Article: How Christopher Morel Has Gotten On Plane and Achieved Liftoff

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs retained the best hitter from their 2023 team, but didn't bring in the supplementary slugger for whom fans pined throughout the winter. As it turns out, they might have a budding monster who justifies that inaction.

Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports

The more we come to understand hitting, the more clearly we come to see that it's not just about timing, the way the first guardians of the craft told us it was. It is, as the iconoclastic but utterly brilliant Ted Williams started telling people 75 years ago, about getting on plane with the incoming pitch. That's why pitchers, in the modern game, don't just focus on disrupting timing. They're also trying to force a hitter to attack on the wrong plane.

Teams know this, too. Famously, the 2021 San Francisco Giants ran platoons based as much on their hitters' swing planes and the repertoire of the opposing starter as on handedness. Less famously, plenty of other teams do similar matchup work. Some swings are well-built to attack the high fastball. Others are great at handling the plunging breaking ball. The best swings are at least somewhat adaptable, of course. A great hitter knows how to manipulate his barrel without giving up all of his bat speed, especially when he can anticipate a given pitch and/or location based on count or scouting report. Most hitters have a bat path wired into their muscle memory, though, and pitchers' focus now is on exploiting that wiring.

In his first two seasons in MLB, Christopher Morel had an exploitable swing, because while he generated plenty of bat speed to be dangerous when he met the ball just right, he often entered the hitting zone with the bat too flat or even angled downward. That led to a surfeit of hard-hit but misaligned batted balls: he was in the league's 16th percentile for Sweet Spot % (the share of batted balls clustered in the most valuable band of launch angles) in 2022 and the 8th percentile in 2023. His average launch angle across those two seasons was 10.8 degrees, which isn't bad, but it reflects that tendency toward topping and/or tapping the ball when he was caught off-balance. In this way, his plane problem did become a timing problem. With a swing as flat as the one he was cutting loose, he had to time the pitch just right to make the kind of thunderous contact of which he's capable.

Here's Morel last May, swinging at a slider with a good piece of the plate, but which was swerving away from him.

Last season, he did a lot of that. Morel tries to drop the barrel below his hands and find the ball, here, but his actual swing path just doesn't get beneath the flight path of the ball and up into its plane until far too close to the theoretical contact point. Therefore, absent perfect timing, he was doomed to whiff, and that's just what he did. A daunting, dragging 43.9 percent of his swings against breaking stuff last year ended in nothing but a whoosh and the thud of ball into catcher's mitt.

Now, consider this pitch from last week against the Rockies, when Morel saw a similar slider on the outer third of the plate.

The choice of a flyout here was a conscious one. We're not trying to evaluate Morel's perfect swings, here. This is about what happens when he's imperfect, It's about the extra margin for error he's creating for himself. Watch the barrel of his bat as he starts each swing. In 2023, the stick took a steep downward angle into the back end of the hitting zone, and then he was able to correct it upward only slightly as he flashed it through that space. This season, his barrel drops and moves backward, taking up more space behind the zone and entering it at a positive angle, working up toward the incoming pitch. The change looks very subtle, especially from the center-field camera, but it's an important one. 

That the barrel of one's bat can or should move backward at the initiation of a swing is still highly controversial in hitting circles. Some coaches swear by it, and others swear it's a recipe for being disastrously rushed, late, or loopy. In truth, of course, much depends on the person swinging the lumber. Aaron Judge is a disciple of one iconoclastic coach who avers carrying the barrel backward, and it's worked out ok for him. Morel, like Judge, belongs to the special brotherhood of players who are strong and twitchy enough to generate sufficient bat speed to get away with going backward before moving forward. Watch both clips again, and notice that that move (while seemingly forcing him to hurry to get the barrel to the zone on time) creates strength and tension throughout the rest of the swing, speeding up his moves without compromising his control of them.

By whatever mechanical means a batter chooses, getting on plane early this way is hugely valuable. The hitters who give you that tingle on the back of your neck when you see them--Mike Trout is the best example of his generation--specialize in getting the bat moving so neatly in line with the incoming baseball that the collision feels almost pristine. Anyone who has played the game knows the unmatchable feeling of perfect contact. Just watching Trout square up a ball can give one a frisson of that, and Morel's swing tweak has made him a bit more that way, too.

Though the full suite of tools isn't yet available, Baseball Savant will soon make bat tracking data available on a much bigger scale. In the meantime, we have a few peeks into what it looks like and what it can tell us, because the MLB App has been generating data visualizations with swing-tracking technology on some home runs since last season. Let's use snapshots of these to further clarify what Morel is doing differently. Here's his bat path from a home run at the very end of last season, along with some of the data on it.

Morel crashed into this ball with tremendous force, and happened to catch it above the center of the barrel by the perfect fraction to lift it out of the park. That bat path is very flat, though, all the way from its entry into the zone through contact. Here's the same tracking data for the homer he hit in Texas on Easter Sunday this year.

You can see just from the single-number summary that his attack angle is slightly steeper, but go even further. Note the sweep of his bat from the back side of the hitting zone through the contact point. Morel was on plane early. That meant less need to manipulate the barrel and more bat speed at the time of the collision between wood and leather. His margin for error--the window within which he might have slightly missed, but hit a single or a double or a higher home run--is much wider here than on the ball he launched last September.

Throughout baseball history, pitchers have tried to frustrate hitters who showed a knack for getting on plane. Sandy Koufax was great, more than anything else, because he paired a fastball that rode high and hard at the top of the strike zone with a plunging, high-spin curveball that entered the zone at a viciously steep angle. His spiritual ancestor, Clayton Kershaw, has built his own Hall of Fame career on the same foundation, with a filthy slider as his answer to the great sophistication and athleticism of the hitters he's had to face, relative to those Koufax saw. Unique, very flat and/or very steep vertical approach angles are the best way to frustrate hitters trying to square the ball up and lift it consistently, which is why VAA has become all the rage among pitching nerds. Indeed, batters had the most success last year on pitches in the middle range of VAA--those that, whether because their primary movement vector was horizontal or because the pitcher couldn't execute either a hard, flat fastball or a steeper offspeed pitch, entered the zone right around the angle at which most bats come through it.

Last year, Morel had most of his success in that league-wide sweet spot, because his swing happened to have that same flat, unremarkable plane. On fairly steep or very flat pitches, though, he was helpless. The samples for 2024 are too small to set too much store by the differences, but the differences are exactly what you'd think they would be--only even more stark.

VAA	2023 wOBA	2023 Swing%	2023 Miss%	2024 wOBA	2024 Swing%	2024 Miss%
Under -10 degrees	0.234	41.30%	50.00%	0.311	58.30%	57.10%
-10 to <-9 degrees	0.226	42.00%	60.30%	1.569	25.00%	0.00%
-9 to <-8 degrees	0.178	47.10%	51.70%	0.353	37.50%	0.00%
-8 to <-7 degrees	0.431	55.00%	36.80%	0.357	57.90%	22.70%
-7 to <-6 degrees	0.421	53.90%	25.60%	0.398	50.00%	21.40%
-6 to <-5 degrees	0.343	53.00%	18.20%	0.147	50.00%	0.00%
-5 to <-4 degrees	0.437	57.70%	36.30%	0.754	71.40%	20.00%
-4 to <-3 degrees	0.282	32.10%	79.40%	0.696	75.00%	33.30%
-3 to <-2 degrees	0.232	14.30%	100.00%	-	-	-
-2 to <-1 degrees	-	0.00%	-	-	-	-
-1 to <0 degrees	-	-	-	-	-	-

Hitters who get on plane early don't just hit the ball in the air more often (though Morel has, with a 16.4-degree launch angle and his Sweet Spot % up to the 42nd percentile on the young season). They don't just hit the ball harder, thanks to not having to significantly change the direction of their swing on the fly. They also make a lot more contact, and Morel's dramatically reduced whiff rate (across the VAA spectrum) and stellar strikeout rate affirm that.

The league will counter-adjust. While Morel has better than halved his whiff rate on breaking pitches this year (to 20%), he still misses plenty often against offspeed stuff, because he's taking such a pull-focused, aggressive overall approach. He's also slightly more vulnerable to the high, flat fastball after making this change to his swing path. Pitchers haven't caught onto that yet. He's seeing fewer fastballs this year, as the league tries to pick on a guy who whiffed so often on breaking balls last year, but they'll eventually force him to cover the top third of the zone more often against heaters, and that will force him to adjust, too. Still, this change is a small thing with big implications. Morel isn't just on a hot streak, seeing the ball well. He's made a concrete change in his swing path and the approach it informs, and he's ahead of the adjustment curve by plenty.

Research assistance provided by TruMedia.

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[Billy62]

How could you not just love this kid? His love for the game, his infectious smile and love for other players, umpires, hell maybe even the hot dog vendor. You get all this and a potential team leader as well. If this kid gets 550-575 major league at-bats this season, your looking at a player who could potentially drive 35 or more balls out of the park. And, he is not striking out as much. His defense at 3rd is improving, and promises to only get better. Lets just sign him for thirty years and big money. 🙂 When he gets done playing we can bring him in as a team ambassador. As you can tell, I love this kid. 🙂