Red Flag Hitters for 2025 - High Strikeout Rates
Nolan Jones busted in 2024 after a red flag riddled 2023 breakout season. What lesson can be learned from that, and which hitters should we avoid in 2025?
The Background
Work begins on the team previews for next season pretty much as soon as the current season ends. I usually start even before the postseason ends. It takes a long time to write up all 30 teams in a way I feel deserving of being paid for it, so I get right into it.
This week, I was writing up the Rockies, and I was reminded of the Nolan Jones bust. Maybe you’ve forgotten or blacked it out, but let’s think back to what Jones did in 2023.
424 PA, .294/.387/.540, .926 OPS, 20 HR, 20 SB
A 20-20 season from a 25-year-old Rockies hitter in two-thirds of a season! That was huge, and it made Jones a top-50 pick in 2024 fantasy drafts. Most teams that got their hands on him in 2024 used their 3rd or 4th pick to get him - and that proved to be disastrous.
297 PA, .227/.321/.320, .641 OPS, 3 HR, 5 SB
There were a couple of injuries along the way, but he was awful out of the gate and never showed any sign of life in his three different goes at MLB pitching between IL stints.
The pick was not without risk, and there were red flags. The biggest red flag was the strikeout rate he posted during that 2023 breakout. His 2023 strikeout rate was 29.7%, the 20th-worst mark in the league. He made up for it by rarely missing when making contact. His .926 OPS was the best in the league among hitters with a strikeout rate above 29%, and he got there with an elite 15.7% Brl% and .353 xwOBA. The question for 2024 was then: can he repeat that elite quality of contact profile? It wasn’t unreasonable to think he could, but the answer when the dust settled was a resounding no.
That’s the story, and it sets up the question we need to answer for the future. How should we handle hitters who had strikeout problems when looking to next season? I’m here to try to shed some light on that question.
The Idea
I looked back to 2021 for hitters that met this criteria:
K% above 29%
xwOBACON above .415
xwOBACON = expected wOBA on contact
I chose .415 because that’s about the 75th-percentile mark (it’s very good)
I used xwOBACON because xwOBA factors in the strikeouts, so I didn’t want to double count. The idea here is to find these hitters who had successful seasons despite their high K% because of how well they hit the ball when they were making contact. After that, I checked how each player performed the following year, this time looking at their wOBA (because that’s what they actually did on the field - and at the end of the day, that’s what we care about - you don’t get points for expected stats).
The Example
Let’s keep going with our Nolan Jones example just to make it crystal clear what we’re doing.
In 2023, we see Jones with a high K% and a high xwOBACON. He was able to generate a high .395 wOBA with that combination. The following year, the wOBA plummeted 108 points.
One example tells us nothing, so we want to look at a larger group of these types of profiles and see how often they had these large fall-offs in wOBA the following year.
The Results & Analysis
Between 2021 and 2023, I found 33 examples of hitters who met this criteria and then had at least 400 plate appearances the following year so we could reliably check their wOBA. You can check out all the data and an interactive scatter plot here. Here’s a look at the plot:
The red dots are the hitters whose wOBA decreased the following year, and the green dots are the hitters who generated an increase. Of the 33 dots, only nine of them are green (27%). That means 73% of hitters performed worse (in wOBA, at least) the following year after meeting this criterion. The average change was -0.031. If we look at a percentage, the average is a loss of 8.6% of the previous year’s wOBA. To put that in perspective:
League Average wOBA: .330
After an 8.6% Loss: .302
If we’re putting names on that, Alex Bregman put up a .330 wOBA in 2024, and Andrew Vaughn posted a .304 mark - so that gives you an idea of what kind of downgrade you see.
If we look at the hitters who improved:
Brent Rooker - 2024 (.348 → .392)
Teoscar Hernandez - 2024 (.317 → .360)
Eugenio Suarez - 2022 (.306 → .344)
Joey Gallo - 2023 (.286 → .320)
Giancarlo Stanton - 2024 (.297 → .330)
Christopher Morel - 2023 (.322 → .347)
Eugenio Suarez - 2024 (.313 → .337)
Matt Chapman - 2022 (.311 → .331)
Kyle Schwarber - 2024 (.350 → .366)
I put in bold the hitters with wOBAs that were already above average. It’s pretty easy to improve on a .286 wOBA (Gallo), so it means a lot more when you already had a decent one and then improve even further on it. But we see how rare that is.
Of the 33 in the sample, 21 had year one wOBAs above .330. Only the two above improved, and that’s 6% of the sample. The average loss in that sample was 50 points - a massive number.
The Conclusion
This conclusion could be explained in a simpler way. We could just re-iterate what we already know - xwOBACON is not overly sticky. There’s regression to the mean in those instances. That’s the basic rule that we’re seeing here.
What we see here is that xwOBACON regression will damage hitters with high strikeout rates more harshly. If you’re giving away 30% of your trips to the plate to a strikeout, that puts enormous pressure on having success in the other 70%.
The last thing to do is to check the names that qualified for this post in 2024. ADP is king and most leagues are sharp enough to downgrade these types of guys a bit, so we’re not immediately writing these names off, but we should certainly expect a worse outcome in 2025. Here are the ten names, ordered by 2024 wOBA:
There are some talent-level outliers here in Elly, Oneil, and Stanton. With steals guys like Elly and Oneil, there’s more to consider in a fantasy league situation (Elly will still be an elite fantasy player with a .320 wOBA, for example).
The guys I’d worry about a bit here would be the ones who get drafted pretty aggressively next year and don’t have the steals or the outlier skills to fall back on. The main guy there is Vientos, I think he’ll be one of the first third basemen off the board.
Cowser, Stanton, O’Hoppe, and Toglia will go later in the draft - but I’d still be looking to fade them as a general rule, given what we’ve seen here. Marsh and Siri probably aren’t guys that will get drafted in a standard league, so we don’t have to worry much about them.
That’s it for another offseason analysis piece, I’ll be back soon with more!