We’ve already discussed Alex Bregman’s huge, game-tying home run twice already, including how improbable it was against Louis Varland, one of the most dominant and homer-stingy closers in baseball, but … hey, why not re-live the moment one more time?
It’s not often you get a two-strike, two-out, two-run, game-tying home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, right?
That homer left the bat at 99.7 mph, traveling 368 feet into the basket at Wrigley Field. And although it just barely got out, that would have been a homer in 30 of 30 ballparks (at 355 feet, Wrigley Field has the longest HR distance in MLB down the left field line).
That was also Bregman’s third home run in the second half and his sixth since June 30. For the season as a whole, Bregman is still just a tick above average (103 wRC+), but his offensive production has really ticked up for what I bet is a longer stretch than you may realize.
Alex Bregman Heating Up
Some interesting (i.e., convenient) cutoffs for Alex Bregman:
- Second half (86 PAs): .282/.349/.500 (134 wRC+)
- Since June 29 (141 PAs): .270/.345/.508 (134 wRC+)
- Since June 9 (220 PAs): .254/.355/.443 (122 wRC+)
And although it’s not a perfect split down the middle, that June 9 cutoff leaves a big enough sample before (297 PAs) and after (220 PAs) to use as a good splitting point. So what’s changed?
Over his first 297 plate appearances of the season, Bregman slashed .243/.327/.342 (89 wRC+) with a 9.8% walk rate and a 17.2% strikeout rate. After that, his walk rate ballooned to 12.3% while his strikeout rate came down almost exactly as much (to 14.5%). So right off the bat, it seems like he started seeing the ball better, making better swing decisions, and whiffing less.
And the numbers bear that out:
- O-Swing%: 23.1 –> 20.6
- Z-Swing%: 57.3 –> 63.7
- Z-Contact%: 88.5 –> 92.6
- SwStr%: 7.0 –> 5.3
What those numbers tell you: Alex Bregman is swinging at fewer pitches out of the zone, swinging at more pitches in the zone, and making more contact on pitches in the zone. And he’s also whiffing on fewer of the pitches he sees overall while swinging a bit more often (which makes the drop more impressive than it looks).
Disappointingly, that hasn’t resulted in meaningfully better exit velocities or more barrels over the entire sample, but if you look at the trend, it’s clearly headed up (especially since the break).
Alex Bregman is also hitting the ball on the ground less often, taking his GB% from 41.3% before June 9 to 34.4% after. And he’s had more success as the batted-ball results went the other way; his .284 BABIP in the first period (pre-June 9) outpaces his .267 mark in the second, which sits below his career BABIP (.280).
And again, almost everything above is going all the way back to early June. If you look at where he’s been in just the second half of the season (86 PAs and counting), he is hitting the ball harder (42.6 hard%, 89.6 mph EV) than he has at any other point this year.
Perhaps there won’t be enough time for him to get his numbers all the way back up where you’d like them for the full season — and perhaps he won’t keep outpacing his expected production (which he has all season, including this most recent stretch) — but I don’t think there’s much of a question that he’s looked better at the plate for a while now, and that he can be a significant part of this offense the rest of the way. My bet? We have more moments like yesterday ahead of us.
