William Contreras, Sights Raised, Has a Lot More Power in Reach in 2025

Almost no matter where a pitcher throws the ball, William Contreras is a lot more likely to hit a ground ball than the average hitter. On anything down and anything on the outer part of the plate, he's perhaps the most grounder-prone hitter in baseball, and even when he turns on a ball inside or attacks one up near his shoulders, he's not getting beneath it as often as a lot of modern, power-focused hitters are.

There's a subtle difference there. He's better at elevating the high pitch, even relatively speaking, than he is otherwise. Still, he's going to hit it on the ground a lot, and the base rate for launch angle varies hugely by pitch location. Should a hitter like Contreras want to start tapping into more power, he would unavoidably benefit by swinging more at pitches up in the zone—and less on those down where even most air-raid sluggers often put it on the ground.

In 2023, that was part of Contreras's problem. He swung at just 51.0% of the pitches he saw in the upper third of the zone, or just above it and over the middle third of the plate. That was the 400th-highest-ranking season of 587 player-seasons since 2022 in which a player has seen at least 300 such pitches. That pitch high—but not way out off the plate where it's unreachable, or way inside, forcing a spin out of the way—is a good one to swing at, if you're trying to slug. Contreras didn't swing at enough of them to do it, at least at an elite level. In trade, of course, he made very good swing decisions in the lower half of the strike zone, and he was still a productive hitter that year: .289/.367/.457, in 611 plate appearances. He only hit 17 home runs, though.

Last year, Contreras changed. He upped his swing rate on those elevated offerings to 56.9%, which ranks a much healthier 205th of the aforementioned 587 player-seasons. According to Baseball Savant, his expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) on those high pitches also shot up: .274 in 2023, 374th on our little list; .383 in 2024, 44th-best. Contreras began to raise his sights, not the angle of his swing, and it worked even better than adopting an uppercut could have. He swung faster when he attacked those pitches—with a 72.3-mph average swing speed on them in the second half of 2023, and a 73.4-mph mark in 2024. His contact was flatter, though, and he reduced the average launch angle on those pitches from 27° in 2023 to 20° last season.

A lot of that, of course, came in the second half. For the season, Contreras hit .281/.365/.466, with 23 home runs—better than his first year with the Crew, but only incrementally, and all in the form of just a little extra power. In the second half, though, the improvement was more tangible, and larger. He hit .271/.387/.509 after the All-Star break, with 12 of those 23 home runs despite 150 fewer plate appearances than it took to hit the first 11. That's because, late in the going, he started really sitting on high pitches, and when hurlers tried to get him out there, he was ready. Here's a blast from August, when he was at his very best.

His heavy workload slowly stole his ability to load up and hurl himself at the ball that way, as the season wore on. Still, though, he would look for that pitch, shorten his stride and stay upright, and find a way to generate hard contact on it.

The toe tap he switched to often in September and the earlier landing for his front foot made him a bit more stable, if a bit less able to rotate at full speed and beat the ball to its spot. With smart, subtle adjustments to his own moves in the box, he can get the head of the bat to the ball at a good swing speed, whether it happens deep in the hitting zone or whether he gets out around it.

The biggest benefit of sitting on that elevated pitch is that you don't have to be perfect with the swing to find success that way. If you're looking for the ball up, you can mistime your attack a bit, get the ball off the end of the bat, and still hit a line drive that's almost impossible to defend.

It's a long way from promised, but the modified approach and the varied mechanics Contreras demonstrated down the stretch in 2024 makes him a superb candidate to hit 30-plus home runs in 2025. He's always evolving as a hitter. He's learning to anticipate the way pitchers will try to get him out, and thwart them, anyway. It's a bit reminiscent of Miguel Cabrera, Contreras's countryman and another No. 24 who found ways to cover the whole strike zone by outguessing pitchers and altering his swing brilliantly. A full bloom into the next Cabrera is unlikely from Contreras, but he's almost that caliber of hitter, at his best. With his rejiggered approach, he might be capable of sustaining his best for a full season. That's a scary proposition for the rest of the National League.