Garrett Mitchell's Swing Speed Reached Elite Territory Late in 2024. So, Now What?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Even if the team will take further steps to replace their departing slugger, it's clear that they'll need a power surge from their young outfielder. He has all the tools to do it; he just needs a new plan.

Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images

It's pretty stark, when you stop and examine it. It's not just that Garrett Mitchell has better swing speed than any other Brewer; it's by what a wide and frightening margin that's true. William Contreras and Christian Yelich come fairly close, but compare Mitchell to his cohort of young hitters on the team and it looks like he's doing something altogether different than they are.

In fact, he is. Players' swing speeds don't all fall on a normal distribution, the standard bell-style curve with symmetrical wings in size and shape. Brice Turang and Sal Frelick belong to the fraternity of hitters whose curves lean slightly to the left, indicating that they slow down their swings more often than they max out and aim for the fences. Blake Perkins does have a fairly smooth, normal distribution. But Mitchell is one of the hitters whose curve leans right, indicating more of a focus on power—and given the baseline created by his typical speed, the difference is especially huge.

As you can see from the dotted line indicating the league average, Mitchell doesn't just stand out by his teammates. Their slow swings make his bat speed especially shocking, but he boasts some of the better bat speed in the league. This is something you can sense, in a general way, when you watch Mitchell, but looking at it this way drives the point home especially hard. The guys with at least 250 swings and a similar average swing speed to Mitchell's (Jorge Soler, Willson Contreras, Vladimir Guerrero Jr.) indicate just how valuable the skill is. You really should be able to hit for big-time power if you can swing this fast.

Honestly, the wildest thing is, that chart and the names listed there slightly undersell Mitchell. Remember, he injured his hand on the eve of Opening Day and missed the first half. Watch the way his swing speed changed over time, once he returned on Jul. 1.

As he got further from that injury, Mitchell's bat speed only further ramped up. By the final fortnight, he swung with an average speed of 76.8 miles per hour. That puts him right next to Matt Chapman, Jo Adell, and Ronald Acuña Jr., and a hair better than Yordan Alvarez or Shohei Ohtani. Admittedly, it's easy to make an argument that Mitchell is more like Adell than any of the other names listed here, but even Adell hit 20 home runs in 451 plate appearances in 2024.

Why, then, is Mitchell projected for just 15 homers in a similar amount of playing time in 2025? Why doesn't he consistently access power like the rest of these players? 

The temptation is to blame it all on his vulnerability to the strikeout, and of course, there's truth in that. Jake McKibbin wrote earlier this offseason about the way Mitchell's swing gets him into trouble: he gets too far beneath the high fastball and is catastrophically likely to swing and miss at certain pitches in certain spots. He can't touch the ball upstairs.

Yet, plenty of hitters have that kind of hole, and some of them even end up with massive strikeout rates. They still hit for power, though. Mitchell fails where those hitters succeed, because he hits the ball on the ground way too much. He doesn't pick on the ball down; he looks to hit the high pitch.

Because he doesn't make much contact up there, he still has one of the lower average pitch heights on balls in play, but there's no automatic relationship between that stat and hitters' average launch angles. Mitchell has plenty of brethren who hit the ball down too often, but some of them prefer the high pitch. It makes no difference.

The only location in which Mitchell consistently makes contact at a productive launch angle is middle-away, where he generally doesn't swing much in the first place. In short, he's mishitting everything: into the ground in most places, straight up if it happens to be up and in.

With Willy Adames now a member of the Giants, the Brewers need an infusion of power in 2025. They'll get a lot—more than people think, I believe, and that will be a topic for another time—from Jackson Chourio, and some from William Contreras. They badly need a healthy and productive Mitchell, though, because if he can figure out how to get behind and beneath the ball, rather than always being on top of it, he can be a lethal slugger. He showed that ability even in the postseason in 2024. It's nice for the Crew to have such capable options in Perkins and Frelick, but they have to hope that Mitchell can start taking that sensationally quick swing cleanly enough through the ball to generate the power his raw movement data suggests is there. If he can, they become a more dynamic team, and one with a real chance to make a deeper run in the 2025 playoffs.

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[igor67]

A good time to remember that because of injuries he has very low total of professional ABs compared to his age/ years of experience. It makes me more optimistic than I would be otherwise he still has a potential big breakout in him and isn't just another If only guy.

[Brian]

No mention of his bat weight compared to the others.  Maybe he uses a lightweight bat which accounts for the greater bat speed without the power. 

[WAN2]

Lethal???  Historically, the best hitters have the best bat speeds?  Cherry picking won't hack it.  

[Frisbee Slider]

On 12/19/2024 at 7:10 PM, Brian said:

Maybe he uses a lightweight bat which accounts for the greater bat speed without the power. 

Mitchell has .805 career OPS in 322 MLB at-bats. Career OPS+ is 121. That’s not bad and demonstrates some power, to be sure.

[Brian]

1 hour ago, Frisbee Slider said:

Mitchell has .805 career OPS in 322 MLB at-bats. Career OPS+ is 121. That’s not bad and demonstrates some power, to be sure.

Also, Garrett Mitchell is a 80-grade runner which is a player with a running speed that is considered elite. 

So are Corbin Carroll, Elly Da La Cruz, Shohei Ohtani, 80-grade runners. 

That is if he can keep from pulling his hamstrings.