Those baseballs have families. Do you even think about that, Matthew?
On Wednesday, Matt Wallner did the damn thing again: he launched a 108-MPH drive to right-center and watched it sail 442 feet for his sixth home run this season (25th if we’re counting Triple-A). That’s a dazzling distance, and yet, when you watch the replay of Wallner’s swing, it doesn’t even seem like he hit the ball quite flush. He reached out and got the end of his bat on Luis Severino’s tailing changeup, still managing to muscle it out with ease.
What we’re seeing should not be taken for granted. This is not normal. Wallner is literally hitting the ball as hard as anybody in the major leagues, and that includes the most famed and acclaimed bashers of this generation.
Don’t believe me? Let’s just take a look at the stats. They’re unbelievable. Wallner does not have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, having spent almost three months in the minors, but if he did, here’s where he’d rank on the MLB leaderboard for three of the main Statcast measures of contact quality.
AVERAGE EXIT VELOCITY
- Aaron Judge: 96.0 mph
- Matt Wallner: 95.9 mph
- Shohei Ohtani: 95.8 mph
- Oneil Cruz: 95.3 mph
- Juan Soto: 94.6 mph
HARD HIT PERCENTAGE
- Matt Wallner: 61.8%
- Shohei Ohtani: 60.2%
- Aaron Judge: 60.2%
- Juan Soto: 57.8%
- Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: 56.5%
BARREL RATE
- Matt Wallner: 29.4%
- Aaron Judge: 27.5%
- Shohei Ohtani: 20.5%
- Juan Soto: 19.7%
- Giancarlo Stanton: 19.1%
Now, the big caveat here is that Wallner strikes out WAY more than anyone on this list. Only Cruz (33%) and Stanton (31%) are even in his stratosphere, but not really — Wallner has struck out in a whopping 43% of his plate appearances this year. He still has managed to produce a .990 OPS, which leads the Twins and is 73% better than the average big-leaguer. Now, there’s partially some good batted-ball luck at play (he won’t maintain a .429 BABIP), but also, it’s what quality contact will do for you.
One measurement that was recently added to Statcast’s public metrics serves to help explain why Wallner punishes the ball so much when he gets wood on it. Bat tracking data tells us that Wallner swings the stick at 77.6 MPH on average, which — if qualified — would rank third in the majors, behind Stanton and Cruz, ahead of Kyle Schwarber and Judge.
I suppose one could reasonably ask if Wallner should continue to swing this ferociously hard. There’s certainly no reason to change anything at the moment, but if production dries up and his extreme proneness to strikeouts sends him into another slump, the idea of dialing back slightly could gain merit. The slugger could theoretically afford to take a little off, given that he’s registering legitimate MVP-level contact results right now.
The other scenario is that he keeps hitting the ball this hard and manages to rein the strikeouts back to a semi-reasonable level. In that case, we might need to start rethinking how we talk about his ceiling as a difference-maker for this franchise.
For the time being, I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the show. I’m a sucker for players who have visibly elite skills, and Wallner’s ability to crush the ball is verifiably elite. I’m loving it; I’d probably love it less if I was an infielder who had to stand anywhere near him, or a family member to one of those poor baseballs.
