New Statcast Metrics Say William Contreras Might Be the Best Hitter in Baseball

[Matthew Trueblood]

It might be time to stop talking about the Brewers' backstop as one of the best offensive catchers in the game, and start discussing him as an elite hitter, period.

Image courtesy of © Peter Aiken-USA TODAY Sports

About a quarter of the way through the 2024 season, it's not looking good for most of my bold predictions for the Brewers. That's ok; it's in the nature of bold predictions. It still feels a little bit good, though, to report that one of the prognostications about which I felt the strongest seems to be coming true. William Contreras is having a breakout, superstar kind of season at the plate. Now, new numbers available on Baseball Savant give us a bit of insight into how good he really is.

Thanks to the comprehensive motion-tracking technology that now captures all aspects of every MLB game, teams now know exactly how fast every swing is, and how squarely the bat meets the ball, and at what point along the bat. They can capture the length of a player's swing, by measuring the total distance (in three-dimensional space) traveled by the tip of the bat. The league's official public repository for this kind of data has now rolled out some curated sets of that data for all to see, and the top of the leaderboard is eye-opening for Brewers fans.

Unsurprisingly (If you watch him closely), William Contreras doesn't stand out in terms of raw bat speed. His average swing speed of 74.1 miles per hour ranks a very respectable 50th of the 221 batters who qualify for the leaderboard posted at Baseball Savant, but he doesn't even lead the Brewers in that category. Willy Adames holds that honor, and Adames also paces the Brewers in the percentage of his swings that rise above the 75-MPH speed threshold, where production ticks up sharply. Contreras, at 46.1 percent, is close behind him again, but ranks 48th. 

Contreras slows his swing down at times, according to the situation, the pitch type he anticipates, and the way he senses that his skills match up against those of the opposing pitcher. That hurts him in these rankings, but it doesn't actually cut into his production. Compare Contreras's bat speed distribution on swings on which he makes contact with those of two of the game's other elite hitters, Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani.

Contreras doesn't have quite the same consistency to his swing that those two have, but he shows the same capacity to crank it up to elite levels that they do, and his mode for swing speed--the speed he achieves most often, for those of you who've let go of sixth-grade math terms--is virtually identical to those of Ohtani and Soto.

That's not what makes Contreras elite, though. Rather, it's his ability to get a really good piece of the bat on a good-sized piece of the ball, while maintaining that swing speed. When a hitter can meet the ball on the sweet spot of the bat, at a relatively square angle such that the ball has to absorb most of the force of the swing, the resulting exit velocity is higher. Squared-up swings have at least 80 percent of the potential exit velocity created by the matchup of pitch speed and swing speed.

Contreras has squared up the ball on 34.4 percent of his swings, 18th of the aforementioned 221 batters. Here, again, he doesn't even lead the Brewers; Brice Turang is a few spots ahead of him, at 34.7 percent. As you'd guess, though, Turang doesn't have nearly the swing speed Contreras does, which means that his squared-up balls aren't as valuable as Contreras's. 

If (instead of using all swings) we use only swings that result in contact as the denominator in finding the rate at which a hitter squares up the ball, Contreras rises to fifth in the league, though he still can't quite make it to the top of his own team's leaderboard. The very best hitter in baseball at squaring the ball up, when he makes contact at all? It's Blake Perkins--but again, that's with the caveat that he just doesn't swing as fast as even an average hitter, let alone an exceptional one.

Now we're seeing how Contreras stands apart from the rest of the league. There are players who swing harder, or who generate more bat speed more often, but only Soto, Ohtani, and Contreras are so good at both creating that speed and finding the meat of the ball and bat with that violent a swing.

Finally, Baseball Savant provides a stat that blends these two crucial abilities--squaring the ball up and doing it on fast swings. Whether you use the total number of swings or only ones that generate contact as the denominator, the league leader in this statistic (dubbed Blasts on the site) is none other than Contreras. To make clear just how valuable this skill is, let's plot it against overall run value created by hitters.

How does a player without Luis Arráez's preternatural feel for contact or good speed hit .346/.429/.526, as Contreras is doing so far this season? Consistently putting a big piece of the bat on a big piece of the ball, even while swinging pretty hard, is the best formula. It's still likely that Contreras comes back to Earth a little bit--after all, his batting average on balls in play for the season is .415 right now. As we've discussed before, if he wants to take the final leap and become the best hitter in baseball, he probably needs to generate a few more line drives and fly balls and a few fewer grounders. With a good sense of the strike zone and one of the fastest, most accurate barrels in baseball, though, he's already close to as good as a hitter can get.

View full article

[WAN2]

So far, so good.

[Trax]

He has been great, and the Hader trade while the timing wasn't the best was a WINDFALL for the Brewers.  Essentially netting Contreras and Gasser long term.

Better sign Contreras to a longer term yet extension Brewers right now.  Maybe the plan is to ride it out and trade him when Jeferson is ready....