This article was originally published September 23, 2023.
Cody Bellinger has authored one of the best narratives of the 2023, producing a bounceback season that would turn a Superball green with envy. If it was a surprise in April and a pleasure in July, well…it’s old hat by now. Bellinger wavered briefly surrounding an IL stint in May, but has otherwise been consistently stellar, with a slash line of .317/.360/.550.
That line harkens back to his 2019 MVP season, but ultimately falls a bit short in the latter two slash stats—it’s hard to believe how good he was that season given what he’s done since. Daniel R. Epstein covered Bellinger’s re-reinvention a few weeks ago, and Patrick Dubuque highlighted what proved to be lasting changes way back in the third week of the season. So why am I writing about him yet again, you might be wondering. Well, there’s something at the end of Daniel’s piece that I wanted to explore a little more. Two things, actually, that have a bit of synergy to them. First, the final table in Daniel’s article detailed a significant dropoff in Bellinger’s hard-hit rate, which he then explained:
He replaced his swing-for-the-fences, all-or-nothing-(usually-nothing) approach with a contact-oriented, singles-hitter modus operandi. Even though a lower percentage of his contact qualifies as a hard hit, he’s making so much more contact that it offsets the difference, which is why he has 20 home runs.
This jibes with Patrick’s earlier analysis, with Bellinger flattening his swing, keeping it in the zone longer while sacrificing some loft. It’s not a bad trade to sacrifice some pop while still slugging .550, nearly halving your K% as you do it. There have been a number of narratives around what’s driven these successful changes, many revolving around a finally-healthy player who has focused on recovering his athleticism in the box. That taps into an area that we can’t really verify—Bellinger’s agent seemed to accuse the Dodgers of forcing him back on the field before he was fully healthy, but also seemed to recant that later—but it’s hard to argue with it on the surface, given the results. There’s only one catch: Bellinger’s pop might be a bit deceiving.
It’s not just that Bellinger’s hard-hit percentage (the percentage of balls hit at 95 mph or more) has dropped, but that his overall average exit velocity has dipped in kind. That’s not a surprising connection, but it is an important one—it’s not a weird quirk where he happens to be hitting a bunch of 93- and 94-mph balls that just miss the cut. Even at his nadir with the Dodgers, Bellinger was averaging between 89-90 mph on contact. This year, despite establishing his highest max exit velo since 2020, he’s seen his average figure drop to under 88 mph—League average is 89.1. That’s about a tick and a half of velocity he’s missing on average, and the news doesn’t get much better when digging deeper.
There are good reasons to avoid leaning on average exit velocity, even though it’s what we’re given by MLB at the moment. The basic case is that a player who consistently hits the ball in a narrow band of exit velocities and a player who hits the ball in discrete bands of velocity can produce wildly different results on balls in play despite a similar average velocity. The difference between a 100 mph liner and a 105 mph liner can make a single into a double or triple; going from 85 to 80 converts a ground-ball out into… a slower ground-ball out. That’s why teams and analysts tend to prefer using 80th or 90th percentile exit velo, which isn’t something readily available but does tend to weed out some of these edge cases.
Bellinger’s 90th percentile exit velocity is 102.4 mph. Here’s the issue with 90th percentile EV, driven by the fact that it’s just not easily accessible: most folks won’t have any idea if that’s good or bad. It turns out it’s not so great: the average 90th percentile exit (weighted by batted balls) is 104.3. That places Bellinger’s quality of contact below average in both average exit velo and 90th percentile exit velo. To get a better sense of what this means, we can look at who surrounds Bellinger in this category: He’s joined at exactly 102.4 by Justin Turner, Kris Bryant, Nick Senzel, and Miguel Vargas.
That list starts out alright but ends up with a couple of guys who have earned demotions this year. He’s beat out (if barely so) by the likes of Nick Fortes (102.5), Zack Short (102.6), Raimel Tapia (102.7), post-deity Matt Carpenter (102.8), Isiah Kiner-Falefa (102.9), and Luke Maile (103). That’s just a small portion of an extensive list, but one that’s been filtered to more than 100 batted-ball events to avoid extreme outlier (admittedly 100 is still not a ton).
It’s no wonder then that DRC+ hasn’t bought into Bellinger’s season the way other stats have. DRC+ is the result of a model that includes exit velocity as an input, and it can’t love what it has seen from Bellinger in this regard. Patrick just analyzed Davis Schneider, the incredible start to his career, and why the different value statistics (OPS+, wRC+, DRC+) and their varying philosophies are useful perspectives to view a player’s season through. As he said:
When you dive into DRC+, it’s more about isolating how much of each play the batter contributed to. Who we are, typically, is stickier than what we’ve done.
The purely results-based stats love Bellinger’s 2023, and how could they not. You know the slash line. It works out to a 140 OPS+ and a 141 wRC+. That’s what’s happened. His DRC+, though? A paltry 111. Accordingly, where Bellinger has accrued 4.2 WAR from both Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs, we have him at a steady 2.5 WARP, based on his contributions to the results he’s received. That number is derived from the following breakdown:
| Measure | Ball in Play Out | Strikeout | Walk | HBP | Reach on Error | Single | Double | Triple | Home Run |
| Actual | 47.00% | 15.73% | 6.63% | 0.62% | 1.24% | 18.20% | 5.18% | 0.21% | 5.18% |
| Deserved | 48.86% | 17.28% | 7.33% | 0.74% | 0.54% | 16.59% | 4.96% | 0.38% | 3.32% |
The big difference there is in home runs, where he’s outpacing his deserved HR% by nearly two points—which is quite meaningful—and he’s also outrunning his deserved values in singles and doubles. It can be a lot to take in, but perhaps some examples could help. These were put together by Mike Axisa for his patreon RAB Thoughts just ahead of the trade deadline:
It’s easy to say “that’s baseball” (Suzyn), and that’s true. Over the course of a season plenty of things like that will happen, but if they happen enough to one person it can distort the topline statistics just a bit, enough to where the figures under the hood start to reveal a different story. As Axisa noted in his post at the time, Bellinger earns plenty of hustle doubles and infield hits thanks to his high-end speed. No one thinks he’s built his whole season off of lucky hits or awkward fielding. The question rather is how much of what he’s doing in 2023 is, to quote Patrick again, sticky.
Which (finally) brings us to the second, related subject that Daniel’s article provoked:
There is no chance he opts into his $12 million mutual option for 2024 because a long-term deal approaching nine figures awaits him in free agency.
Nothing I’ve discussed dissuades me from Daniel’s conclusion—that Bellinger will sign a nine-figure deal in the offseason—but it does make me wonder how much pause it’s going to give his suitors. If we accept that he’s creating an unrepeatable portion of his offensive value with hustle doubles and other speed-dependent contributions, it’s not just the risk that he’ll lose a step, but that ticking time bomb combined with the possibility he just won’t repeat the sort of contact he needs to capitalize on that ability while it’s there.The notion that Bellinger is getting more out of his contact this year than can be relied upon in the future, as a level of risk, just sits on top of the very real concern that, as was the case so recently, he’ll just lose that contact again.
It might be easy to feel DRC+ is dinging Bellinger too hard in certain categories—his BABIP might look high, but that speed and the pressure he puts on defenses can justify it. The hustle doubles can offset the types Axisa was able to highlight, etc. But the lack of even middle-of-the-road impact in either average or 90th percentile exit velocities makes it really hard to buy into the notion that he’s going to be able to repeat this type of success on contact. Until he unveils Cody Bellinger 4.0, of course.
Thank you for reading
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Cody is being punished for putting his bat on the ball.
For example, if take two player and both player A and B hit the ball at 100mph exit velocity and in their subsequent 5 at bats player A strikes out all five times and player B puts the bat on the ball and hits all five at 90mph exit velocity average, Player A exit velocity will stay at 100 while player B will drop to 95.
You dont hit 25 homers and bat 300+ by hitting Baltimore chops.