Harper back to MVP form with strike-zone discipline
Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper is dialed in this season. To say the least.
The 24-year-old slugger is batting .418 with eight home runs in Washington’s first 22 games, creating runs at a rate that is almost two-and-a-half times the league average after adjusting for park and league effects (246 wRC+). He has 16 extra-base hits (.405 ISO) with an equal amount home runs (four) hit to straightaway center field as they are pulled for power. His latest home run, a three-run shot as part of an 11-run seventh inning against the Colorado Rockies on Thursday night, had a true distance of 441 feet, the secondhome run hit this season.
We’ve seen Harper hit for power and average before, but this season his mastery of the strike zone is almost unparalleled.
Harper is walking more often (20 percent) than he is striking out (15 percent) and has been swinging on a career low 40 percent of pitches while making contact with more than 92 percent of balls in the zone. He’s obviously got a long way to go this season, but the unanimous 2015 NL Most Valuable Player is on track to join Barry Bonds (2002 to 2004) and Brian Giles (2002) as the only batters this century to swing at no more than 40 percent of pitches with a zone-contact rate in excess of 90 percent.
In a major change, Harper is laying off pitches near the outer part of the plate, preferring to wait until a pitcher makes a mistake in his wheelhouse rather than chase a pitch he can’t do much with. He swung at more than 11percent of pitches on the outer part of the strike zone in 2015 and 2016; this season, he is only taking a swing on 8.8 percent.
This has led to more than 47 percent ofhis plate appearances with him ahead of the count, three percentage points higher than his 2015 MVP season (44 percent). And he is doing more damage,
producing a 1.554 OPS in these at-bats compared to 1.488 in 2015 and1.107 in 2016.
On pitches that Harper swings at within the strike zone, he is whiffing a mere 2.4 percent of the time, seventhlowest among major league hitters seeing at least 300 pitches this season. He’s swung and missed at just one fastball down the middle, with five home runs, two doubles and two singles the other 13 times.