A Simple Example Of Using the New Leaderboards

We at Baseball Prospectus are excited to introduce our new Leaderboards and Player Cards. I, as a baseball researcher, am also excited, because the leaderboards give me an opportunity to delve into searches I never had access to before.

I’m going to show you a simple example. Juan Soto and Luis Arraez are two of the most singular players in the game. They are both Hispanic left-handed batters whose bat is their calling card. They both display normal platoon splits, though Arraez’s is larger: .823 OPS against right-handed pitchers, .689 against lefties. For Soto, it’s .992 against righties, .861 against southpaws.

But there’s a big difference in what they’re known for. Soto is said to have the sharpest batting eye in the majors. Arraez, who hardly ever strikes out, has supreme contact skills. Last year, among players with at least 350 batted balls, Soto’s average exit velocity of 94.2 mph trailed only Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. Arraez’s 86.3 mph ranked 117^th out of 128. Soto walked more often than he struck out, 129-119. Arraez almost made it there, but very differently: 24 walks, 29 strikeouts.

That got me thinking: How do they do at their singular skill on a platoon basis? We can look up Soto’s chase rate (O-Swing%, the percentage of times he swings at pitches outside the strike zone) and Arraez’ contact rate (Contact%, the percentage of times he makes contact when he swings). Or we can look at their platoon splits, as I did above. But now we can do both.

In the leaderboards, I clicked the bubble in the top row that says Platoon. In the second row, I moved the lower slider on the PA bubble to 150. That gives me platoon splits for all batters with at least 150 PA on a side of the plate. Finally, I clicked Plate Discipline to get their swing data.

I downloaded the csv and sorted it.

Here are the five players with the lowest chase rate against RHP last year:

That’s Soto and four guys who combined to hit .197/.308/.312. Chase rate isn’t everything.

And here’s the five with the lowest chase rate against southpaws.

That’s a more accomplished quintet of hitters. But the same guy’s still at the top.

As for contact, here are the five hitters who swung and missed the least against right-handed pitching.

You just can’t shake Anthony Rendon.

And here are the five who made the most contact against lefties.

Arraez isn’t at the top, but he’s awfully close.

But maybe last year’s results are a fluke. Move the Season slider to 2022-2024 and we can get the three universal DH seasons. Here are the top ten seasons for hitters avoiding swinging at pitches thrown by right-handers outside the zone.

OK, not a fluke. Soto had the lowest chase rate in the majors every year.

How about against same-handed pitchers?

First in 2022 and 2024, third in 2023. Definitely not a fluke.

And Arraez? Here are the league leaders in contact rate for the past three years against righties.

The Arraez and Kwan show. They are standouts. But Arraez stands out more.

Against lefties, though, the list is different.

Only one appearance by Arraez? Did portsiders foil him in 2022 and 2023?

In a way, yes. I noted his platoon splits above. He’s considerably better when he has the platoon advantage. In recognition of this, he got only 138 plate appearances against left-handed pitchers in 2023 and 124 in 2022, missing my 150 plate appearance cutoff. (Mike Shildt gave him 204 last season.)

So if I reduce the cutoff to 120 plate appearances in the PA slider the list changes.

Arraez’ 2023 season, with an 87.4% contact rate, rates 28^th among 523 batters who faced left-handed hitters at least 120 times.

By combining splits, we can definitively say that Soto is the least chase-prone hitter against both lefties and righties. Arraez is supreme at contact regardless of the handedness of the guy on the mound. Their 2024 seasons weren’t one-offs.

Similarly, the new leaderboards—and the similar tools on player cards—can answer many questions that were previously unanswerable. Which team had the highest home and road OPS in a month last year? On the Hitting leaderboard, click Team, Month, and Home/Away and unclick Player in the top row of bubbles, and click OPS to sort, and you’ll see the Twins had a .948 OPS at home in June and the Mets’ was .894 on the road the same month.

Which AAA pitcher had the highest groundball rate from August to the end of last season (minimum 20 IP)? Adjust the Date, Level, and IP bubbles in the second row of the Pitching leaderboard and you’ll see two-thirds of Scott Effross’ balls in play were worm-killers.

You probably know Chandler Simpson stole 104 bases last year, the most in organized ball in 2024, but do you know who were second and third? Select All from the lower Level bubble on the Hitting tab. Since this is a counting stat, you’ll want to change the lower limit on the PA slider to 1. Click the SB column to get all players ranked. You’ll get Enrique Bradfield Jr. with 74 and Justin Dean with 68. And you can break it down even more: Click the Level and Team bubbles at the top and the top five by level are Simpson with 73 at AA Montgomery, De La Cruz with 67, Yhoswar Garcia with 65 at A Carolina, Caleb Ketchup with 62 at High-A Tri-Cities, and Seth Stephenson with 60 at High-A West Michigan. And you can customize splits on the player cards to help you research players to pick up on your fantasy team.

I could go on, but you should try out these powerful new tools for yourself. Have fun. I certainly will.