Pitch Jackson Chourio Inside, This Year, and You Will Not Find the Ball

My favorite baseball quotation varies from day to day, week to week, month to month. One that stays in regular rotation, though, comes from Roberto Clemente—one of the men who belongs on any baseball Mt. Rushmore. Clemente is remembered, now, through a gauzy historical patina, often treated as the sainted martyr of the game, shrunken in our minds to "only" a trailblazing member of a racial and ethnic minority and a great humanitarian.

In fact, he was not only one of the most well-rounded players in baseball history, but one of its fiercest and most cerebral, on and off the field. He was extraordinarily dedicated to the kinds of aid work he died doing, when his plane carrying supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua crashed, but he was not the Anthony Rizzo kind of community pillar: always smiling, as tender and personable and eager to please as he is compassionate. Clemente was much more given to long periods of saturnine moods, and he was much more unflinching in both his own approach to the game and his demand to be respected—respected first, liked second—by everyone he encountered within and around the sport.

"Pitch me outside," Clemente once said, "I will hit .400. Pitch me inside, and you will not find the ball."

That mentality doesn't work for every hitter, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the practically perfect way to approach being a big-league hitter. It's unapologetic and sharp-edged, and it accurately captured what Clemente was about. He played in a low-power era, mostly in pitcher-friendly environments, but he did hit for an exceptional average—and when pitchers tried to work him inside, he did make them pay, mercilessly.

Sorry to lead with a digression, but I promise, it's not all for naught. This year, his second in the major leagues, I projected Jackson Chourio to take a major step forward, even from the admirable level he achieved as a 20-year-old rookie in 2024. Specifically, I thought Chourio could access considerably more power than we saw in his first tour of the big leagues, and that we would at least glimpse what I believe will eventually be 40-homer pop from the compact but powerful young hitter. Not even 10% of the way through the season, we're seeing that happen, and it's taking the form of a dedication to a very Clemente-like approach.

Last year, Chourio handled pitches on the inner third of the plate perfectly fine. He got quite good at staying inside the ball, using his bat speed to catch it deep in the hitting zone but make solid contact and direct the ball to the opposite field.

He stayed closed on those pitches, as you can see. His stride remained directly at the pitcher, which forced him to wait on the inside pitch a bit but kept him short to the ball. At other times, however, he did struggle, especially when he tried to put the pedal down and open up on an inisde heater.

Because of his commitment to staying through the ball and covering the pitch away, Chourio was forcing himself to rotate exceptionally fast to get to the inside pitch last year. He's a good enough athlete to do that, sometimes, but it's a very hard thing for even elite ballplayers to do. Eventually, if you want to generate big bat speed and do damage on the ball inside, you have to get comfortable anticipating, trusting what you see, and opening up more with your whole body. When you stride a bit more toward (for a right-handed batter) the shortstop, you create more torque and more space within which to let your whole body generate bat speed, while still getting the barrel to the ball inside. This year, that's what Chourio is doing.

Ok, but that pitch is a bad mistake from Ian Gibaut. It's a sweeper that didn't sweep. Crushing mistakes is one of the benefits of gearing up more to attack the inside pitch, but you can't rely solely on doing that if you want to enjoy the kind of success Chourio has found early this year. Here's a pitcher executing much better, on a pitch that should have been much harder to turn around (particularly while keeping the ball fair).

Sure, Carlos Estévez also missed his spot badly here. But that's a high fastball on the scary side of 95 miles per hour, on the inner edge. Chourio's bat is fast enough to whip the barrel through it, anyway. He just couldn't do this last year, even as he came on tremendously strong at the end of the campaign.

The numbers on pitches inside tell the same story as the pictures do.

Chourio's not as short to the ball inside in 2025 as he was in 2024. He's not trying to be. Instead, he's decided to be sensationally dangerous on those pitches, and it's worked. It's a longer swing, and he might whiff a bit more often this way, but he doesn't care. He's swinging faster, hitting harder, and has not lost any of his ability to elevate the ball. Pitchers are learning the hard way: they have to content themselves with working Chourio away, away, away. If they do, he might still hit for a high average and generate some impressive opposite-field power, as Clemente occasionally could, too. If they don't, though, they're going to go through a lot of baseballs.