News

Jun 15, 2023

Going Oppo Has Propelled Christian Yelich’s Resurgence

Watching the ebbs and flows of Christian Yelich’s career has been very interesting. From 2018 to 2019, he was one of the best players in baseball, winning the NL MVP in 2018 and placing second in the

Watching the ebbs and flows of Christian Yelich’s career has been very interesting. From 2018 to 2019, he was one of the best players in baseball, winning the NL MVP in 2018 and placing second in the voting the following year. He was sending balls to the moon like he never had before (some of that might have owed to the livelier ball, but Yelich also hit the ball very hard those years, and continues to). Then from 2020 to 2022, he was just an average dude. He had a 108 wRC+ over that span, swatting just 35 home runs and accruing 4.4 total WAR.

Typically, I’d say that a player like Yelich already has a blueprint for success. Faced with a few down seasons, his focus should be on regaining the traits that had served him so well previously. However, a lot of what we know about the Brewers outfielder needs to be thrown out the window. This is a different player from the one we saw during Yelich’s MVP run, and he’s also a different player from the one we’ve watched the last two and a half years. Instead of figuring out how he could get back to his old self, Yelich seems to have decided to blend all of his previous years together to create a new version. And with a 129 wRC+ and 3.6 WAR so far this season, Yelich has shown he can still be a star player — it just looks different.

There won’t be much of a focus on plate discipline during this analysis. Yelich’s heart-of-the-zone swing rates and general chase rates aren’t far off from last season or even his superstar stretch. Instead, our focus will be on his batted ball profile and mechanical adjustments. I’ll start by showing you some more general information about Yelich’s directional hit rates, both vertically and horizontally:

The standard assessment of Yelich has been that he needs to get back to hitting the ball in the air like he did in 2019. That hasn’t been what we’ve seen this season, however. Additionally, there was the idea that he needed to make the most of his ability to hit the ball hard (95th-percentile hard-hit rate) and pull the ball consistently. Once again, that hasn’t been what we’ve seen. His pull rate is in line with previous years. Instead, he’s been hitting more line drives and peppering the ball to the opposite field. The latter has never been a big part of Yelich’s game, but now it is. Let’s take a closer look.

Among hitters with at least 100 batted balls to the opposite field since the beginning of 2022 , Yelich ranks fifth in all of baseball in oppo xwOBA with a .416 mark. In 2022 alone, he was sixth in baseball. If there was one skill he could prop up as much as possible this year to make the most out of this success, it was hitting the ball to the opposite field with greater consistency, and that is exactly what he has done. Below is a table detailing Yelich’s opposite field performance this season relative to the previous two:

Yelich’s .650 xwOBA on opposite field liners last year was his highest mark since 2019 (.769). This year, he has increased the percentage of his line drives that are hit to the opposite field and the performance has stayed about the same. Never in his career have a third of his line drives been hit oppo, but this year nearly half of them have been. Similarly, he has never hit so many of his fly balls to the opposite field. Although his wasn’t particularly successful on those batted balls in his previous two seasons, he has turned that around this season and has a .481 xwOBA on his oppo fly balls. Basically, the story here is Yelich doing more of what he was good at last year (oppo line drives) and refining something that he wasn’t so good at (oppo fly balls) while hitting the ball to the opposite field more overall.

To make these kinds of changes, Yelich made a mechanical adjustment. You need to do something to gear your swing towards making opposite field contact more consistently. From a data perspective, this would be something like changing your average horizontal bat angle (HBA) – the horizontal orientation of the bat relative to the front of home plate – to be more consistently negative and pairing that with an ideal upper body orientation. In other words, there needs to be a body and barrel adjustment.

Visually speaking, we could expect to see Yelich make more of an effort to get his barrel on plane with the ball earlier in his swing. If you’re hitting the ball to the opposite field more often, then you’re likely making deeper contact more often. To make sure this doesn’t result in an even higher groundball rate than Yelich already has, his barrel and body need be on an angle conducive to hitting hard line drives. As we’ve shown, this wasn’t necessarily an issue for Yelich, but there was room to do it more often. Let’s take a look at some of his swings. These two are from last season:

While these two are from this season:

At times in 2022, Yelich dabbled with a toe tap – particularly against lefties – but by the end of the year he was back to leg kicking exclusively. This year, you won’t see him leg kick – that is the first big change. He uses a toe tap to get evenly aligned, then strides open as he always has. However, the stride open has less movement to get to the same point. This has probably helped him get his feet under him while making a more aggressive bat tip – the second key change this season. Changing your bat tip allows you to change your vertical entry angle (VEA) – the angle of your bat relative to the ground right before the downswing. The difference is easier to see with slow motion video:

The bat is simply more active in 2023. It begins to tip as he enters his hip hinge and tips even more as he strides. That is in stark contrast to 2022, when the bat maintained its position for most of the swing and only had a slight tip during the end of the stride out. The result of this change is a flatter VEA that can get on plane to a pitch both more smoothly and more quickly. Given that his vertical bat angle (VBA) – the angle of the barrel at contact – has stayed the same, a flatter VEA results in a quicker transition into the contact point. In simpler terms, he is creating a reciprocal movement by having a more active bat tip that leads to a more adjustable barrel. It’s the perfect recipe for a hitter to hit a bunch of hard line drives to the opposite field.

I’ve already mentioned this, but I think it’s important to reiterate: Yelich has changed his batted ball profile and mechanics while making little to no change in his swing decisions. I thought that since his swing was now more geared towards the opposite field, he would attack pitches on the outer third more frequently, but that isn’t the case. His swing rate on outside pitches is just about the same as last year. The same goes for pitches in the upper third. This truly was all about gearing the swing towards his strengths and keeping almost everything else the same.

Yelich might not be a seven-win superstar anymore, but he’s playing his best defense in years, has already swiped over 20 bases, and is hitting the snot out of the ball. He ranks third WAR among all left fielders, trailing only Corbin Carroll (4.0) and Juan Soto (4.3). His all-around game is as good as it’s been in the last few years, and most importantly, he is one of the best hitting left fielders in the game again.