Andrew Fischer and the Extremes

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There's no getting around this: striking out a third of the time in the minor leagues is a red flag. Few batters can succeed in the big leagues while whiffing that often, and very few batters go from the minors to the majors without seeing their strikeout rate rise. To punch out as much as Andrew Fischer has during his first full professional season is to flirt with the untenable. That's why, despite a record-breaking season of slugging, Fischer isn't currently riding high on most of the national prospect lists. Forget the top 100 prospects in the sport; FanGraphs ranks Fischer 14th in the Brewers system. The glaring danger of all those strikeouts has turned people off even more than 47 home runs have turned them on.

I'm not here to offer any guarantees about Fischer. The concerns about his swing and approach are reasonable. Actuarially, you can't expect to succeed the way he's succeeded this year when you get to the majors and the book is out on you. It's also important to take a little bit of air out of his numbers, because this has been a historic season for offense in the minor leagues. People in the know believe the ball is livelier than it's been in over a decade in multiple affiliate leagues; that's distorting raw numbers. It's not fair or right to compare Fischer's 47 bombs with, say, the 43 Kris Bryant hit in the Cubs system in 2014. In addition to being more balanced in terms of contact and plate discipline, Bryant had 34 doubles and a triple that year. Fischer only has 17 doubles and three triples this season, which is evidence that he's benefited from some balls that would ordinarily hit or one-hop a wall carrying right over it.

That said, national outlets dinging Fischer for his strikeout proclivity are going too far right now. There's a dynamic being overlooked. Fischer is slugging 1.136 on contact this year. He's only hitting 20.9% of his batted balls on the ground, and he's pulling the ball 55.7% of the time. He's also drawing walks at a very high rate. The degree of extremity in his process is impossible to overstate. This is a player taking grip-it-and-rip-it to a new endpoint, beyond what anyone else would (and perhaps even what he should) do. That, as much as the environments and level of competition, has fueled his power explosion.

To properly evaluate him, you have to place all of his stats in context—the homers and the strikeouts alike. His raw power is not as impressive as the homer total implies, not only because the ball is flying, but because he's totally selling out to get to all of that game power. That same selling out, though, explains his strikeout rate, and it should mitigate your worry about that number somewhat. Here's the final thing, which is subtle and is being underrated by Fischer's loudest doubters right now: the fact that selling out that way has worked speaks to a better hit tool than anyone is giving him credit for.

It takes a hitter with some real feel for the barrel to go as hard after pulled power in the air as Fischer has and actually find it. Yes, the run environments of the leagues in which he's played have helped. No, this approach will not work in the majors. If the Brewers didn't want him to do things this way, though, he wouldn't be doing them this way. You can be sure that Milwaukee—the organization least given to this kind of plan for their big-league batters—will have him change tack next year. They had a good developmental reason for letting him cut it loose—even encouraging him to do so—this season. There will be a major adjustment. One thing Fischer can take from this campaign is the proof that he can execute an approach few other hitters can. Therefore, when he moderates that plan and does what comes easier to just about every pro batter, he's likely to strike a more balanced overall profile.

This power surge isn't quite real. That slugging average on contact is a video-game number, and video games aren't real life. He'll go through some growing pains and lose some of his pop next year, as he (presumably) ascends to Triple-A Nashville and knocks on the door of the majors. However, he'll also strike out less, surprising many prospect hounds—but not observers who are able to sit with the complex message delivered by interleaved trend arrows pointing in opposite directions. What looks like a player with a huge raw tool but little refinement is actually a more nuanced case of skills interacting strangely while a prospect settles into the long task of becoming a strong big-league hitter.