We’re 10 years into having Statcast at our finger tips to analyze baseball in a more granular way than most of us could have dreamed of.
The Statcast metric I continue to waver about is maximum exit velocity (Max EV), which Eno Sarris once referred to as a way to quantify the raw power we see graded for players on the 20-80 scale.
Max EV is fun, that much I’m sure of, and hitting baseballs harder than anyone else on the planet is undoubtedly cool.
Baseball America’s Kyle Glaser summed up raw power this way:
Raw power generally is measured by how far a player can hit the ball, but game power is graded by how many home runs the hitter projects to hit in the majors, preferably an average over the course of a career.
Of the five position player tools — hit, game power, raw power, speed, field — I have started to wonder if raw power is the least valuable bit of information we could have in a scouting report, and if it’s even worth bringing into the conversation when we’re trying to analyze players.
Check out this leaderboard from FanGraphs looking back at the past 10 years for Max EV leaders (no minimum PA requirement):
It’s a nice mix of current and former stars, with players you may have completely forgotten about interspersed.
For the players on this leaderboard who failed to become big-league regulars, there was usually too much swing-and-miss in their profile (bad hit tool), or their defensive value was too low for them to play enough to improve against top-level pitching over time.
Our final show of the past week (Friday) featured a question about the long-term ceiling of Jackson Chourio, and an inquiry about where we expect redraft leagues to target him in 2025 drafts if his current production continues over the final seven weeks of the season.
One of our Discord members suggested the Round 2-3 turn (~pick No. 30 overall), where Elly De La Cruz and Gunnar Henderson were going throughout the 2024 draft season, which makes a lot of sense given the expectations for Chourio as a prospect and his relatively quick ascent toward those levels during his rookie campaign.
As for the long-term ceiling, Eno pointed to Chourio’s max exit velocity (109.7) as a reason to temper the power expectations (at least for now) from the 20-year-old rookie, and that’s when I began to wonder if that particular data point is enough for us to shape expectations, especially for players debuting at such a young age (I would apply similar reasoning to prospects, since physical development is not necessarily complete for most players in their early 20s.)
Nevertheless, I’ll use Chourio’s teammate, William Contreras, as one example of why I think Max EV might be more misleading than helpful. Contreras has the third-highest max EV on a batted ball this season (118.1 mph) — only Oneil Cruz (121.5) and Shohei Ohtani (119.2) have hit a ball harder. Despite that raw power ceiling, Contreras has just 13 homers in 502 plate appearances, in large part because he continues to hit the ball on the ground at an elevated clip (54.3% in 2024, 53.5% GB% for his career). Yandy Díaz frequents the Max EV leaderboards (he’s sixth this year), and his home-run output is usually light relative to his raw power. Add Jesús Sánchez and Seiya Suzuki to the group of players with elite top-end numbers without the 25-30 homer pop you might expect to accompany them.
Cruz’s somewhat underwhelming homer total (18 in 422 PA) relative to his league-leading Max EV is the result of swing-and-miss (32.7% K%), but I think there might be more than one way for a player to earn above-average scouting grades for their power. Consider Keith Law’s write-up of Chourio from his Brewers Top 20 prospects list.
“Chourio still finished fifth in the Double-A Southern League in steals and tied for fourth in homers, and has barely begun to fill out physically, getting to that power and hard contact with strong wrists and incredible bat speed.
“It’s a simple swing with just enough loft in that follow-through for line-drive power, and he projects to hit for high averages as well.“
The most intriguing current players with similar Max EVs to Chourio are CJ Abrams, Jazz Chisholm Jr., and Francisco Lindor — all within 0.3 mph of Chourio’s top-end exit velocity. Chourio has delivered a strikeout rate as a rookie that’s better than any we’ve seen from Chisholm (even in a career year), and it will be interesting to see just how much Chourio can push his K% down to potentially match early-career averages from Lindor (.273-.311 between 2015 and 2019).
Lindor is also a fun retro comp for Chourio because his entire MLB career has unfolded with Statcast available. Here’s a quick trip down memory lane courtesy of FanGraphs. You might recall that Lindor debuted in Cleveland as a 21-year-old in 2015. His Max EV high point came in Year 4, along with a surge in barrel rate to a level that was a career-high until his past two seasons with the Mets at ages 29-30.
Many of us likely underprojected Lindor’s power coming off his 2015 rookie year marks — 110.4 max EV, 3.2% barrel rate — but the potential was in the scouting reports all along, and we should have been hesitant to consider a 21-year-old as a finished product while many players his age were two or three levels away in the minors.
My assumption and projection for Chourio is that low-to-mid 20s homer totals might be the safe short-term projection, but his bat speed and ability to hit top-end velocity high in the strike zone give me added confidence in a ceiling that includes a few 30+ homer seasons at his power peak. Nothing we’ve seen to this point in Chourio’s career points to a Ronald Acuña Jr. level power ceiling (Acuña has topped 40 homers in each of his full, healthy big-league seasons), but there is plenty of room to be a highly productive player even if we don’t have a future 1.1 ceiling in the current forecast.
Now that we’re 10 years into the “Statcast Era,” how are you working with the available data to analyze players? Drop a comment below, or join our Discord to be a part of the conversation!
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Just a couple of quick highlights from the past week’s episodes.
Our game plan segment with Trevor May on Thursday featured Blake Snell, and trying to find an approach for hitters to utilize when the two-time Cy Young Award winner has all of his stuff working, as has been the case his return from the IL prior to the All-Star break.
Eno explained why the matchup against Marcell Ozuna will be one to watch in Snell’s next outing Monday against Atlanta.
It’s Ugly Now, But the Future Isn’t Hopeless
The White Sox snapped a 21-game losing streak last week, and while their team preview segment this winter featured a summary from yours truly that said something to the effect of “I know a 100-loss team when I see it,” things have gone even worse than expected in 2024. Thanks to bottoming out in a surprisingly quick fashion, the White Sox have the “Worst Team in Baseball” label, but with less than two months to go before the playoffs begins, we wondered on our Tuesday episode who the best team in baseball is at this point in the season. The White Sox came back on the Friday show as Baseball America released farm system midseason talent rankings, which had them inside the top 10 thanks to Colson Montgomery, Noah Schultz, Hagen Smith, Drew Thorpe and Edgar Quero.
While Guardians and Brewers fans might feel snubbed by the lack of a mention in the “Best Team in Baseball” conversation, their exclusion was merely the result of being clearly in the next tier of talented clubs, all of whom are capable of winning a World Series this fall.
Of the teams that were included — Phillies (Britt), Orioles (Eno), Dodgers (DVR), Royals (honorable mention) — the Dodgers might be the most fascinating to watch down the stretch as they try to patch together their best 26-man roster in time for an October run. The season-ending UCL strain for River Ryan that occurred a few days after this episode was recorded is a low-key big deal for someone who looked like a potential stabilizing presence for the middle of the rotation, at least until Yoshinobu Yamamoto was ready to come back from the IL.
Thanks for reading (and listening) — we’re back at it Monday!
(Top photo of Jackson Chourio: Dale Zanine-USA TODAY)
