Nico Hoerner Is Flirting With Perfection

Do you know how many leaderboards we have here at FanGraphs? I don’t. I genuinely don’t. Just in our main offense, defense, and pitching leaderboards, I counted 78. That’s before you get into team stats, league stats, splits, spring training, the postseason, combined WAR leaderboards, NPB, KBO, the minors, college, the BOARD, and on and on. We have hundreds of leaderboards because you, the citizens of planet baseball, deserve them. If you want to know who’s leading the Florida State League in groundball-to-fly ball rate, it is your right to learn that Kyle Henley of my beloved Daytona Tortugas is somehow hitting a mind-boggling seven grounders for every ball he hits in the air. I didn’t think it was possible for a baseball player’s offensive profile to suffer from acrophobia, but here we are learning new things from the leaderboards every day.

We have three plate discipline leaderboards because we pull data from Sports Info Solutions, Pitch Info, and Statcast. The strike zone is (for now) three dimensional, and so is our coverage of it. I came to really appreciate this fact on Monday, when I got curious about which hitter was doing the best job of avoiding whiffs. According to SIS, Chicago Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner is leading all of baseball with a perfect, shining 100% contact rate inside the strike zone. Let’s stop for a moment and reflect upon this achievement. We have been playing baseball for over a month now. Over more than 100 plate appearances and nearly 400 pitches, Hoerner has yet to swing at a strike and miss. He is the only player in baseball who can make such a claim, and yet that claim is disputed nonetheless.

If you venture over to the Statcast leaderboard, you’ll see that Hoerner is still in first place, but he’s at a measly 98.4%. Statcast thinks that Hoerner has swung at and missed two pitches in the zone, whereas SIS thinks he’s been perfect. Whence arises this disagreement? It’s not about the swings and misses, the definitions of which are well established. It’s about the strike zone, which exists in a perpetual state of border disputation. Here are the two whiffs in question:

Jiminy Christmas. This is why Hoerner’s not at 100%? Because he missed two perfectly located pitches that caught a combined eyelash or two of the corner? This robot strike zone has an awfully cold heart. No wonder SIS, which is logged by flesh and blood humans, has Hoerner at 100%. As for Hoerner, the feeling of swinging and missing at a pitch anywhere near the imaginary rectangle was so unfamiliar that he looked genuinely confused after both of the whiffs.

Here’s where things get really weird. Pitch Info’s leaderboard doesn’t even have Hoerner in first place. Pitch Info has Luis Arraez in first place at 98.3% and Hoerner in second at 97.6%. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Arraez is the premier contact hitter in baseball and has been for years, but let me show you his pitch chart. Remember Hoerner’s? It had those two pitches that just barely, barely caught a tiny piece of the zone. They just breathed too loudly as they crossed the plate, and the Hawk-Eye cameras got wind of it. Remember? Well, here’s the same chart for Arraez.

Look at those strikes! They’re right down the middle of the plate! One of them is a fastball. Hoerner’s misses got marked down as inside the strike zone because you know, maybe their shadows crossed it, but we’re not exactly talking about the same thing here. These are right over the very heart of the plate. Moreover, Arraez has also foul tipped another fastball right over the middle of the plate.

I visited Brooks Baseball, which uses Pitch Info data, and if you add up the data on the heat maps below, you’ll find that they actually have Arraez missing four pitches out of 145 swings in the zone, for a 97.2% contact rate. Hoerner’s two misses out of 114 swings works out to a 98.2% rate.

So I’m not sure why I can’t make that match our Pitch Info data, but I’m ready to cry foul. However, it’s time to go beyond quantity, because there is a qualitative difference here too. Hoerner has swung and missed just 16 times this season. Sixteen! Here’s what that looks like.

I mean, that’s nuts. That’s every time Hoerner has missed the ball this season. He’s chased a few sliders and cutters. The bottom dropped out of one splitter. He got beat by one high four-seamer. He just barely failed to check his swing on a heat-seeking 92-mph changeup.

In fact, four – literally a quarter! – of his whiffs this season have come on failed check swings. Hoerner has only really tried to hit a pitch and missed it 12 times this season. That’s it. That’s the entirety of his misses so far. By way of contrast, take a look at Rafael Devers’ whiffs so far this season, but before you do, some protective eyewear might be in order.

Devers has missed so many pitches. Just that list of pitch types on the right has more than half as many dots as Hoerner’s actual chart! And as I’m sure you know, despite whiffing in the zone literally 12 times as often, Devers has been a much better hitter than Hoerner overall, even in a down year, because he offsets his strikeouts with loud contact. Baseball is a weird game, is all I’m saying.

According to SIS, Hoerner ran the best zone contact rate of his career last season, when he put up a 95.1% mark. Since SIS started tracking these things in 2002, that ranks 122nd among batters who qualified for the batting title in a full season. Juan Pierre holds the record with a 98.1% zone contact rate in 2006. I went back and reconstructed the numbers based on the percentages. Pierre saw 1,486 pitches in the zone that year, swung at 880 of them, and made contact with 863. He played in every single game for the Cubs, made a ludicrous 750 plate appearances (the 29th-highest total ever), and he whiffed on just 17 pitches in the zone. Moreover, the strike zone was bigger back then!

It’s hard to imagine anybody approaching Pierre’s mark in today’s game, and I have no idea if Hoerner can keep this up all season. There’s so much baseball left to play. He might run into Mason Miller or Kirby Yates, against whom one plate appearance could easily be enough to double his whiffs in the zone. But as long as Hoerner has a 100% mark in at least one of our three leaderboards, I will be watching him closely.

All of the stats in this article are as of Tuesday morning. If it turns out that Nico Hoerner whiffed on a pitch inside the strike zone Tuesday night, I say we all riot.

UPDATE: In the seventh inning of Tuesday night’s game against the Pirates, Hoerner foul tipped a Hunter Stratton fastball in the zone, because of course he did. SIS classified it as a foul, so Hoerner is still at 100%. However, both Statcast and Pitch Info classified the pitch as a whiff. That drops Hoerner to a 97.6% zone contact rate according to Statcast (ahead of Arraez by two hundredths of a percentage point), and a 96.9% rate according to Pitch Info (still good for second place). Here’s the foul tip in question.

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