Michael Busch is a Very Unusual Hitter, and He's Becoming an Unusually Great One

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images

In his first 150 plate appearances of the season, Michael Busch is batting .262/.360/.500, with seven home runs and encouraging underlying numbers to support the topline ones. He's benefited from seeing fewer left-handed pitchers, with 87.3% of his plate appearances coming against righties—up from 82.4% last year. Since all his power comes when he has the platoon advantage (.211 career isolated power against righties; .108 against lefties), that, alone, has made a significant difference.

It's impressive how much power Busch has generated, too, because he's swinging the bat slower than last year—when he was already below average—and hitting more ground balls, too. Busch has traded a bit of the violence in his swing for a more reliable delivery of the barrel to the ball, and it's working. He's always been a guy whose swing was geared to generate the best contact when lifting the ball. This year, by getting a few more pitches concentrated in the launch-angle band where he does the most damage, he's tapping into more power, naturally. That's come with more grounders, because he's being more aggressive, but his grounders have been harder-hit and have had slightly higher launch angles. (It might sound silly, but unless you're exceptionally fast, launch angle matters a great deal on ground balls. Hitting it anywhere north of -5° is quite a bit more valuable than hitting it straight into the ground, especially if you can hit it with any pace to speak of.)

Here's Busch's distribution of batted balls by launch angle for 2024, with the color of each bar indicating the exit velocity and the height indicating the frequency of balls in that band.

Here's the same visual for 2025.

Fewer pop-ups and fewer balls hit straight down have helped him significantly. To produce that more tightly clustered, valuable distribution, though, he's had to make adjustments to his swing path, especially up in the zone. Last year, teams hammered away at a hole in his swing, up and away. He could briefly cover it, but only by guessing and cheating to hit that pitch. Because he was so aware of that issue, he also developed a problem below the zone at times—in that, trying to spot pitches down in the zone on which he could feast, he would sometimes chase too much below the zone, resulting in whiffs or weak contact.

That's changed this year. Busch's swing is shorter (averaging 6.3 feet from its start to the contact point, as measured by Statcast) than it was last year (6.5 feet) in the top third of the zone, and his whiff rate on swings in that area is down from 23.5% to a mere 6.3%.

You can see the way he steps out to the space just behind the plate with his back foot as he finishes that swing. That's rare, for a left-handed batter, because it slows you down in terms of getting out of the box—but it's a sign that he's transferring energy from the back side to the front well, and that he's maintaining balance and control in his lower half as he does so. Busch has been so much better against high pitches this year that it's gone from the thing most teams attack to the last thing they want to ponder. Here's his expected weighted on-base average by pitch location for 2024.

Here's the same graphic for 2025. (Keep in mind, xwOBA is scaled to on-base percentage, so a figure around .350 is good; .400 is All-Star stuff.)

With the adjustments he's made to cover the outside pitch, the new way to go after Busch is to come inside, where the slight diminution in his swing speed is hurting him—but plenty of pitchers simply aren't comfortable living there, and if Busch lays off, he'll earn plenty of walks or mistakes by just not swinging when they do try to attack him in that spot.

Low and in is, of course, the wheelhouse for most lefties. Color Busch an unusual case. Part of the reason for that: he's moved deeper in the box, but closer to the plate this year. He hasn't changed where he wants to make contact, within the context of his own swing, but the shape of the swing itself has changed, and so has his spatial relationship to the zone itself. Starting deeper in the box means a deeper overall contact point, but with his shorter stride and flatter swing, it doesn't actually mean letting the ball travel deeper. Here's his 2024 setup and contact point visual.

Here's the same thing for 2025, as he's gotten on top of the plate and bought himself an extra eyelash of a blink by dropping farther toward the catcher.

Busch is making more contact within the zone (mostly up top, as we've seen). He's still capable of driving the ball, despite a more controlled and (admittedly) slower swing. He's become more able to cover the whole zone, and he can generate power to all fields, while paring down his strikeout rate. He's always been a patient hitter, so when you mix these ingredients together, the result is a hitter with an All-Star-caliber package of skills. Busch will fall shy of actual All-Star status this year, but if he keeps proving to be this good at making adjustments, he could finish the season with 30 home runs and enter next year as a household name—if not because of those nice, round numbers, then because he's also likely to get a chance for some postseason heroics come October.

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