Brewers Video
At the extremely tender age of 20, Jackson Chourio hit an impressive .275/.327/.464, with 54 extra-base hits. After Jun. 1, he was essentially a superstar in full bloom, hitting .303/.358/.525. He has awesome raw power, and it's not hard to imagine him doubling the 21 homers he hit last year in his best future campaigns. That's the good news.
Here's the bad news: Chourio isn't yet tapping into all that power on a consistent basis, and it's relatively easy to see why. Right now, the young slugger seems to be attacking the ball at an angle that generates ample backspin, but (often) scatters his hardest-hit balls at suboptimal launch angles. You can see that by examining his distribution of launch angles, with each bucket colored by the average swing speed of the balls in that range.
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Chourio is plenty capable of generating exit velocity, but his fastest swings are often leading to balls he either chops into the ground or pops up. That means that his best-hit balls are rarely hit at the trajectories where they can do the most damage. Of the 192 hitters who had at least 50 hard-hit balls in 2024, Chourio ranked 155th in the percentage of them that clustered between 10° and 35°, at 43.5%. The top of that leaderboard reads: José Siri, Mookie Betts, Kyle Tucker, and Taylor Ward, which illustrates the value of squaring up your hard-hit balls on an upward swing plane. On the other hand, Siri's leadership does illustrate a problem with it: unless you're supremely talented and have a well-organized approach, hitting those hard-hit balls on a valuable upward trajectory risks big strikeout totals.
We can't yet directly measure attack angle, in public spaces, though Baseball Savant is expected to add that data later this year. When they do, we might well find that Chourio is only beginning to tap fully into his power, because his swing—though lethally fast and highly adaptable, which is all one can reasonably ask of such a young player—is still focused on creating backspin and being direct to the ball, rather than maximizing home runs. That probably won't change in 2025, in a major way, but it could begin to adjust. Chourio's talent gives him a chance to excel at both contact and power, and he's going to get there. To do so, though, he might have to concentrate on creating a bat path that blasts upward through the zone more than the one he brought to the majors with him.
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