With just under three weeks to go in the regular season, you’re either in the thick of a championship race or wondering where it all went wrong. A typical strategy at this point is to focus on making up ground in counting stats, thinking that ratios are essentially fixed this deep into the season. That reasoning is flawed, however. Your final batting average is the same weighted average of the first 85% of the season’s performance with the last 15% of the season’s performance as any other metric. Sure, it might not look like it’s moving as much, but that’s because the scale is much smaller. As in every roto category, the closer you are to the middle of the standings, the larger the marginal gain from improvement in the category.
In one draft-and-hold league (in which my squad has been doomed from the start), I’ve got the median batting average. There are 4 teams within .001 average behind me and three teams within .0014 average ahead of me. All this is to say, you shouldn’t start punting your ratios now just because you’ve invested in them thus far. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the best contact hitters in the league through the lens of their decisions at the plate.
Here at Pitcher List, we have a suite of PLV metrics to analyze every pitch in a baseball game. 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 flip side is that Decision Value punishes hitters if they don’t swing at pitches they should be doing damage on or 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.
No list of premier contact hitters would be complete without Luis Arraez or Steven Kwan; I’ve written about their plate approaches recently, however. I’d encourage you to check out both pieces – Arraez here, Kwan here – because they have extremely different approaches for two players with the same carrying tool. While the remaining hitters might not be quite Arraez or Kwan, they’ve still excelled by our PLV Contact metric.
Jung Hoo Lee – 136 Contact, 91 DV
Lee’s average has ticked up 13 points this season, turning him into a true asset in the category for fantasy managers. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any other development in his game, with Lee posting a .323 OBP and .405 SLG that are virtually identical to his 2025 numbers. More concerning for Giants fans is Lee’s continued defensive decline. He’s no longer a center fielder, playing almost exclusively in right field this season. He still has 83rd percentile arm strength according to Statcast, but he’s inaccurate enough to rank in the 13th percentile in Arm Value, and his range is poor. If he’s going to be a defensive liability, there’s extra pressure on the bat for him to be a regular starter.
Lee has regressed substantially in his plate approach this season, undermining the value of his elite contact skills. In 2025, Lee was close to average in his plate approach, posting a 97 DV thanks to a 22.4% chase rate. In the early parts of this year, Lee was still making good decisions, at least on balls outside the zone. He chased only 25.9% of balls in March and April, but has chase rates of 32% or more in every month since. He has exceptional contact ability, including a 77% contact rate on pitches outside the zone, but it comes at the cost of not hitting the ball hard and not walking at all. At this point, Lee looks a lot like his former teammate Arraez, but without the ability to run consistently high BABIPs. Lee also strikes out about twice as often as Arraez, mostly because Arraez has an 89.6% career contact rate…on pitches outside the zone. Lee has a cool, old-school approach to hitting, but it’s just not that useful in today’s game unless you’re adding value with your legs or on defense.
Javier Sanoja – 135 Contact, 86 DV
Sanoja is having a mini-breakout this year. He played 120 games in 2025, but only reached 342 plate appearances. This season, he’s up to 129 games and 427 plate appearances. He’s maintained his 5.6% walk rate from 2025, but he’s cut his strikeout rate from 12% to 8%. Combined with a .303 BABIP, that leaves Sanoja with a .292/.331/.439 line that is 10% better than league average. Put it all together, and Sanoja has been worth 2.3 WAR in about two-thirds of the playing time that the league leaders have.
Sanoja’s shown his exceptional contact ability all season. The power, on the other hand, is just starting to show up lately. Five of Sanoja’s eight homers have come since the beginning of August. During his hot streak, Sanoja’s hitting .349/.387/.543. While he’s getting more out of his batted balls than expected, his expected average is still .313 over that span. In terms of approach, Sanoja is closer to the Arraez school of contact hitter than the Kwan-style passive approach. He swings at 65.5% of strikes and 38.3% of balls, giving him a very solid 103 zDV and a weak 91 oDV. Overall, the approach isn’t what you’d want it to be. Hitters who chase 38% of the time are usually also more aggressive in the zone. Sanoja has taken a step forward on swinging at strikes this season, increasing his zone swing rate by 6 percentage points, but it’s come at the cost of over 8 percentage points more chase. He’s shown the ability to chase at closer to a 30% rate, though, so the upside is a high average bat with a walk rate closer to 7 or 8%, generating increased opportunities to score runs.
Chandler Simpson – 133 Contact, 97 DV
Simpson is the spiritual heir to Juan Pierre in today’s game, an absolute burner who can also consistently get the bat on the ball (softly). He only walks 4.5% of the time, but he’s trimmed his strikeout rate from 9.8% as a rookie to 8.3% this year. The improvement is in part from a slight increase in zone swing rate, but mostly from the fact that he’s seeing 6 percentage points fewer pitches in the zone. His chase rate has mostly been steady since his rookie season, but his zone swing percentage is up a couple of percentage points. As a result, he has a solid 99 zDV to go with his 98 oDV.
Simpson has a short, slow swing, but consistently makes solid contact. Simpson’s swing has lengthened from 6.3 feet in his rookie season to 6.6 feet this year. For context, Arraez and Kwan have the shortest swings in baseball at 5.9 and 6.2 feet, respectively. Lee and Sanoja, in contrast, swing the bat 7.7 and 7.4 feet. Since Statcast tends to measure longer swings as faster, Simpson’s 65 mph average bat speed is a little more palatable in comparison to Lee’s 68.5. One thing that the elite contact bats tend to share is an ability to get the most out of their relatively weak swings. Simpson is the second-best hitter in the majors by squared-up percentage, trailing only Mookie Betts on a per-swing and per-contact basis.
Jacob Wilson – 129 Contact, 79 DV
It was a quiet year offensively for the young A’s shortstop, with most of his 1.5 WAR coming courtesy of a spike in his defensive stats. He ends the year with a .266/.298/.388 line that, when you account for his advantageous home park, is disappointing at best. Wilson’s strikeout rate remained an excellent 11.6%, although that’s a full 4 percentage points higher than his 2025 mark. Wilson was worse on the road, putting up a .253/.273/.373 line that was more than 20% worse than MLB average.
While Wilson is an excellent contact bat, he does have a couple of weaknesses. He’s more susceptible to whiffing on pitches that are up in the zone, especially out over the plate. When he does make contact on up-and-in pitches, he doesn’t do much with them. Part of Wilson’s issues this season stem from a big increase in his chase rate. Wilson has never been particularly disciplined on pitches outside the zone, chasing 36.8% and 32.1% of balls in 2024 and 2025, but he’s taken it to a new level this season. Wilson’s chase rate of 42.3% would be 7th in MLB if he had enough at-bats to qualify, just ahead of Bo Bichette, another shortstop notable for his poor plate approach. One saving grace is that Wilson’s aggressiveness inside the zone has also ticked up every year, peaking at a 70.4% zone swing rate this season. When you have a home park as favorable as the A’s, putting the ball in play has outsized benefits. Wilson could benefit from dialing it back a little, though. With the increase in chase has come a decline in his contact rate outside the zone. Wilson’s overall plate approach is pretty similar to Ernie Clement’s; if he ends up being the equal of Clement at the plate, you’d have to consider that a disappointing outcome based on his prior performance.
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