 mph actually doesn’t change as much as I’d assumed. Partly this is because of what’s known among Statcasters as the donut hole—the range of exit velocities where hitting a fly ball harder makes it more likely to get caught. Here’s a poorly hit Schanuel fly ball, with an xBA of .750:
And here’s a slightly less poorly hit [Schanuel + 2 mph] fly ball, which—because it carried a few extra feet to the outfielder—had an xBA of just .491.
So, it goes both ways. Still, in the aggregate, harder is generally better, and now we can say exactly how much better:
Schanuel’s contact:
All balls: .303 xBA, .313 xWOBA
Balls hit in the air: .401 xBA, .427 xWOBA
Balls hit on the ground: .154 xBA, .138 xWOBA
[Schanuel + 2 mph] contact:
All balls: .316 xBA, .338 xWOBA
Balls hit in the air: .413 xBA, .460 xWOBA
Balls hit on the ground: .168 xBA, .151 xWOBA
That’s not nothing. It would lift him from the 33rd percentile of all hitters this year to, roughly, a league-average one, though not for his position. It’s not enough to make him a star.
But, then, Schanuel’s contact isn’t just 2 mph weaker than the rest of the league’s. He’s arguably, literally the weakest hitter in the league now that the 5-foot-6 second baseman Tony Kemp has been relegated to Triple-A. The average big leaguer’s max velocity over the past two years is 7 mph harder than Schanuel has ever hit a baseball.
So let’s add 5 mph.
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