New Statcast Swing Data Gives Both Diagnosis and Treatment Information on Struggling Christian Yelich, William Contreras

It's not breaking news to say that Christian Yelich and William Contreras have struggled this season. With the former recovering from a back surgery that removed a significant amount of tissue and muscle from his lower back, while the latter embodies the spirit of the black knight from Monty Python, there are understandable reasons for each to be a far cry from their MVP-caliber best form. 

Last week, Baseball Savant released some new metrics showcasing the specific shapes of various swings. Perhaps these numbers will allow us to delve deeper into their struggles, seeing what their swings have looked like at their best and their worst—and, therefore, what factors are key to their success in the future.

Before I go into the weeds, a couple of these new statistics that may be important are described below:

• EV50 - An average of the hardest-hit half of a player's batted balls, EV50 bins everything a batter hits as either above or below their norm. Separating outcomes this way lets us break down what happens when a hitter meets it well, and tell what's different when they don't.
• Attack Angle - The vertical angle the sweet spot of the bat is traveling at the point of impact, this metric helps us see how geared that swing is toward elevating the baseball. The ideal attack angle is considered between 5° and 20°, but that's a catch-all range. For most hitters, there's some specific, smaller range of attack angles that indicates they timed up a pitch correctly. 
• Attack Direction - The horizontal angle the sweet spot travels at the instant of contact tells us how a swing is likely to direct the ball. It's also a measurement of timing, but in a different dimension than Attack Angle.
• Swing path tilt - This is the average angle of "tilt" across their shoulders/bat path, as in the picture below. Imagine a horizontal line through the handle of the bal. This is the angle between that imaginary line and the bat itself.
• Intercept Point - How far in front of the front edge of the plate a hitter impacts the ball—or, if the number be negative, how far behind that point they do so

So what I'm going to attempt to do is isolate the "good" contact each of our subjects has made, and compare the results over their last two seasons.

William Contreras
Immediately, a couple of things stand out for Contreras, thanks to the shading system employed by Baseball Savant. The batted balls that have reached his EV50 in both 2024 and 2025 have been largely similar.

The attack angle is slightly better in 2025, finding that ideal bat path with more regularity, while the attack directions are identical. In theory, the higher average attack angle and the better concentration within the ideal attack angle range should be producing better results, but that's not what we've actually seen in 2025. Whence comes the difference?

Well, if we look at the difference between the EV50 and non-EV50 balls, a couple of things become clear. The first is that, in 2024, Contreras largely caught the ball at the same average distance in front of the plate, actually getting further out in front on his non-EV50 batted balls. There's a drastic change, however, in 2025, where he's catching the ball several inches further back. With the deeper contact point (relative either to the plate or to his body), Contreras can't get his arms extended through the point of contact, and he can't turn through the natural arc of the swing, which is resulting in more balls going toward the opposite field.

So in 2024, with Contreras's best attack direction to get to his maximum exit velocities being around 5°, he would often access power by being early on the ball. The average non-EV50 batted ball at just 1° to the opposite field at contact tells us that. In essence, he was further extended through the ball in these contacts, and thus still found good elevation to the pull side at times. In 2025, however, that number is more to the opposite field at 8°. In short, he's late, partially because he might be mistiming things, but partially, too, because his bat is slower.

There's also the point that Contreras's swings are at their best in that 1° to 5° range of attack direction. We can see below, when we sort Contreras's data by pitch result into whiffs, fouls and balls in play, that the balls in play all average within that range—while the fouls and whiffs all sit outside of that. That makes sense; you mostly put the ball in play when you get the bat across it, rather than striking a glancing blow.

Contreras is capable of incredible power, so even when not making the best contact of which he's capable, he can get to extra bases—especially when he is getting it elevated to the pull side. If he's late to the ball, however, that means he's likely hitting down on the ball, resulting in less elevation and a greater ground-ball profile, which has certainly manifested itself early in 2025.

The main differentiator here is the bat speed. Due to the arc of the swing, if we took a swing starting from the exact same time, but one swing was two miles per hour faster, that swing would be able to impact the ball further out in front and more to the pull side. Exacerbating this problem is Contreras's stance, which (by becoming more closed off) is making it harder for him to pull the ball with authority and starting the bat slightly farther behind him. That, in turn, changes the sweet spot of contact for him. His stride is pulling him open, but then comes the challenge of keeping the barrel in the hitting zone long enough to punish pitches on the outer third.

The broken finger is no doubt having an impact on the power Contreras can generate through the final parts of the swing with how his wrists and hands manipulate the barrel, and that impact on bat speed is having a huge effect on Contreras's intercept point and quality of contact as a result.

This marries with his 2024 results. Contreras had a hot start in April and May last year; cooled off in June; heated up again in August; and struggled in September, with the effects of a grueling season piling up. We can see the peaks are coming in those hotter periods for Contreras, while dipping off in those periods where he struggled. I'd love to put a rolling average line on the chart above, but unfortunately, Statcast doesn't provide that for bat speed just yet.

The good news is the bat speed has come back more of late, though it's still sporadic. Two of his hits on his big night last Monday came on swings north of 75 mph, a good sign for Contreras. If he can manage the pain in his finger to an acceptable level, hopefully, he can rediscover that bat speed on a more consistent basis. If not, it raises further questions about why an IL stint to get him right isn't being attempted.

Christian Yelich
Yelich's struggles are slightly different from Contreras's. His biggest struggles are in his inability to impose himself on fastballs, with drastic increases in his swing-and-miss rates against sinkers and four-seamers—to say nothing of his travails against anything out of a lefthander's release point.

Where it differs for Yelich is that his bat speed has been absolutely fine this season—if not superior on his EV50 batted balls. His non-EV50 balls come on only slightly slower bat speeds, compared to those same batted balls in 2024, while his tilt, attack angle and even the percentage of ideal launch angles all look impressive. Yet, using the intercept point against his center of mass, we can see that he, too, is catching the ball quite a bit later than he has previously, with his EV50 batted balls being caught almost 2" further back. (This may not sound like much, but wait until we get to the diagrams and you can see the difference.)

As we know from years of watching Yelich, it's not how hard he hits the ball, but how often he can get it in the air that makes a big difference. In 2024, he was ensuring more of those hard-hit balls were out in front, and thus, he elevated them more often. As Matthew Trueblood wrote recently, even when he does hit the ball hard in 2025, he's hitting so many ground balls that the most he can get is a single from that hard contact.

The idea here is that Yelich is catching the ball deeper, and although he's trying to get an upward angle of attack, and actually succeeding with his bat path despite being so much further back in his stance, the contortions required to do so aren't allowing him to consistently time up the baseball with what is a long, fluid swing, even when his timing is on point. On top of the ideal attack angles, another way we can notice this is the angle of the bat direction at contact. MLB average is 2° toward the pull side, but Yelich, in 2025, is averaging 7° toward the opposite field.

He's always had prodigious opposite-field power, but that is an outlier number, and while he is able to adjust the angle of the bat using his hands and wrists to try and gain some loft, he's not able to do so with his attack direction. What should be a natural timing out in front to loft the ball to the pull side is now more of a forced mechanism that's unwieldy in both feel and results. If we contrast that with 2024 below, the difference in contact point and attack direction is noticeable:

At the extraordinarily high level of competition in the majors, the smallest of changes are often the difference between greatness and failure. If we look closely at the two images, we can see three important things:

1. When Yelich made contact in 2024, the ball at the point of contact was in front of home plate, not behind it
2. The attack direction, as a result of the swing's natural arc, is 3° to the opposite field, rather than 7°
3. Perhaps most importantly, if we observe the angle of Yelich's elbows in both the diagrams above (the right arm especially), they are closer to straightening out in 2024 than 2025. In other words, he's further extended through the ball at the point of contact

On batted balls in play, the swing direction becomes an even more stark: 12° toward the opposite field. Yet, Yelich is pulling the ball more than he ever has. It's a clear sign of trying to make his new contact point work, but the good news is that his issues are entirely related to timing. If he can find that sweet spot once more, the whole picture could change overnight. He'll not have to use those excellent hands and the adaptability in his swing to try and manufacture a good attack angle, or pull the ball, instead letting his swing speed do all the work and just flow.

We saw a beautiful example of just this in Pittsburgh. Hitting home runs hasn't been a problem for Yelich this year, so consistency is key in how he backs this up, but a 110-mph monster shot to right field is an impressive sign of a great point of impact for Yelich.

If you've stayed with me for this long, congratulations on surviving my nerd-off! What do you think of the points above? Have you different interpretations on the success of Christian Yelich and William Contreras? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!