Taylor Ward Has Defied The Odds

Mike Trout is an amazing ballplayer. You don’t need me to tell you that. But what exactly makes him good? He has top-tier raw power, but Enrique Hernandez has the same max exit velocity as him. He hits a lot of fly balls which lead to homers, but so does Austin Meadows, and we don’t consider him a generational slugger. He’s struck out at roughly a league average clip, but he’s outpaced in that metric by Kevin Newman and David Fletcher and a countless number of other names who are clearly poor overall hitters. Only a select few players over the past decade or so have been able to combine all of these skills. One of them is Manny Machado, who hits the ball on the ground more often than Trout, but also has more raw power and strikes out less. But Trout has a career wRC+ of 173, while Machado’s looks puny in comparison at 122. What gives?

The previous paragraph is just a long and roundabout way of saying that plate approach is a really important skill that can make or break a profile. Mark Trumbo was a truly gifted power hitter who debuted around the same time as Trout, but a career .302 OBP is a big reason why he was never an above average regular, despite hitting 47 homers in a season. So how good is Mike Trout’s approach? Among hitters with at least 3000 plate appearances since 2015, Trout ranks in the top 5% of hitters at laying off pitches outside the zone. Why is it important to not chase? In the Statcast era, batters have a whiff rate of 17.6% on pitches in the zone, but a 41.1% whiff rate when swinging on pitches outside the zone. Trout’s selectivity gives him many advantages at the plate. First, his 17% walk rate is the highest in the league since 2015, giving him free bases at a higher rate than anyone else. Second, he doesn’t swing at pitches he’ll miss. He doesn’t have the bat-to-ball skills of Michael Brantley or Steven Kwan, but is still in the top 10% of the league at avoiding swinging strikes because of his swing decisions. Finally, he only swings at pitches he can crush, which is why he’s on pace for his sixth consecutive year slugging above .600.

Trout has elite plate discipline, but he also doesn’t swing all that much at pitches in the zone. Overall, he ranks in the bottom 3% of the league in overall swing rate. If you told someone from 2000 that the best hitter of his generation only swung 37% of the time, they might laugh you out of the room, but that’s how Trout does it. As a league, hitters actually have a negative run value when swinging, and Trout’s closest compatriots in swing rate are Juan Soto and Max Muncy, so he’s definitely doing something right there.

I’ve now written nearly 500 words of an article called “Taylor Ward Has Defied The Odds” without talking about defying the odds or even mentioning Ward’s name, so let’s talk about him. Coming into today, Ward has an incomprehensibly elite slash line of .376/.484/.733. To put that into context, that’s a 253 wRC+, and his slugging percentage is higher than the league average OPS of .684. So what did he look like before this season? In roughly one full season of games from 2018–2021, Ward had a 88 OPS+, 15 homers, an 8% walk rate, and -0.5 rWAR. That’s… a huge improvement, to say the least.

So what adjustments has Ward made? Despite an out-of-this-world slugging percentage, his raw power hasn’t actually improved. His 110 mph max exit velo matches his high from previous seasons and is almost exactly league average. His launch angle tightness has significantly improved — his “sweet spot %”, or percentage of batted balls hit between 8 and 32 degrees (basically the optimal range to hit line drives or homers), has gone up from 39% to 45%. He’s not an outlier in this metric, but he’s now solidly above average, and a big reason why he has an elite 16% barrel rate. That’s why he has 16 extra-base hits in 28 games despite a mediocre average exit velocity. But nearly all of his other offensive improvements can be explained by… you guessed it, approach.

Consider the following two sets of plate discipline stats.

Player A is a tremendously disciplined hitter, but Player B is better by every metric listed here. Is Player A Taylor Ward? No, Player A is actually Mike Trout. Taylor Ward, Player B, has been chasing less, making more contact, striking out less, and walking more than the greatest hitter of his generation. Ward seems to have made significant improvements to his swing approach in the span of one offseason. His 2018–2021 chase rates were a little bit above average, but he struck out well above the league average. Did he improve his barrel control or bat-to-ball skills? He actually didn’t — his in-zone contact rate is exactly in line with his career averages. He cut down the strikeouts not by making more contact, but by simply not swinging at bad pitches. \

So why doesn’t every average hitter simply learn the approach of Mike Trout and become a star? Well, like many methods of improvement in baseball, it’s really, really hard. It’s so hard that most players simply can’t do it. While working for FanGraphs, former scout turned prospect writer Kiley McDaniel talked about studies he did while working with teams that indicate “among above average regulars in the big leagues, less than 10% of them materially improved their plate discipline numbers once they got into pro ball”. In other words, swing decisions seem to be an immutable skill that’s “genetic and tied to vision”, in the words of McDaniel. Taylor Ward is part of that small fraction of hitters who slashed their chase rates and embraced a much more patient approach at the plate with tremendous success. While he’s made it look easy, that’s not the way it works for most hitters. His teammate Jo Adell is yet to put it all together in the majors despite double-plus raw power and significantly improved bat control, largely because he chases so frequently without the plate coverage to do damage on pitches outside the zone. Countless tooled out prospects have stalled out before the major leagues for this exact reason, including many who were considered to be quite gifted in terms of contact-making abilities.

I can already hear the doubters in my replies saying “how do you know he can keep this up”? And the answer is that he won’t. He has a comically high .460 BABIP, and his .443 xwOBA is well below his actual wOBA of .517. He’s not going to end the year with Barry Bonds levels of slugging percentage, especially given his pedestrian exit velocities. But many of his underlying metrics like barrel rate, launch angle tightness, and most importantly the plate discipline metrics have likely already stabilized and appear to be real changes. He’s already seen a large sample of pitches (512 of them to be exact), and the chase and swing rates aren’t a fluke.

Is Taylor Ward the next coming of Mike Trout? No, there’s likely nobody alive who is. Ward doesn’t hit the ball as hard as Trout, and that’s perfectly okay. He’s not going to hit 50 homers in a season or get on base at a .480 clip, and that’s perfectly okay. What Ward will do is combine above average damage on contact with elite plate discipline and approach. It might be a shock that the former first-round pick turned AAAA player would become a potential All-Star with Troutian walk rates, but Ward is one of exceedingly few players who has revitalized his game by doing one simple thing — keeping the bat on his shoulders.