Wait, how much is Bryce Harper waving?

Every morning, I go to Fangraphs to raise some rankings. Today, one of my favorites shows 30-day plate discipline statistics. I’ve been checking if he’s been tied up in a swing-first trend since Michael Harris II swung everything and then dug out something to his own huge holes. Never worry, he’s still there to hack – his swing percentage ranked 18th in the Grand Slam last month – but that’s not an article about Harris. Here are the top ten baseball batsmen in the past 30 days:

Usually, this is not the ranking you want to be at the top. Ezequiel Tovar was there because he had never seen a slider he didn’t like. In the overall, this group is hitting horrible Last month. But there are two exceptions to this statement. Ozzie Albies is recovering from the swell, and as can be seen from his low swing, he operates differently than the rest of the group. That was neat, but Albis wasn’t the focus of today’s articles either. No, that would be Bryce Harper, who seemed to ignore all my knowledge of patience and strength.

Dragging the court waiting for them. As long as I follow baseball, I know that. I grew up on Barry Bonds’ perfect idea of ​​zone, A-Rod and David Ortiz, pulling tough balls from the outside corner, Albert Pujols went further, more often than he hit. And this is not a Seager problem either. This metric is about measuring the ability to control attacks, i.e. the ability to swing frequently without bad pursuits. Corey Seager has a career pursuit rate of 27.1%. Harper last indicated that this was a 2018 restriction. How did he do it?

One way Harper does this is to maximize the value of his early swing. “Oh, that’s a pitch he’s going to hit the world” is mostly just cliché, but mainly. Sometimes, pitchers don’t pitch well! Actually, a lot of time. The order is so difficult. The guys kept missing the area at 3-0. No one try To throw Bryce Harper under the plate, but pitchers often do it.

If you stripped the three-ball count and two-shot count, then when the count does not contain strong incentives (walk or avoid strikeouts), all you have left is batsman behavior. What would Harper do when counting doesn’t force his hands? He swayed. The league swings on about two-thirds of the middle court. Harper swung at 83%, the sixth highest rate in the Grand Slam, and he saw about 300 such balls this year. In other words, we are talking about an additional 50 fluctuations on the crushable court due to his aggressiveness.

Among the favorable numbers, Harper’s swing is worth mentioning. This man was not deceived. When he released on these intermediate intermediate products, 22.3% of his fair contact was driven away. That’s about twice his usual speed. In other words, he pursued these balls because they were easier to smash, and he sold out to crush them.

If you think of Harper’s game as a function to maximize these fluctuations, his extremely high swing makes more sense. Why is Bond’s sector discipline so important? Because it forces the pitcher to throw things to him. Harper just cuts the middleman. Forget about working hard to leverage to boost your favor and then ruthlessly squeeze the pitcher to make mistakes. Harper will find his mistakes.

In theory, this sounds great. However, for many players, Harper’s plan will be underwear gnome-y. Step 1: Swing on a good court. Step 2:…Step 3: Profit. Each huge strap board wants to swing on the pitch on the plate with good counts. The problem is that the pitchers don’t throw them away, or they throw so many hit balls that the batsman with swing fun will always be in two hits or any potential complications. In other words, the problem is that “just mash cookies” won’t work properly without anyone giving you any cookies.

I believe the pitcher doesn’t want to throw Harper these gimmes. The data show that, in fact. He believes that the middle class is less than anyone else in baseball in these counts, only 22.3% of the time. The rest of the list is full of innocent hackers like Nick Castellanos and Jose Altuve (free). In other words, the pitcher goes out of his way to avoid throwing these pitches to Harper.

You can imagine this was a big problem for him. Forgot the count-based version of the statistic I’m there to give you; only Altuve and Oneil Cruz see lower pitch rates in the heart of the board. Like every batsman, Harper doesn’t do much damage when the pitcher avoids the most dangerous parts of the strike zone. I’ve been willing to see it as a good sample of his talents over the past four years, which has a lot to do with Harper’s achievements:

OK, so we have a puzzle: Harper saw the court hit less than anyone else in the Grand Slam. However, he caused most of the damage on these courts. This is the puzzle of the classic Slugger. Bonds and his modern compatriot Juan Soto took the gold standard approach: just understand which pitches are not blows, and don’t sway them. Eventually, the pitcher will have to enter the strike zone. What are you going to do, every walk or soto? (Tempting!) The batsmen see the plate heart pitching over a third of the time, while they are only 20% of the count.

Can Harper make plans? perhaps. From 2015 to 2021, he had a steady chase rate and swing below league average, improving 148 WRC+ and a ridiculous 17% walk rate over that timeframe. But if you have Harper’s swing, you might want to use it, and he changed his attack plan to emphasize all cuts all the effects.

Say these things together in your mind and you will see the underlying problems immediately. Almost no one is more swaying than Harper. Almost no one saw much less stadiums than Harper. If you’re Ezequiel Tovar, it’s one thing, it’s a slap hitter, and opponents would rather stuff him with a shocking pitch than risk a free pass. All pitchers want to do it when they want to see Harper avoid him, but his performance there is like he is practicing batting.

You may not be surprised to know that Harper’s single-strike aggression on a crushable court brings some chase problems. When he saw the court outside the strike area early in the number of times, he swung at a speed of up to 36%. The league average is 23%. That’s a natural trade-off; in order to get off on a shocking field, batsmen have to accept some bad fluctuations where they are fooled or read the position incorrectly.

Anyway, the whole puzzle is OK. Why? Because despite Harper chasing too many bad balls, his reputation as a mash makes it impossible for the pitcher to attack the strike zone, and early pitching outside the zone is also great for Harper, even if he sways in so many places. Of course, Harper’s swing rate is high in every court, and he sees the same speed of the court. On the other hand, he didn’t even have half the sway, and he almost never went on strike. As a result, despite his pursuit, he was more frequent than the average batsman this year.

Harper’s weird approach works because the cost of these early strikes is not particularly high compared to the benefits of being easy to stand out. In fact, his gambit won a lot of rewards. Think of it this way: He saw the tone of the plate at the speed of his first year. But 49% of his playing came from these courts, which is the 33rd percentile of baseball. So his extreme aggression is to convert a fixed mash-and-match court into as much damage as possible.

In the early days of the quantity, it’s very good. Harper has more swings and turnovers than your average batsman, but he has fewer foul balls and fewer strikes, so he counts at average speed. However, in two hits, his method has weaknesses. Swings and lapses on two strikes became more expensive, and foul balls weren’t that bad. At the same time, everyone is swaying more, so no one will be called a strike. If Harper continues to sell out middle class courts, he could have a horrible strikeout rate.

But Harper’s strikeout rate is not terrible. He had a simple solution: he just stopped swaying at such an extremely high speed. Throughout 2025, Harper’s swing ratio was the tenth highest in baseball and his pursuit rate was the 90th percentile. But when he went on two strikes, he chased much less frequently. His pursuit rate dropped to the 60th percentile, part of the constraint method of the two strikes. His contact rate increased – he cried in a 60% chase before two strikes and only 40% after reaching two strikes. This is very different from the league as a whole, with a 47% chase rate and a 44% chase rate before two strikes. When Harper fits him, Harper becomes a new, accessible batsman.

In other words, Harper’s swing priority is deceiving us. You might think he saw the red there, swaying from the shoes, allowing the fries to fall where they could. But this is not what happened. Harper has excellent strike zone judgment and has the ability to absolutely destroy the ball in the strike zone. A hybrid approach is ideal for those with these two great skills. When the drawbacks are not bad, he is swinging a big shot, and then when the count makes the decision more valuable, he becomes a more selective batsman.

So, in the end, why did Bryce Harper swing so much? Because the pitcher almost begs him. The further they were away from the heart of the plate, the more he was actively hunting the remaining middle middle gifts. It may not make sense at first, but if you are as good as Harper, you can make things impossible. What is the conclusion?