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 flipside 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.
We’re now about two-thirds of the way through the MLB season. Just like a hot or cold streak, changes to a player’s plate approach in the middle of the season may fly under the radar. In today’s edition of PLV DV Weekly, I’ll be checking in on the swing decisions of some notable players and some notable changes in swing decisions since June 1st.
Esmerlyn Valdez – 124 DV since June 1
Valdez has an excellent approach for a guy running a 37% K rate. Valdez generates his strong approach metrics by having an excellent sense of the strike zone. He chases only 23.2% of balls, which is about 5 percentage points better than league average. He swings at over 66% of pitches in the zone, by comparison, which gives him a very strong 43.5% zSwing minus oSwing.
The issue driving Valdez’s strikeout rate is his inability to make contact consistently when he swings. He has just a 64.7% contact rate overall, and just 71.1% on strikes. To put that in perspective, Rafael Devers ranks last among the 149 qualified hitters with a 76.5% zone contact rate. Jorge Soler is last among qualified hitters with a 65.4% overall contact rate. It’s not great to be an outlier in your inability to make contact.
Of course, when Valdez does make contact, exceptional things happen. He’s barreling the ball on an incredible 28% of his batted balls. His incredible contact quality means he puts up barrels at an elite rate per plate appearance despite his limited ability to make contact. Among qualified hitters, Yordan Alvarez leads baseball with a 12.4% barrels per plate appearance. Valdez barrels the ball in 13.9% of his plate appearances. Statcast lists James Wood, Elly De La Cruz, Aaron Judge, and Munetaka Murakami as the most similar hitters to him. He’s clearly a contact-challenged slugger with good discipline, but he’s somehow an outlier in every dimension, good and bad.
Nasim Nuñez – 122 DV
Nuñez has taken a big step forward in his plate approach over the last two months. He began the season with a DV that was just slightly above average, sitting at 105 through the end of May. Nuñez is in some ways the polar opposite of Valdez as a hitter, with a .043 ISO that is last among qualified hitters by 16 points. They share some strengths in their approach, though, with Nuñez chasing just 24.3% of balls and swinging at 67% of strikes.
Nuñez has maintained his 67% zSwing all season, but his chase rate has been improving. In the first two months of the season, Nuñez chased just over a quarter of the pitches he saw outside the zone. Since June 1st, he’s cut that number to 22.9%. It’s a small change, but it’s led to meaningful improvements. Nuñez has solid contact ability, but he’s relatively better inside the zone. He ranks in the 59th percentile in zone contact rate, but only in the 48th percentile in contact rate on balls. The drop in his chase rate, plus an increase to a 91.4% zone contact rate, has cut nearly 3 percentage points from Nuñez’s swinging strike rate over the past two months. He’s turned from a massive liability at the plate, with a 46 wRC+ in the first two months of the season, to an average or better bat, posting a 118 wRC+ since June 1st. If he can post just an average line at the plate going forward, combined with his good glove and excellent contributions on the bases, Nuñez could be a three-win player that the Nats found in the Rule 5 draft.
Drew Gilbert – 121 DV
It hasn’t been the most effective 248 plate appearances for Gilbert, but it’s hard to blame his approach, at least for the last 126 of them. Since June 1st, Gilbert has shown incredible discipline, chasing under 20% of pitches outside the zone. He only swung at 57.8% of pitches in the zone over that time, but that’s not much of a change from his start to the season (60.2% zSwing). The chase rate is a huge improvement, though, after he swung at 30% of balls to start the year. Gilbert’s early-season DV wasn’t bad (95), but this is another level for the young Giants outfielder.
One other source of improvement for Gilbert is a change in the composition of what pitches he swings at in the zone. To start the season, Gilbert swung at 61.2% of pitches in the Statcast heart of the zone. All of those pitches are strikes, clearly. He also swung at 56.8% of pitches in the “shadow” zone, which is an area 1 baseball’s diameter in or out from the edge of the zone. Roughly half the pitches in the shadow zone are strikes, and half are balls. Gilbert is chasing a lot less and swinging a bit less since June 1st, but he’s actually increased his heart swing percentage to 64.9%. He’s cut his shadow zone swing percentage to just 43.4%, meaning the strikes he’s lost are the ones around the edges of the zone that are harder to do much with. The result is an improvement from a 4.9% walk rate and 20.5% strikeout rate to 11.9% and 12.7%, respectively. His power has disappeared with the change in approach, dropping from a .395 SLG to .308, but he’s gained 71 points of OBP, leading to a 9-point improvement in his wRC+. I love the change in approach at the plate, and I’d be optimistic that the power will return to its previous modest level.
Zach Neto – 65 DV
Neto has taken a step back in terms of his swing decisions over the middle part of the season. He has the sixth-worst DV among hitters who have seen at least 400 pitches since June 1st. The only hitters who have lower DVs than Neto over the past two months are inveterate hackers like Michael Harris II and Salvador Perez. While Perez is not having much success this year, he’s always been this type of hitter. Harris and Neto have been significantly better, indicating that it’s certainly possible to succeed despite your swing decisions, not because of them. Heck, even the otherworldly Yordan Alvarez has an 85 DV in the middle part of the season.
Neto is different than Perez and Harris because he hasn’t been this type of hitter all season. In the first two months of the season, Neto had a 92 DV, courtesy of slightly below average choices on pitches both in and out of the zone. Since June 1st, however, Neto has taken a step back in both his zSwing and oSwing. Early-season Neto was aggressive, swinging at 31.1% of balls and 70.8% of strikes. Midseason Neto has lost a couple points of aggression inside the zone, but is chasing 43.6% of the time. This version of Neto’s chase rate would rank 5th in MLB, behind the aforementioned Perez and Harris, plus Ezequiel Tovar and Ernie Clement. Clement has elite contact skills, and Harris makes excellent contact in the zone. Tovar and Perez don’t, and are struggling. Neto is somewhere in between. He’s traded 34 points of OBP for 23 points of slugging with the new approach, which doesn’t seem worth it to me. That said, he’s still maintained a 108 wRC+ after starting the season with a 115. Still, based on the promise of his first couple seasons, it’s sad to see him take a step back in his approach every year. He’s looking like a healthier Boston Trevor Story instead of the potential superstar he seemed like in 2024.
Cody Bellinger – 74 DV
Bellinger started the year making uncharacteristically good swing decisions, posting a 108 DV through the first two months. He’s turned back into a pumpkin, though, with two months of a 74 DV that is even lower than the 84 he ran in 2025 and the 88 in 2024. The main explanation of Bellinger’s step back is a massive increase in his chase rate. Bellinger started the season with a 23.4% chase rate that harkened back to his explosive 2019 season with the Dodgers. Since June 1st, however, Bellinger has been chasing 38.5% of the time. His performance hasn’t been immune to the change, either, with him slashing .271/.378/.476 over the season’s first two months and .244/.311/.348 since.
Bellinger has odd swing metrics for a hitter who made his name by averaging 37 homers in his first three seasons in the majors. We can’t measure if anything has changed because bat tracking data doesn’t exist for the start of Bellinger’s career, but he has a slow swing, especially for one as lengthy as his. On the plus side, it’s remarkable that a player with consistently poor chase rates has managed to keep his K rate at 16% or lower ever since leaving Los Angeles. Bellinger is currently out for 4-6 weeks with a hamstring injury, but hopefully the time spent on the sidelines will allow him to reset his approach to what it was at the start of the season.
