Brice Turang Has Baseball's Most Adaptable Swing

As the centerpiece of the team's great defense and their leadoff hitter against most right-handed opposing starters, Brice Turang was obviously essential to the Brewers' success in 2024. He followed up a rookie season that included a long demotion to the minor leagues and some deep doubts about his viability as an everyday player with a campaign in which he still had periods of major struggle, but was unmistakably valuable and occasionally star-caliber.

Power wasn't part of Turang's improvement, of course. He only had 35 extra-base hits in 619 regular-season plate appearances, and only seven of those were homers. He did, however, make lots of contact, which fueled a dramatic improvement in batting average and on-base percentage. Thanks to Statcast bat-tracking data released in early May, we know that a key element of his contact skills is the compactness of his swing. Among players with at least 300 tracked swings this year, only Luis Arraez had a "shorter" swing than Turang's--using the system's definition of swing length, which is the total three-dimensional movement of the tip of the bat from the start of the swing through the contact point.

Most of the time, though, short swings mean slow swings, and indeed, Turang's average swing speed was the 10th-lowest in the qualifying group. That costs power, and when it comes from the fundamental inability to generate bat speed, it's a real problem. Inescapably low swing speeds make you unthreatening to the point where pitchers will come straight after you, denying you the ability to draw walks, and they leave you unable to generate the pop necessary to make up for that.

So, we need to know more than average swing speeds and swing length. On his superb shiny app, analyst Kyle Bland offers a helpful tool: each batter's Coefficient of Variation (CoV) in swing speeds, which is calculated by dividing the standard deviation of a player's distribution of swing speeds by their average swing speed. Bland's table reports the raw CoV multiplied by 100, for ease of display and understanding. From it, we can figure out how much a hitter's swing speeds tended to vary. Did they get off their 'A' swing every time, or did they frequently slow things down, either because they had trouble identifying and attacking the ball or to give themselves a better chance of making contact?

In 2024, only the Rays' Jose Caballero had a higher CoV than Turang's, which suggests a high level of adaptability in Turang's swing. But wait: is higher always better in CoV? Not really! Much depends on how hard you swing, on average. If you're capable of elite swing speeds on a consistent basis, like Aaron Judge or Giancarlo Stanton, you don't want to have a high CoV. It makes plenty of sense for you to swing at that maximally dangerous speed, more or less, every time. You're likely to hit for more than enough power to make up for swinging and missing a lot, if indeed that's what happens.

The lower your average swing speed, the better news it is if you have a high CoV, because that means you're at least occasionally getting off a good, hard, lethal swing--but then again, lower average swing speed is a bad thing. So, I played with Bland's numbers a bit. Taking the geometric mean of each player's average swing speed and their CoV, I then divided by swing length--because there's a strong correlation between swing length and contact rate, and I wanted to make sure we weren't unduly rewarding players with long, sweeping swings who swing fast and modulate that speed a lot, but still whiff too much as a result of their bat paths.

Here's the leaderboard for Swing Adaptability Score (SAS).

Turang not only paces the league, but does so comfortably. He takes one of the most compact swings in the league, which is why he whiffed on barely over 13 percent of his swings this year, but unlike other specialists in short swings like Arraez, he can generate a lot of bat speed when he elects to sit on a pitch and attack it.

This doesn't mean Turang will break out in some further way in 2025. That question will depend on how many adjustments he can continue to make, including in terms of approach and mindset. However, if a player's upside does hinge on their ability to adjust, it's awfully encouraging to have so much evidence that they do that specific thing better than just about anyone else in the league. Turang is a good and valuable player even if he doesn't get materially better at bat, because of the sheer brilliance of his defense and baserunning. Because he's shown a mature ability to throttle up and down with his bat speed and to address the ball directly, though, he has at least some chance of taking the quantum offensive leap his manager envisioned for him seven months ago.