This piece assumes that you have read Robert Orr’s piece on Baseball Prospectus on Corey Seager and how Seager’s swing decisions are elite, so if you have not read that click the link and then come back here. From there Rob walks through various more traditional swing decision metrics before creating a new metric dubbed SEAGER (SElective Aggression Engagement Rate). For those who do not subscribe to Baseball Prospectus (which you should do for Rob’s piece alone), essentially Rob is trying to distill down the hitting approach that is aggressive on hittable pitches, especially in but is selective on non-hittable pitches. This accounts for where in the count things are, so as we will see in a second, swinging at the first pitch of the at bat is different than swinging with 2 strikes. Rob ended his piece by linking to a Google Sheet with all of the data for hitters with enough plate appearances, which naturally had me filtering down to the Phillies hitters, which I grouped to then talk about the hitters I actually want to talk about.
Bryce Harper (100th Percentile)
If you were confused about this metric, then this should help. The metric is named after Corey Seager who is the best at it, but second best and still in the 100th percentile outcome is Bryce Harper, because Bryce Harper does a lot of the same things that Corey Seager does. Bryce is a very aggressive hitter early in counts, especially on pitches in the strike zone. He tends to be aggressive on pitches in the zone in general throughout counts, but he has a lot of swing and miss early in counts as he just lets it rip. He then settles in and doesn’t really chase out of the zone and still hammers hittable pitches. So while this is all named after Corey Seager, you can just replace that with how Bryce takes at bats.
Kyle Schwarber (73rd Percentile)
Not every baseball player is a superstar and not every player can make contact do things like the stars. That said, Schwarber still rates out very well by this metric (73rd percentile). He does it by not swinging at a lot of hittable pitches (the entire Delaware Valley just yell “No Shit” at me), but also not chasing at an extreme rate too. He also does as much damage as anyone when he puts the bat on the ball. Could Kyle swing at a few more balls in the zone, probably, but it isn’t like it doesn’t work for him.
Trea Turner (72nd Percentile), Nick Castellanos (60th Percentile), J.T. Realmuto (57th Percentile)
I grouped the three right handed batters together because they all broadly do the same things (which was a problem in the NLCS), all three swing at hittable pitches more than average and chase more than average, with Trea and Nick having sort of the same pattern and J.T. swinging less and chasing less. All could afford to chase less, but I am currently saying obvious things.
Edmundo Sosa (0th Percentile)
Sosa qualified for Rob’s cutoff and he might be the worst hitter in baseball in this metric (I say might because he does have a smaller sample size), but he somehow takes a bunch of hittable pitches and chases out of the zone a ton. The SEAGER metric essentially says he has some of the worst swing decisions in baseball, and it is hard to fully disagree.
Brandon Marsh (35th Percentile)
Now we are into players that are actually why I wrote this. Brandon Marsh’s changes this season to his approach have made him a mini-Schwarber. He has the same high level of hittable pitches he is not swinging at, and he has the second best lack of chase on the team behind Schwarber. This actually translated to a really good year for Brandon Marsh, but he does not have Schwarber’s level of selectivity. Given that, the next step for Marsh will probably not to go full aggression, but to pick some more spots to swing early looking to do some damage. He does run the risk of putting himself in disadvantageous counts, because while he does not chase, he is not a high contact hitter and so this is going to be an area of give and take for him.
Alec Bohm (34th Percentile)
The biggest critique of Alec Bohm is power output. He finally cleared the 20 home run mark, and his power was up in 2023, but a .437 SLG isn’t really something for a corner bat to write home about. Bohm chases less than Turner and Castellanos, but that has come at the expense of leaving a lot of hittable pitches in the zone. It is rare that he comes to the plate looking to swing at a pitch in the zone early, and especially rare that he is looking to do damage on that pitch. Unlike the other right handed hitters on the team, Bohm has very good contact rates. That means he can survive more with two strikes, fouling off pitches, but also some of that contact rate is coming from looking to make contact and not looking to hit for power. It isn’t new or innovative to say Bohm should look to damage on strikes early in counts, but the data really indicates that he is caught in the middle of not swinging in the zone, but also not selectively avoiding chases either.
Bryson Stott (1st Percentile)
This metric rates out Stott very poorly for one glaring reason, he takes more hittable pitches than anyone else in baseball. Stott has made himself into a contact master, and he chases pitches out of the zone less than anyone but Marsh and Schwarber. He has dealt with holes in his approach and swing, by just not swinging. Being bad in this metric does not make a player a bad player, and Stott rating poorly because one stat drags him down is more indicative where he can go than a fundamental long term flaw. Stott had a .138 ISO in 2023, which was an improvement on a disastrous 2022 season, but not by much. Stott had a lot of two strike hits, often singles into places where balls tend to be singles, but not a ton of power output. The possibly less obvious improvement Stott can make is to chase even less, because he ran a 6.1% BB% in 2023 because he was often fouling off balls deep in counts and not just taking the walks he was given. That isn’t going to change his overall power output, it is just going to shift his walk rate more towards where Brandon Marsh and Kyle Schwarber trend out. The obvious improvement is the one that manifested in his grand slam in the Wild Card round where he went up first pitch swinging and did damage. Stott has gotten himself to a place where he can be an elite 2-strike hitter, and so he can take more risks knowing that if he does get to two strikes he can battle. No one is asking him to be a maximized Harper or Seager, but his current hittable pitches taken rate is 20 percentage points higher than the leaders and is 6 points higher than the patient Schwarber and Marsh. It is definitely an area that Stott and Kevin Long have acknowledged, but it would be great for his long term future if he can get to more power production and do it by being more aggressive early in counts and hitting the hittable pitch when it is given, and not be changing up his swing or overall strategy.