Five buy-low MLB hitters who should be in for better days

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In 2023, Juan Soto spent March and April hitting .202 with a good on-base percentage (always!) but not great power — only five homers and three doubles in 126 plate appearances. This, coming off a September in 2022 that saw him hit .220 with three homers and five doubles, might have led some to think there wasn’t anything that legendary about his bat going forward.

From May 1 to the end of the 2023 season, Soto hit .290 with a .418 OBP and a .548 SLG, built on 30 homers and 29 doubles.

Of course he did. Even in April, he was barreling the ball (14.7 percent barrel rate), hitting the ball over 95 mph a lot (57.4 percent hard-hit rate), showing his patented plate discipline and making decent contact.

Good peripherals! A short sample of bad results! That’s what we’re all looking for when we look for hitters who should do better going forward. So here’s what I call “The Sauce”: plate discipline (judged by zone-minus-chase rate), hit tool (judged by contact rate) and power (judged by hard-hit rate and barrel rate), thrown into a blender using z-scores. Sauce tells us which batters should do better going forward. So here are all the batters who are doing at least 10 percent worse than they were last year (by wRC+), sorted by their Sauce (through Tuesday’s games).

Juan Soto’s got Sauce. Should’ve figured. He, along with Vladimir Guerrero Jr, Brent Rooker, and Bobby Witt Jr. pretty much fall into the bucket of, “Yeah, they’re actually pretty good right now, and they’ll be better going forward, too.” It would be pretty tough to pry them loose, anyway. But the rest of these players seem very gettable. Let’s highlight five in particular.

Brandon Nimmo, Mets OF

There’s a fair amount of agita around Nimmo, given the fact that he hasn’t had a good month by batting average since June of last year. That’s a long time spent in the low .200s. It doesn’t seem like he deserves it, though. If you look at fair comparisons for the Mets outfielder — using hard-hit rate, ground-ball rate and pull percentage to get a sense of where he’s hitting the ball and how hard — his .254 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) since the beginning of last year is a real outlier. It’s the 10th-worst among qualified hitters over that time, and his batted-ball comps had a number 37 points higher. He should hit for a better batting average going forward.

That’s not to say he isn’t a little different now. He’s definitely swinging more and missing a little more because of it. He’s older too — because of injuries to both knees over the past year, or just age, he’s dropped from the 68th percentile in sprint speed down to the 49th, and he doesn’t have a steal this year. Sometimes he looks ginger on the basepaths. But being more aggressive has helped his power peripherals. If you’re just looking for a guy who can hit .250 with 15-20 more homers, and any steals are a bonus, that player looks like he’s still smiling away in Queens.

Alec Bohm, Phillies 1B/3B

If I told you that I could get you an in-his-prime infielder who was hitting the ball harder than he ever did in a full season, hitting the ball hard in the air more than ever, and making more contact than ever, would you need to know a lot more to be interested? All of these things are true for Bohm, who is also hitting in the low .200s with no power and one steal.

To be completely fair, the best version of Bohm is not an elite player, as he’s built on mostly making contact and popping 15-plus homers and not much else. So there is risk in acquiring him — his The BAT X projections have him barely inside the back end of the top 10, and if he only hits 10 more homers the rest of the way and isn’t a base-stealing threat, he might slip out of relevance in shallower leagues. He is letting the ball travel two inches further into the box and that’s hurting his power … but that’s two inches — on a guy who has pulled the ball more than this in the past, and is also not a guy you’re picking up to hit a bunch of homers for your team. The Sauce says he’ll get back to where he was as the weather warms in Philly: good batting average and just enough power.

Taylor Ward, Angels OF

On some level, this just ended up being a post about BABIP, didn’t it? Ward has seven homers, but he is sporting a .180 batting average on the back of a .195 BABIP that isn’t sustainable. There are a couple of other things going on, of course. He’s striking out more than ever. He’s seeing more sliders than ever and fewer four-seamers. But he saw a ton of sliders last year and not a lot of four-seamers either, and an 8.6 percent swinging-strike rate suggests that his strikeout rate is coming down, too. But the BABIP is the key part here.

Since he became an every-day starter in 2022, he’s never had a BABIP under .284. If you just swapped that number out for his .195 current number, he would be fine right now. But this situation is a little like the one with Nimmo … he’s only attempted one steal and didn’t make it. At 31, he’s maybe older than expected, and even though he’s running faster than last year, there’s not a high likelihood he steals even the five or six he’s projected for. But can he hit .240-plus with another 20 homers? The contact quality and the track record say he can.

Christian Walker, Astros 1B

There are two ways to look at Walker’s profile on Statcast.

The negative one would say that his bat speed is down, his batted-ball metrics are down, he’s chasing more than 65 percent of the league, whiffing at about the same rate and has an expected slugging percentage under .400. Not what you want to see out of a 34-year-old first baseman in particular.

But there’s the other side of the same coin, which means he might be a decent buy-low. He’s still in the 64th percentile for barrels, and about the same for hard-hit rate. His bat speed is still in the 76th percentile. Something like expected slugging percentage is not as predictive as those other factors — not every colorful slider on the Statcast page is equally meaningful.

Walker has been steadily getting more breaking balls over his career, and he’s hitting them this year, but not the fastball. With good bat speed, he can still hit the fastball. He seems likely to figure it out and still hit close to .240 with something like 25 more homers.

Bryan Reynolds, Pirates OF

We had to get one player in here who might steal a few bases down the line, so Reynolds wraps it up for us. He’s been a little unlucky with balls in play, too. But the barrel rate would be the best of his career, the hard-hit rate one of his best and he’s swinging the bat faster this year — so the power should be better than it has been so far. You’d expect him to lift the ball like he has over his career as the season goes on.

The biggest worry point for Reynolds is his strikeout rate, which is up to 28 percent on the season. For a guy with a 22 percent career number, that’s not great, and it’ll cost him in batting average. On the other hand, his swinging-strike rate is about the same as ever, and you can see from this rolling graph from FanGraphs, he’s had moments like this in the recent past, too.

The strikeout rate looks like it’s returning to normal, and his other peripherals are fine. Maybe this is the area of his game that ages worse than expected in the long run, but he’s only 30. The end isn’t here yet, and he’s probably still good for a .260 average and another 16-plus homers and 10-plus steals.

(Photo of Alec Bohm: Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)

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