Ranking MLB's Best Bad-Ball Hitters Entering 2023 Season
This is for anyone who, in the course of watching a Major League Baseball game, has ever witnessed a hit that caused them to blurt out, "How in the name of Vladimir Guerrero did he do that?"
That's right. We've ranked the nine best bad-ball hitters in MLB going into the 2023 season, for no reasons other than they're a fun bunch who deserve a tip of the ol' cap.
Before we get into it, let's be clear that we didn't look to the strike zone to define the difference between "good" and "bad" balls to hit. We opted for Baseball Savant's more thorough breakdown of the hitting zone, which consists of four areas where batters have had drastically different levels of success over the years:
Our focus was naturally on hitters who do well in those bottom three areas, particularly the last two. Because when you're good at hitting pitches that everyone else is bad at hitting, you might just be a good bad-ball hitter.
Let's count 'em down in order of just how impressive their bad-ball bona fides are.
9. 1B Freddie Freeman, Los Angeles Dodgers
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
Dating back to his first full major league season in 2011, Freddie Freeman owns a league-high 927 hits against pitches in the shadow area of the zone. Nobody else even has over 900.
How Good Is He, Really?
There's an obvious problem in counting good shadow-area hitters as good bad-ball hitters, and it's that the area itself partially overlaps with the strike zone.
Freeman has thus gotten a sizable chunk of those 927 hits against pitches that were strikes. More pitcher-friendly strikes than hitter-friendly strikes, to be sure, but it seems safe to assume that knocks like this double and this single probably didn't elicit that ol' "How did he hit that?" query from anyone.
Freeman wouldn't be on this list, though, if he didn't also have plenty of hits like this one:
That home run was a good example not just of the reach afforded by Freeman's 6'5", 220-pound frame, but the strength as well. If he can get to it, he can drive it. And he can get to just about anything.
Yet let's also give the guy proper credit for not always relying on his strength to rack up hits in the shadow zone. He's generally not averse to simply getting bat to ball and letting the BABIP gods take it from there, and hits like this one, this one and this one show that he truly thrives at it in the shadow zone.
8. 1B José Abreu, Houston Astros
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
What Freeman is to producing hits, José Abreu is to making hard contact in the shadow area. Since his debut season with the White Sox in 2014, he leads the majors with 695 batted balls of at least 95 mph in the shadow area.
How Good Is He, Really?
Alas, hard contact and base hits are not mutually inclusive. Abreu knows this all too well, as he also leads MLB with 337 outs on hard-hit balls in the shadow area since '14.
Yet that still leaves 358 hits on such balls, including this 109.1 mph, 434-foot home run (skip to the 0:23 mark) from 2020 that's fairly instructive:
Like Freeman, the 6'3", 235-pound Abreu is a big dude with plenty of reach and plenty of power. What separates the two is that Abreu is pretty much always trying to hit the ball hard even if he's going after hard-to-reach pitches.
As in the above video, sometimes that means just using his height to his advantage. But he's also been known to contort himself in his pursuit of hard contact, such as when he went down to hammer this low breaking ball into the seats or when he had to lean a bit over the plate to punch this slider for a single.
It may not always work, but it works often enough for the 36-year-old to not have to worry about changing a thing.
7. SS Amed Rosario, Cleveland Guardians
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
OK, enough with the talented shadow-area hitters. The real bad-ball hitters more so operate in the shadow and waste areas, and that's where Amed Rosario is ascendent with a league-leading 37 hits across the last two seasons.
How Good Is He, Really?
As his chase rate was in the 10th percentile in 2021 and then in the fourth percentile in 2022, Rosario frankly doesn't have much choice but to be a good bad-ball hitter.
It's a good thing, then, that he's so good at making contact against chase and waste pitches that he also leads MLB with 107 balls in play from those areas over the last two seasons.
This inside-the-park home run from 2021 isn't technically an example of one, but, meh, close enough:
While that was a case of Rosario coming through with a well-struck knock on a high pitch, he's more so an equal opportunity hitter on extremely inside and extremely outside pitches. It wouldn't be so if he didn't have both a quick bat and good reach on the part of his 6'2", 190-pound frame.
Rosario nonetheless loses some points in our estimation because of how often his chase and waste hits were made more by his speed than anything else. They all look like line drives in the box score until you watch them and behold ugly-sounding ground balls that barely went anywhere.
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6. LF Eddie Rosario, Atlanta
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
Since his debut season in 2015, Eddie Rosario's 109 hits against pitches in the chase and waste areas are the most of any left-handed batter. He also holds the top spot for the most such hits recorded in a season since then, with 25 in 2018.
How Good Is He, Really?
There's clearly a lesson here that if your last name happens to be Rosario, you're destined to be a bad-ball hitter. Probably. Definitely.
But we digress. The important thing right now is that we revisit the time Rosario (Eddie, that is) went down and nine-ironed a low curveball from Austin Voth over the fence in 2021:
Dude can do that. Dude can also turn on pitches that might have otherwise drilled him and loft them into open space in right field. Likewise, dude can also poke pitches that have strayed into the right-handed batters' box into left field.
At 6'1", 180 pounds, Rosario isn't even that tall or that hefty. His bad-ball hitting skills more so stem from an apparently preternatural ability not just to put any pitch in play, but in such a way that it's likely to find a hole. Of his 109 hits against chase and waste pitches, 60 have had better than a 50 percent hit probability off the bat.
Really the only catch with Rosario's inclusion on this list is that, after injuries limited him to just 80 games in 2022, his bad-ball hitting might be a tad rusty in 2023.
5. 2B Jose Altuve, Houston Astros
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
Jose Altuve has been a regular in the Astros lineup since 2012. In that time, he's racked up a league-leading 155 hits against chase and waste pitches. What more do you need?
How Good Is He, Really?
Well, yeah. Obviously.
People are usually exaggerating if they say a hitter swung at a pitch that was up around his eyes. Not so much when the 5'6", 166-pound Altuve goes after a high one, and he's pretty good at making the effort worth it. Observe:
Given his size, one might assume that the bad balls Altuve really excels at hitting are inside ones that he can turn, and not anything that requires him to reach. Weirdly enough, however, the opposite is true.
This immediately stands out when you look at a map of where he's gotten his chase and waste hits. The area near his body is largely empty, while various spots away from his body are decidedly not. Seemingly nothing is too far for him to reach, including 67 mph changeups in the left-handed batter's box and 83 mph splitters that just about touch the ground.
Our only gripe is that Altuve generally doesn't hit the ball hard when he goes fishing. Of those 155 hits, 125 were mere singles.
4. C Salvador Perez, Kansas City Royals
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
Ever since Salvador Perez settled into his role as the Royals' regular catcher in 2013, his 58 hard-hit balls against chase and waste pitches are the most in the majors. Eddie Rosario is the only other hitter with at least 50.
How Good Is He, Really?
You know what makes that tidbit even more impressive? That Perez missed a whole dang season recovering from Tommy John surgery in 2019.
There's clearly some efficiency at work with Perez's pursuit of hard contact on hard-to-reach areas, which tracks onto how his overall hard-hit rate has landed above the 90th percentile in three of his last four healthy seasons.
And then there's the eye test, which has been informed over the years by baffling blasts off Perez's bat like this one from 2021:
This is fairly standard in the sense that the 6'3", 255-pound Perez prefers to reach for his bad-ball hits. It's basically that or bust for him, as his near-total lack of hard-hit balls against pitches near his body capture how he's never had the quickest bat speed.
Like with Abreu, though, we have to ding Perez for being better at producing hard-hit balls than at producing actual hits on bad pitches. Of those 58 in question, only half have found the seats or a hole in the defense.
3. SS Javier Báez, Detroit Tigers
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
You knew he was coming, and here he is. And Javier Báez's bad-ball bona fides more or less live up to the legend. Against chase and waste pitches since his first full season with the Cubs in 2016, he ranks third with 93 overall hits, second with 27 of the hard-hit variety and tied for sixth with 19 extra-base hits.
How Good Is He, Really?
We're probably not alone in associating Báez's "El Mago" nickname more so with his wizardry on the basepaths and in the field, but the guy does indeed have a knack for pulling hits out of a hat.
How he did this, for example, we don't know:
You're generally not going to see Báez do something like that on a pitch off the outside edge of the strike zone. He can reach those, sure, but he has all of one hard-hit base hit on pitches in that region since 2016.
Rather, showing off his bat speed is his preferred means of crushing bad pitches. That especially shows when he turns around high-velocity offerings, as he did on this inside heater from Tyler Beede and this high hard one from Ryan Brasier.
The obligatory knock against Báez as a bad-ball hitter is that his success is also a volume thing. Since 2016, he's gone fishing after hundreds more chase and waste pitches than the next hitter.
2. 3B Rafael Devers, Boston Red Sox
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
Rafael Devers knows a thing or two about extra-base hits, up to and including when he goes after pitches in the chase and waste areas. He didn't even play a full season in his debut year in 2017, yet he still leads with 26 extra-base hits and 48 hard-hit balls in those areas since then.
How Good Is He, Really?
Even regardless of pitch location, extra-base hits and hard-hit balls are practically synonymous with Devers by now. He leads the majors in the former since 2019, wherein he ranks behind only Abreu in the latter.
Yet it really is the seemingly impossible hard-hit balls that Devers has generated that stick in one's memory, such as when he turned around this down-and-in 98 mph heater from Jhoan Duran last April:
As for whether that's Devers' most impressive bad-ball hit, answers may vary from "maybe not" to "definitely not."
For instance, there are also arguments for when he blasted an opposite-field homer on a 94 mph fastball that was practically in the opposite batter's box. Or when he smacked a 104 mph double off a fastball that was one of those legit eye-level offerings. Or when he turned an outside slider from a left-hander into a 107 mph, 435-foot shot to center field.
The idea should be thoroughly gotten by now. Only a guy whose feel for the barrel knows no bounds is capable of such things, and that's Devers.
1. 3B Nolan Arenado, St. Louis Cardinals
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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
Nolan Arenado actually has two claims to fame as a bad-ball hitter. His 272 extra-base hits on pitches in the shadow area since 2013 are the most of any hitter. And since Statcast came online in 2015, he also likewise leads with 63 likely hits (i.e., with an xBA of at least .500) against pitches in the chase and waste areas.
How Good Is He, Really?
There isn't a whole lot about Arenado that can be called "underrated," but his ability to hit just about any pitch sure seems to make the grade.
For visual evidence, we submit a home run that he hit off Madison Bumgarner in 2021 that inspired exactly the right reaction from the Cardinals' official Twitter account:
Arenado is nonetheless like Altuve and Perez in that he's more adept at reaching for a bad-ball hit than he is to simply turn on an inside pitch. He gets most of his down below and off the outside edge of the strike zone.
That's where he tends to engage in the kind of bad-ball magic with which Eddie Rosario can relate. It's not just about getting bat to ball when Arenado decides to go fishing, but to do so in a way where the ball (see here, here and here) is likely to find a hole. A soft line drive can be just as effective as a hard one.
Add it all up, and nobody makes swinging at a bad pitch look better than Arenado does.
Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.
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