Going With the Outside Pitch, With Cody Bellinger

If Cody Bellinger can hold onto the gains he made in 2023 in terms of strikeout rate, it will certainly boost his production for 2024. On its own, though, putting the ball in play isn't enough. It's perfectly possible to hit the ball meekly and poorly and come up with results not far removed from the ones you'd have had if you'd taken a more fearless swing and just missed altogether.

Last year, though, Bellinger did quite a bit more than that. What got attention was that he even touched the ball in many of those situations, but what made him phenomenally valuable was the way he hit it. Specifically, Bellinger started genuinely going with that pitch, rather than being so much in a mode of trying to create power that he rolled over and hit weak ground balls to the pull side.

Here's Bellinger from 2020-22, with his exit velocities and launch angles plotted and the expected wOBA (xwOBA) of those batted balls shown by the color of each data point, but only on pitches on the outer third (or beyond). 

Right away, let's compare that to the same chart for 2023. Again, this is only batted balls on pitches that were at least on the outer third of home plate.

There are a fair number fewer lazy fly balls in the 2023 sample, but they've been replaced mostly by weakly hit balls with a launch angle just above 0. That's still not exactly a recipe for much more production. Yet, he did see such a jump, from a sub-.300 SLG for 2020-22 to a .456 mark in 2023, on those outer-third offerings. Is that evidence that he just got lucky last year, after all?

Well, no. Firstly, Bellinger put many more balls in that part of the zone (and beyond it) in play than he had previously. He whiffed much, much less often when swinging at outside pitches in 2023 than from 2020-22.

It was easy to ignore and hard to fully articulate when he was hitting 40 home runs per season, but Bellinger has always had great feel for contact. That's why he was an MVP, and even over the previous few years (when he was anything but an MVP), he didn't have a disastrous whiff rate on outer-third pitches.

In 2023, though, he shored up what wasn't even a notable weakness, per se.

Again, we're not talking about a guy solely getting lucky. He got the ball moving. If he'd hit it precisely the same way he had in previous years, though, there might not have been much value in hitting it more. Bellinger made his bones by being great at pulling fly balls, and it's very hard to pull fly balls on the outer edge of the strike zone. His revelation, of course, came when he realized he didn't need to do that.

Instead, Bellinger started going the other way more. His average exit velocity on the outer third plummeted last year, but the direction of those hits earned him plenty of value. Here's where his batted balls on pitches on the outer third went from 2020-22.

He stopped trying to yank those pitches last year, and the difference was night and day.

Whereas the differences between the plots of his exit velo and launch angle were so subtle you had to study them to see them well, these jump off the page. The gray dots that represent launch angles around 20 degrees were the keys; Bellinger was shooting the left-center gap for soubles, even on pitches where hitting a home run or a more traditional double was out of the question.

It would come as a shock if Bellinger went out and hit .307 again this year. That's not his history, and after all, he did have some good luck. However, it's equally silly to assume he'll regress into the .250 range, or worse. We know his strikeout aversion should have some staying power. He returns to Wrigley Field, where there's some incentive for him to keep aiming for left-center field, anyway. Mostly, though, this just seems like a welcome maturation at the plate. Bellinger still will (and still needs to) occasionally turn and burn on a ball in order to hit a home run, but he's improved at knowing when pitchers might work the outside edge on him; seeing the pitch out of the hand when they do; and staying on the ball, to take it to the opposite field. 

Though it never happened in 2023, we could see Bellinger bat second at times for the Cubs in 2024. With his low ground-ball rate and good overall skill set, he's a terrific candidate for that role. If pitchers continue not to be able to get him out away, they'll have to try him inside more often, and thence could come even more power. In any case, he's a newly versatile offensive weapon.

Research assistance provided by TruMedia.