George Springer Is Swinging Softer but Hitting Harder

During the last week of spring training, I expressed some serious concerns about how George Springer would play this season. “He’s 35,” I wrote, “and it wouldn’t be crazy to see him put up one more three-win campaign. But if he doesn’t, if he gets off to a scary, slow start, the Blue Jays will have to act.” As it turns out, George Springer is not off to a scary, slow start. In fact, as I write this on Thursday morning, his 256 wRC+ is the best among all qualified players. After two weeks of games, George Springer has been the best hitter in baseball and I should probably consider shutting up.

Like anyone who’s off to this crazy a start, Springer has definitely benefitted from some luck. Not only is his .625 BABIP the highest in baseball, it’s more than 100 points higher than Will Smith in second place. If his BABIP were to get cut in half, it would still be on the higher side! However, his .445 xwOBA is still 15th-highest among all qualified players. So maybe he doesn’t deserve to be the absolute best hitter in baseball, but he’s still right near the top. He’s running absurd exit velocity numbers and a 55.6% hard-hit rate, and because he’s lifting the ball in the air too, his barrel rate is right at the top of the league.

Obviously, it’s very early in the season. We’re only talking about 44 plate appearances and 27 batted balls. Nobody in baseball is going to keep running a 256 wRC+. However, there’s more going on with Springer right now, and I’m honestly not sure what it means. The first thing I did was check whether he’s gone on a run like this in recent years. Is he doing something new that should change our perception of his abilities, or is this just part of the package and we just happen to be catching him at a good time? Here’s his rolling hard-hit rate over the past five seasons, courtesy of FanGraphs.

Ok, so this isn’t anything new. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great sign that Springer came out of the gate mashing the ball. However, the graph makes it clear that he’s had a stretch that was as good or better than this in each of the last four seasons. We’re seeing him at his best, but we probably shouldn’t adjust our expectations about how much hard contact he’s capable of making. I won’t make you look at another chart, but I pulled the same graph for groundball rate. Once again, we’re not seeing Springer reach a new plane of existence when it comes to launch angle. He’s had a stretch where he lifted the ball like this in all of his recent seasons.

Here's where things get weird. When a player is hitting the ball harder like this, you would naturally expect them to be swinging harder. Springer isn’t. In fact, his bat speed has fallen from 71.9 mph last year, which put him in the 52nd percentile down to 70 mph this year, which puts him in the 22nd percentile. He went from average bat speed to the bottom quartile of the league while hitting the ball much harder. Baseball Savant lets us break things down further.

It's not just that some soft swings are skewing the average. The distribution graph above shows that Springer’s median swing is softer too. When Springer really swings it, he’s not swinging as hard. So why is the ball jumping off his bat? It’s time to look at the other aspect of Statcast’s new bat tracking metrics.

Springer’s squared-up rate has skyrocketed from the 55th percentile to the 84th. I’ve broken down the whole formula here, but in case you’re not familiar, squared-up rate shows how often a player hits the ball flush, and it’s calculated on a sliding scale, depending on the velocity of the bat and ball. So you don’t have to have great bat speed to have a great squared-up rate. In fact, it usually works the other way. The players who lead the league in squared-up rate are always bat-control guys with slow swings and low exit velocities, most notably Steven Kwan and Luis Arráez. Springer has somehow traded a bunch of bat speed for a bunch of flush contact, and the result has been a huge increase in exit velocity. Bat tracking is still very new, but to put it plainly, that’s not something we’ve seen before. I’m not at all certain that it will last, but you can bet I’ll be watching.