Ernie Clement Can’t Stop. Ernie Clement Can’t Miss. Will Ernie Clement Hit?

I don’t know else to say this, but Blue Jays third baseman Ernie Clement is a total freak. I mean that in a good way for the most part, but it’s undeniable. There is quite simply no one else in baseball like Clement. The 28-year-old infielder has a career wRC+ of 81, which means that he’s been 19% worse than the average hitter, but he possesses bat-to-ball skills that put him in the conversation with some of the game’s most talented hitters. That’s possible because Clement features a mish-mash of skills that don’t normally get stuffed into the same batter.

It all starts with his odd idea of plate discipline. When he saw a pitch outside the strike zone in 2024, Clement swung 43.3% of the time. Among batters with at least 400 plate appearances, that was the third-highest rate in baseball. Quite simply, that is not where any batter wants to be. Chasing pitches out of the zone results in whiffs, strikeouts, and weak contact, and those are very bad things. However, on pitches inside the zone, Clement was more aggressive than average, but not particularly extreme. In 2024, the league as a whole swung at 67.7% of pitches in the strike zone. Clement’s 70.1% mark put him right around 95th place. For the most part, players who chase are just players who swing a lot, but not Clement. Here’s a scatterplot that shows the chase rate and the zone swing rate of every player who made at least 400 PAs in 2024. Clement is the red dot that's not near any of the other dots.

Look how far below the trendline he is. Nobody who chases anywhere near as much as Clement does is as patient as he is when it comes to pitches over the plate. There’s a simple reason that Clement is unusual in this respect: This is not a recipe for success. Players who swing at bat pitches while letting the good ones go by don't last very long. So why is Clement still around, getting ready to play in his fifth big-league season? Because he can, to some extent, make this extremely suboptimal approach work.

That brings us to Clement’s real superpower: he makes so, so much contact. He swings at more bad pitches than just about anybody, but he’s incredible at avoiding whiffs even on the most ill-advised swing. Baseball Savant breaks the strike zone down in to four categories: heart, shadow, chase, and waste. The heart zone is what it sounds like, pitches over the middle of the zone. The shadow zone is pitches within two inches of the edge. The chase zone is pitches that are outside the zone but close enough that batters might be tempted to swing at them. Lastly, the waste zone is pitches that are so far outside the zone that batters almost never swing at them. In 2024, no player put more pitches in the waste zone in play than Clement did. Only four players – each of whom saw over 1,000 pitches more than Clement – put more pitches in the chase zone into play than he did. Here he is homering on a pitch in the waste zone. It’s at his eyes!

Here’s our second scatterplot. It once again features every batter with 400 PAs during the 2024 season, and once again Clement is the red dot way the hell away from everybody else in baseball. He’s all the way in the upper right in open defiance of the common-sense law decreeing that pitches that are hard to reach are also hard to hit.  

So Clement is a drastic outlier this season, but we can look further back. Here’s the same graph, but it shows every player season with at least 400 PAs dating all the way back to 2002. That’s 1,681 seasons. It’s a much noisier graph, but the trendline is even stronger, and Clement’s 2024 season still stands alone.

Over the past 23 seasons, no one has ever chased as often while making as much contact as Clement did. This season was an enormous outlier.

Clement didn’t just make a lot of contact, either. The 2024 season was the first in which Statcast started tracking squared-up rate, which uses pitch velocity, exit velocity, and bat speed to calculate how solidly the batter struck the ball. Clement’s 36.9% squared-up rate was the third highest in baseball, trailing only Luis Arráez (43.9%) and Steven Kwan (38.8%). He was just ahead of Mookie Betts (35.8%). That’s some incredible company. Clement truly has a gift for getting the barrel to the ball. If he ever figures out how to channel his aggression in a more productive manner Clement could easily find himself in the conversation with players like Arráez and Kwan. They’re not the best hitters in the world, but their incredible gifts for contact allow them to produce, year in and year out.

Unfortunately, that’s an extremely tall order, because plate discipline is stubborn. Over the years, it has proven extremely hard to improve upon. If he wants to keep getting big league ABs, Clement will just have to keep making tons of solid contact, because almost nobody has ever gone from chasing as much as he did last season to showing excellent plate discipline the following year. Then again, maybe we shouldn’t count Clement out; if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s doing things that previously seemed impossible.