Here at Pitcher List, we have a suite of PLV metrics to study every event in a baseball game at the pitch level. Decision Value (DV) is our hitter swing decision metric. It takes inputs like pitch velocity, location, and movement and tells us whether the hitter made a good decision to swing or take a particular pitch. This isn’t quite as simple as plate discipline; swinging at a Logan Webb sinker and pounding it into the ground is a bad outcome even if the pitch was a strike. Instead, Decision Value rewards hitters for swinging at pitches they should be able to hit hard, and for taking pitches they’re unlikely to do much with. The flipside is that Decision Value punishes hitters if they don’t swing at pitches they should be doing damage on or do swing at pitches that are unlikely to generate quality contact. You can find a much more thorough introduction to PLV metrics and Decision Value here.
We got our first updates of PLV metrics over the weekend as hitters have finally accumulated enough pitches seen to start drawing some inferences from their performance. The table below is the top 10 performing hitters on the PLV Decision Value metric through the early stages of the season.
A number of these players are reprising their elite swing decisions from 2025. Gleyber Torres was second in baseball last year in DV among batters who saw at least 400 pitches. He did so primarily on the strength of his out-of-zone DV (135) and not based on his swing decisions inside the zone (101 zone DV). Torres has always had good plate discipline, and he took it to another level last year, chasing only 17.1% of pitches. He’s tamped down on chase even further so far this year, swinging at only 16.3% of pitches outside the zone. He’s cut his swing rate in the shadow of the plate by nearly 10 percentage points since 2024; some of those are strikes, though. On clear chase pitches, though, he’s swinging at less than 10% of chase pitches and has not swung at a waste pitch yet this season. Other members of our PLV DV top 10 list who are elite at not chasing obvious balls include Alex Bregman, Spencer Torkelson, and Miguel Vargas, ranking in the top 10 of both metrics.
Ramón Laureano is the hitter with the best zone DV among our overall best swing decision-makers. Laureano is elite at swinging in the heart of the zone, where hitters perform best.
While he’s been more aggressive this year than last year, he’s still most aggressive middle-middle and along the inner third of the plate. He’s performed pretty well on pitches middle-down, but tends to swing at them less, perhaps because he runs a 6 degree average launch angle and 46 percent ground ball rate on those pitches. Chase Meidroth is also a strong decision-maker inside the zone so far this year after being below average in 2025. He has swung the most at pitches in the “cross” of zones across the middle (height) or middle (width) of the zone, although his swing rate on middle-middle pitches is actually low; he’s just seen a lot of center-cut meatballs.
Meidroth has an unusual batted ball distribution across different parts of the zone this year where his launch angles are inversely related to the pitch location. This isn’t necessarily the norm for him, as he elevated both middle and upper-third pitches more frequently last year, but it is responsible for the slight decrease in his overall average launch angle this year.
If his batted ball launch trajectories normalize back to how he performed in 2025, Meidroth’s results should improve significantly at the top of the zone. Meidroth has made some small swing changes so far this year, though, with 2 degrees more tilt and 3 degrees steeper average attack angle. A steeper swing would be consistent with struggles at the top of the zone, but it’s hard to believe that the swing changes are driving the result. As a comparison, Laureano’s swing is 3 degrees steeper than Meidroth’s with a significantly steeper attack angle. Given that we’re still just a couple weeks into the season, it’s likely that Meidroth’s extreme groundball results at the top of the zone are just a fluke of early season small samples. One feature of DV is that it’s rewarding Meidroth for swinging at pitches he should do damage on—even if his results so far have been weirdly unsuccessful.
