After One Week, Owen Caissie's Swing Data Already Puts Him in Rare Air

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

The Cubs don't prize bat speed. Almost every team in the league does, by now, and the Cubs certainly don't truly disdain the ability to swing fast, but Chicago is willing to zig against a league-wide zag in this regard. If you sort all batters with at least 25 competitive swings this year by average bat speed, the Cubs have no one inside the top 125, and only three players in the top 200.

Well, that was true until a week ago, anyway.

Owen Caissie's power is his calling card. If he didn't have very good bat speed, it would be both surprising and profoundly worrisome. The more dependent a player's profile is on power, the more non-negotiable it is that they swing fast. Good bat speed is one of the key foundations of slugging. It's a relief, then, to see that Caissie has swung the bat at 75.1 mph since arriving in the big leagues—43rd-fastest among the nearly 600 players with at least 25 swings.

Teams have bat-tracking data even for players in the minors, though it tends not to be as complete or as accurate. Thus, the Cubs knew Caissie swung fast before they called him up, but there's another question to be asked that goes beyond the validity of data, too: how reliably can a hitter get off his 'A' swing against big-league pitchers?

It's not hard to find examples of players who took a long time to learn to do that, because the big-league strike zone is slightly larger than that in Triple A, and because big-league pitchers have many more ways to manipulate opposing batters and ruin their timing. Plenty of young hitters (even ones with prodigious talent) come up and find themselves caught in between, or struggling to execute a swing that can cover all the offerings their new, better opponents can throw for strikes.

Caissie will almost surely go through that kind of adjustment period at some point, but in his first 14 plate appearances, he's shown the ability to do those difficult things and still swing fast. There's one more fun wrinkle, too. This one, too, was known in advance, but it's stark to set it into a big-league context. Caissie has a swing with above-average tilt, in addition to that sheer swing speed.

Only 22 hitters have an average bat speed of 75 mph or higher and a swing tilt of at least 33° this year. (The league averages are 71.8 mph and 32°, respectively.) Here they are.

This isn't a list comprised exclusively of superstars. Former Cubs farmhand Alexander Canario's inclusion is the most glaring reminder that this kind of swing will get you plenty of chances, but not necessarily bring you unmitigated success. Much depends on whether you can consistently make contact, and famously, that's been Caissie's one weakness throughout his minor-league career. There's a firm and lowish ceiling on the contact rate one can achieve when swinging this fast, with a tilted barrel designed to generate loft. On balance, though, it's an exhilarating thing to see from the Cubs' top prospect.

If you take out the guys on whom the jury is necessarily still out (White Sox rookie Colson Montgomery, the oft-injured Triston Casas), it's fair to say that swinging this fast with this plane gives a hitter about a 60% chance of becoming a star-caliber slugger. The chances of being an actually bad player are remote—around 10%. Caissie will have to prove he can sustain these swing characteristics whenever the league forces a big round of adjustments, and much of that might happen next year, rather than right now. As things stand, though, he's right in line with the sluggers who have lit up the league throughout this season, and it's encouraging to see that merely coming to the majors and seeing better pitchers didn't rob him of that ability to exercise his talent.

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