Baseball is a copycat league: a team or player tries something new that works, and suddenly, everyone else is doing that same thing. On a macro level, this is the league’s obsession with strikeouts and power. On a micro level, players adopt various strategies and tactics from one another. Amongst players, many look to the best to learn how they, too, can become the best.
Enter Juan Soto, the logic-defying 26-year-old who signed a 15-year, $765M contract for his elite skillset this offseason. As we all know, Soto has prodigious power, solid bat-to-ball ability, and the best eye of any active player. Soto’s .421 OBP in his 26 and under seasons ranks third among all players since 1980 (min. 1000 at-bats), only trailing Frank Thomas and Wade Boggs. Soto’s skillset is so desirable because he’s carved out this floor of solid OBP, preventing struggles with the bat from limiting his game completely. A batter’s eye also ages better than any physical trait a player may possess, so there’s a high likelihood that Soto is getting on base at a good clip for most, if not all, of his 15-year contract.
As hitters get more big-league experience, they gain a better feel for the zone (data based on qualified hitters from 1980-2024). With what we’ve seen from Juan Soto’s uber-elite eye, it’s hard not to want to recreate his approach if a player has a somewhat comparable eye. But Juan Soto is Juan Soto for a reason. Many promising players have a similar skill set, featuring solid power peripherals and a keen eye, yet they cannot compete.
There are two players I want to compare to Soto: Wyatt Langford and Lars Nootbaar. These are both exciting bats with a similar approach to Soto but are better off when they aren’t like him.
Though Soto laps the field across the board, the other two possess excellent 90th-percentile exit velocities and above-average barrel rates. That provides all of these players with at least 25 HR potential.
However, it’s the plate discipline where the two players share a unique similarity in their profile. There is a 25% or larger difference between their in-zone decision value (zDV) and their out-of-zone decision value (oDV), and they all possess solid power metrics. With their passive swing decisions, all of them excel at letting pitches out of the zone go but struggle to take advantage of those inside the zone and do damage at the potential we can see. Soto, however, is the extreme use-case of this archetype.
Soto has average zDV and 97th percentile oDV, which he pairs with his exceptional power. The list of players with equal or better oDV than zDV paired with above-average contact and power is relatively small and a pretty good group. I realize this is a niche sorting of players, but that makes sense given the player archetype I’m trying to identify: Who is a good hitter who doesn’t make poor out-of-zone decisions and capitalizes on pitches in the zone?
Of this group, Soto’s 27% difference between zDV and oDV is 6% ahead of Kyle Tucker (who’s also pretty good) and clear the rest of the group. It’s a small but mighty group of players, with Spencer Horwitz (when healthy) and Trevor Larnach being popular breakout candidates this year.
Meanwhile, suppose we expand our search to all players with better oDV than zDV (and above-average contact & power). Four players appear above Soto: Jonathan India, Jon Singleton, Lars Nootbaar, and Wyatt Langford.
We’ve circled back to where we started with Nootbaar and Langford. They are the most interesting here because the consensus is that we haven’t seen the best yet from either player. Singleton is 33 years old with a nine-year gap between big league appearances, and India has shown two full seasons of his capabilities.
The Case for Lars Nootbaar
With Nootbaar, he possesses a swing rate similar to that of Soto, with 37.2% compared to Soto’s 36.9%. These are the two lowest swing rates among players with 400 plate appearances in 2024. However, Nootbaar sees 7.4% more pitches in the zone than Soto. The 54.6% zone rate ranks 11th out of the 207 hitters with 400 PA.
It’s a clear path for pitchers to succeed against him, and why not take advantage? Pitchers can fill the zone without fear of Nootbaar taking advantage of it. They also don’t need to fear him either; Nootbaar’s only peaked with 14 HRs and a 123 wRC+, which is good but not necessarily star-level. This comfortably explains Nootbaar’s poor zDV: he’s getting hittable pitches that he isn’t taking enough advantage of. While I understand being a passive hitter, this much passivity is detrimental to his performance.
If Nootbaar wants to take that step forward and play up to his full potential, he has to take a slight hit on his passivity (pun intended). By comparing Nootbaar to the league in xwOBA, zone rate, and swing rate by count, we can see that he is not taking advantage of being ahead in the count.
Nootbaar’s 12.6% difference from the league average in swing rate while ahead of the count is the most out-of-place figure when looking at the xwOBA for that count status. That’s where Nootbaar, or any hitter, does the most damage, and that should be the time to be aggressive. He’s also getting more pitches in the zone than league average while ahead in the count because pitchers aren’t as worried about him doing damage.
It’s also not beneficial for Nootbaar to get to two strikes. Even if he performs better at two strikes than league average, a 0.278 xwOBA is not good. He must try to succeed in situations where he has the advantage rather than sitting back and fighting with two strikes.
Additionally, Nootbaar is best against fastballs and struggles against slower stuff, and fastballs show up more in counts where the hitter is ahead. Nootbaar saw 68.8% fastballs while ahead in the count, compared to 57.0% while even and 40.6% while behind. That’s almost 30% more fastballs when ahead in the count, and he’s not taking enough advantage of those pitches.
His swing rate on fastballs in the strike zone while ahead in the count (wordy, I know) is 78.4%. While that may seem reasonable, that’s in the 38th percentile among hitters. He needs to be more aggressive when he gets “his pitch” in a batter-friendly count.
We’ve also already seen the case for Nootbaar being more aggressive: when he’s playing well, he’s more aggressive than not.
This isn’t to say that Nootbaar needs to revamp his approach completely. A 12-14% walk rate is just too high for a player of his caliber, and he can still be patient at the plate with a 10-11% walk while doing more damage in a Cardinals’ lineup that needs it. Nootbaar’s zDV peaked in that late hot stretch of last year, proving he can approach the league average.
If Nootbaar can take the decision-making peaks we’ve seen and apply them to a more extended period, I think there’s a 140 wRC+ bat in there. The most bullish projections systems peak at 123 wRC+ for him, but that accounts for similar abilities as previous years. Nootbaar still has the potential to take a huge step forward, and he needs to actualize it.
The Case for Wyatt Langford
Langford is a different story from Nootbaar. Langford was a 2023 draft pick who shot through the Texas Rangers minor league system in no time and had a highly anticipated debut to start 2024. It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing at first; he didn’t hit his first over-the-fence HR until June, but Langford’s September has many thinking a star might be born this year.
Fangraphs’ prospect graduation report of Langford has him with 70/70 raw power, 35/70 game power, and 40/55 hit tool, which more closely resembles what Soto’s last Fangraphs’ prospect grades looked like. He has more potential to unlock the 35+ HR potential that we’ve seen from Soto too, which makes Langford one of the most exciting players in the game. As mentioned above, Langford struggled to get off the ground throughout most of last season as he put up a 91 wRC+ through August but surged with a 180 wRC+ in the last month of the season. Not only did he double his wRC+, but he doubled his HR total too: Langford hit 8 HRs in his first 443 PA and 8 HRs in his last 114 PA.
Langford has a low 42.8% swing rate, which is only in the 86th percentile compared to Nootbaar and Soto’s top-of-the-line figures, but still makes similar amounts of contact to them. As Langford navigated the season, his improvements were not directly linked to his swing rate but to his overall decision-making process.
He had both highs and lows in swing rate during September, yet the swing aggression and Process+ chart show a more linear improvement to the highs in aggression and overall Process+.
In September, Langford showed that the true potential starts to show when he attacks. Though there was stagnant performance throughout the year until that last month, Langford was all over the place in tinkering with his approach until he found what worked. Despite his entire season’s 74 zDV being one of the worst in baseball, the developments are arguably more enticing than consistency.
Langford struggled the most with fastballs, but his Process+ suggests that performance won’t repeat itself this year.
He didn’t make the best in-zone decisions on fastballs but overcame that decision-making with the brute force of contact ability and hitting for power. By the end of September, Langford was also making average decisions (both in zone and out of zone) on fastballs despite pitchers presumably being aware of the tear he was on.
Despite otherwise underwhelming results, we saw constant growth in his zDV on breaking pitches.
Langford saw a hefty amount of breaking pitches and slowly decided not to swing at well-executed pitches. The linear growth shows that Langford might be banking these skills for the upcoming season and that there isn’t much more we need to see before he becomes a star.
Overall, Langford’s in-zone decision value saw a dramatic spike in September, which is consistent with the results.
Langford’s projections reflect that this is a player poised for something big. Not every day you see a second-year player get a near 20-point jump in wRC+ after a 110 wRC+ season.
Both players have exciting potential, which is actualized by refining their approach. It’s easy to want to emulate Juan Soto, but it’s not worth it if players can’t take advantage of “their pitches.” Most of baseball deals with hitters being too aggressive as a bad thing, but this is the small niche where aggression is good. Wyatt Langford and Lars Nootbaar do damage when they hit the ball; they just need more consistency.