In their series against the Detroit Tigers immediately preceding Jac Caglianone’s June 3rd debut, the Kansas City Royals used six outfielders. Those six outfielders – Drew Waters, John Rave, Kyle Isbel, Mark Canha, Nick Loftin, and Dairon Blanco – had struggled to a .264/.296/.369 line over the first two months of the season, answering the age-old question “What if Lenyn Sosa had no pop?” Despite their struggles to that point, that collective was nevertheless an improvement over the recently released Hunter Renfroe. Nevertheless, the Royals lost two of three to the Tigers, scoring only six runs and underlining the importance of adding more firepower to the lineup.
It’s easy to see why the Royals thought Caglianone might help jump-start the offense at a position of need. Jac was on a torrid two-month stretch across Double-A and Triple-A, slashing .322/.389/.593 for a 160 wRC+. Importantly, despite his proclivity to chase outside the zone, scouts’ fears had not yet manifested as Jac maintained a strong 20% strikeout rate and accessed enough of his prodigious power to hit 15 home runs in only 229 plate appearances.
The first 60 games of Caglianone’s career, however, were an awful experience for Royals fans and fantasy owners alike. Caglianone struggled to a .147/.205/.280 line that was 70 percent worse than league average before hitting the IL in July. After a lengthy rehab assignment where he mirrored his earlier minor league success, Jac ended the season with a month in the majors where he improved to a still-unplayable .183/.310/.333, leaving Royals fans yearning for the early-season performance of their six-man Frankenoutfield. What happened, what can be done, and what can we expect from Jac going forward?
Despite the results, Jac actually hit the ball reasonably well last year. While getting results like Austin Hedges at the plate (and Hedges’ evil twin in the field), nevertheless, Jac hit the ball fairly hard, reasonably frequently, and apparently directly at defenders at a disproportionate rate. Despite a 12% barrel rate on contact and in 8.2% of his plate appearances, the equal of his substantially more effective teammate Vinnie Pasquantino, Caglianone’s results were comically worse than expected. Jac had a .157 average against a .237 xBA; his -.080 difference was the largest margin in the majors among batters with at least 150 PAs. He slugged .295 against a .432 xSLG, also the largest deviation from expected outcomes in the majors. This combination resulted in a .239 wOBA vs a .321 xwOBA, good for, as expected, the largest difference between results and expectations in the majors.
It may not be surprising to hear that Caglianone had awful luck on balls in play. After all, it’s hard to conceive of a position player posting a Rey Ordonez-like .532 OPS without suffering some bad luck on their batted balls; only two players with at least 100 plate appearances and a worse wOBA than Jac outperformed expectations. It’s useful, however, to contextualize just how bad things went for Jac. Not only did he underperform his expected batting average by more than any other major league hitter, but the difference between his underperformance and the second least fortunate hitter (Tommy Edman) was the same as the difference between Edman and the 43rd least fortunate hitter (Oneil Cruz). It didn’t even matter if Jac crushed the ball. On his 14 batted balls of 110-114 miles per hour, exit velos at which MLB collectively hit .729 and slugged 1.670, Caglianone hit .500 with a 1.143 slugging percentage, missing the equivalent of an additional two doubles and a home run.
Simply regressing Jac’s batted-ball luck to normal wouldn’t be sufficient to generate a good season, though, and there is room for improvement on things within his control. There are two commonly cited areas to be concerned about his future production at the plate: his (in)ability to elevate the ball and his propensity to chase outside the zone. In the remainder of this article, I hope to convince you that the first of these red flags is maybe a little less crimson than it appears at first glance, while providing a counterintuitive perspective on the second.
It’s certainly the case that Jac suffered from a 4.1-degree launch angle, which impaired his ability to access his power in games. In some sense, we should be impressed at his ability to barrel the ball consistently despite his low launch angle. No one among the 15 players with the flattest launch angles in baseball (Caglianone ranks 13th) barreled the ball as frequently as Jac, while the closest is Christian Yelich at a 6.5% barrel per plate appearance rate. Indeed, Yelich is the most optimistic comp if Jac never learns to elevate. Despite his career 4.1 degree launch angle, Yelich has been an overall excellent offensive player, even if the shape of his contributions has varied from year to year. While Yelich’s massive 2019 season benefited from the rabbit ball, his 44 home runs also came from elevating the ball more frequently, as he posted a career-high 11.3-degree launch angle. Of course, Yelich has displayed an exceptional ability not to chase outside the zone, which certainly does not describe Jac’s approach at the plate and to which we shall return shortly.
There are, however, a couple of reasons to be optimistic about Jac’s ability to lift the ball and access more of his power in the future. The simplest reason for optimism is that he already did so in Triple-A, where he maintained a 14-degree launch angle. Statcast swing-tracking metrics corroborate the idea that his launch angle could return closer to his minor league numbers as well. Jac does have a relatively flat swing, with a below-average 29-degree tilt (32 degrees is MLB average) and slightly below average 9-degree attack angle (10 degrees is MLB average), but he’s not extreme in either sense. Two Blue Jays help illustrate the difference. Addison Barger featured the same tilt and attack angle as Jac, but a 12-degree average launch angle and more balls hit in the air. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., notable for his consistently low launch angles (7.5 degrees for his career, 7.8 in 2025), shares the same swing tilt as Caglianone and Barger, but remains remarkably flat at the point of contact with a 3-degree attack angle. One place Caglianone’s swing truly stands out is in his average bat speed of 77.4 mph, just faster than Kyle Schwarber, and among the 10 hardest swinging batters in baseball.
Where Jac differs from players who had more success is in his choice of what to swing at (spoiler alert: it’s almost everything, and not in a great way). Jac’s penchant for chasing in the minors was well known, and he did not stop chasing after debuting, swinging at 38.5% of pitches outside the zone. Jac still maintained a pretty solid 57% contact rate on those swings, nearly identical to Ronald Acuña Jr., despite chasing dramatically more often. If we operate under the assumption that batters generally swing at more hittable pitches than less, this is promising for Jac: reducing his chase rate to a manageable level could dramatically improve his contact ability. While his proclivity for swinging at bad pitches may explain some of his lack of success, I don’t think it captures the entire scope of the issue. Instead, Jac had a rare combination of aggression outside the zone and passivity inside the zone, which gives him the opportunity to improve in two dimensions.
Somewhat paradoxically, despite chasing all the time, Caglianone generated less value for his team on pitches on strikes than he did on balls. Jac contributed -12 runs on pitches in the heart of the zone and -10 runs on pitches in the shadow zone while still contributing positively on chase and waste pitches. Part of this is straightforward; even when you chase 40% of the time, pitchers throwing outside the zone is generally beneficial for the batter due to walks, while pitches in the heart of the zone are strikes if not hit. To maximize the value of pitchers throwing over the middle of the plate, batters need to hit those pitches hard. Indeed, we see that the most productive hitters on pitches in the middle of the zone are the league’s elite power hitters, while the least productive include high-contact slap hitters like Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan.
On a per-pitch basis, Caglianone was worse than even Kwan, which is shocking given how hard he swings and hits the ball. The surprising explanation is that Jac is remarkably passive on the most hittable pitches. While he swings at pitches 51.3% of the time, and pitches in the zone 67.5% of the time (188th lowest rate among 348 players with 200 PAs), Caglianone only swung at meatball pitches 64.3% of the time (20th lowest). MLB as a whole swings at pitches about 48% of the time, at pitches in the strike zone a bit under 67% of the time, but at meatballs 76.3% of the time. Somehow, Jac is more aggressive than average overall, more aggressive than average in the zone, but nearly 10 percentage points more passive than the most passive team in baseball on the most-mashable pitches.
To underline the scope for Jac’s improvement by ramping up the aggression in the middle of the zone, return to our optimistic comp for a guy who hits the ball hard but doesn’t elevate at all, Christian Yelich. While a good amount of Yelich’s value is his superb plate discipline on balls outside the zone, even if we consider just pitches in the heart or shadow of the zone, Yelich performed much better than Jac. Despite the fact that Yelich saw a greater share of pitches in the zone than Jac last year, Yelich put up a +3 run value in the heart of the zone and only -12 runs in the shadow of the zone while seeing about three times as many pitches. The difference isn’t due to the two players’ contact abilities either. While they both made contact on about three-quarters of the pitches they saw, Jac actually hit a greater share of pitches both inside (89.3% to 85.1%) and outside (55.6% to 45.2%) the zone than Yelich.
While it’s undeniably true that Jac would benefit from some improved batted ball luck, elevating on contact, and chasing outside the zone less, these shouldn’t be the only adjustments he makes. When you have excellent contact ability, swing the bat as hard as anyone in the game, and can hit the ball 114 mph, you should try to do that when the pitcher gives you the opportunity. Jac should be swinging more often (sometimes).
Photos by Icon Sports Wire | Graphic by Carlos Leano
