Article: Bo Bichette Is Back To Bashing

[Davy Andrews]

It's not just that Bo Bichette is playing well. It's that he's hitting the ball the way he did before injuries ruined his 2024 season.

We’re not supposed to read too much into spring training stats, so I’m not going to go crazy with the spring training stats. I won't tell you Bo Bichette's spring training batting average or his wRC+. We can start with the eye test, because I’m writing this on Monday afternoon, and Bo Bichette just did this:

In case you’re curious, that’s Bichette’s second home run of the spring, and he hit that ball 109.5 mph. During the 2024 season, Bichette didn’t hit a ball that hard until June 27. Bichette has now put 22 balls into play under the watchful eyes of Statcast cameras this spring, and although that one was the hardest, it was his ninth to top 100 mph. If you’re keeping score at home, that means that 41% of his tracked batted balls have been hit at least 100 mph. Bichette’s career mark is 31.4%, and his season high of 34.3% came in 2022. He’s blowing that out of the water. On Monday alone, he came to the plate three times and hit the ball 109.5 mph, 100.7, and 99.7. That's some day.

As you may know, Statcast’s definition of a hard-hit ball doesn’t start at 100 mph. It starts at 95 mph, and there’s a solid, logical reason for that. If you’re interested, in December 2023, I broke down all the different ways to interpret exit velocity for FanGraphs, explaining the pros and cons of each method. One of the things I found was that, especially over a shorter sample size like spring training, the louder the contact, the more predictive the results are. Let me show you what I mean with a graph from that article. It shows the correlation between hard-hit rate and performance in the following season, but the threshold for hard-hit rate changes as the graph goes on.

The blue line is for players who have bigger sample sizes, and the red line is for players with smaller sample sizes. We’re interested in the right side of the graph, where they hit their peaks. You can see that the blue line peaks earlier, a bit after 90 mph, while the red line doesn’t peak until right around 100 mph. Over a long season, what matters is the ability to hit the ball hard consistently. But when you don’t have as much information to go on, what matters is demonstrating the ability to really crush it. That’s what Bichette is doing right now. He’s healthy, he’s got a cool, new haircut, and he’s demonstrating that 2024 was a blip by obliterating the baseball.

Maybe you believed that 2024 was a blip already. Injuries limited Bichette to 81 games, and he certainly didn’t look like himself. Moreover, the advanced stats said that he got very unlucky, running a .269 BABIP that was miles below his career mark and a .264 wOBA that was nearly 40 points below his xwOBA of .303. However, there was a real dip in exit velocity numbers, provided you look in the right place. Although his average exit velocity of 89.2 mph matched a career low, it was still roughly at the league average, and his 43.5% hard-hit rate was still well above average. This is where the different ways of interpreting exit velocity really matter. If we look at 95th percentile exit velocity, which throws out the bottom 94% of a player’s batted balls and just tells you the exit velocity of the ball at 95%, we can see the problem.

Bichette was still able to hit the ball hard in 2024, he just wasn’t able to hit it hard hard. All of a sudden, he lacked the top-end power that made him a 20-homer threat in each of the three previous seasons. But now let’s add 2025's spring training data into the mix and see how it affects the graph.

See what I’m getting at here? It’s a resurrection! It’s still too early to draw firm conclusions. It's March 10. All the same, I’m not sure what else Bichette could do to show us that he’s back to being the player he was before injuries laid him low in 2024. He's not just hitting the ball hard. He's hitting the ball hard hard.

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[Spanky99]

Bo knows hittin'