CJ Abrams Has a Decision To Make

CJ Abrams does not wait patiently. That’s never been his thing. He rampaged his way to the major leagues in 2022 at age 21, on a playoff contender no less. Now, should he have been in the majors that year? It’s easy, in retrospect, to question San Diego’s decision to call him up. He was below replacement level as a rookie with the Padres before they sent him to the Nationals in the Juan Soto trade, and then he was also below replacement level with Washington that year. But doing things even before they make sense has always been Abrams’ game.

To wit: You wouldn’t teach a major leaguer to swing like Abrams does. He’s one of the most aggressive hackers in the sport. His 53.1% swing rate – and 34.2% chase rate – are both among the highest marks in the league. And this isn’t some case of premeditated, Corey Seager-style aggression, either. Everyone who swings more frequently than Abrams swings at more strikes than he does. Seager chases seven percentage points less frequently and swings at strikes seven percentage points more frequently. Abrams isn’t playing six dimensional chess when he swings. He’s trying to do this:

That’s absurd (complimentary). As fate would have it, I was watching that game on TV when it happened as part of an article I hoped to write on the opposing pitcher, Hayden Birdsong. I made a strange sound when Abrams hit that ball, somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. Look at his contact point again:

How ludicrous was this combination of swing decision and result? For one thing, only one higher pitch resulted in a home run last year. But that undersells it; there have been only four home runs hit against higher pitches in the entire Statcast era. One of those came against a position player. Only one came on a faster fastball; none were on a pitch farther off the plate. And not only that, but he pulled it! Pitches that high and outside might lend themselves to punching the ball the other way, but not to a majestic blast like that one. No one on record has turned a ball like that into a home run like that other than Abrams.

From that video, you’d think Abrams was the second coming of peak Javier Báez. The combination of willingness to swing at something that far from the zone and ability to turn it into a home run is rare and delightful. But unfortunately for Abrams, he’s not cranking pitches like that, or even a little like that, every day. Here’s a chart of every ball he’s hit 100 mph or harder in the air in his major league career:

That’s a tough chart to put in context, so I’ll give you another one. Here’s Báez, the patron saint of bad swings, over the same time period as Abrams, 2022-2024. Forget peak Javy; Abrams doesn’t even compare favorably to the current version:

And for a display of what it looks like when an elite hitter swings aggressively, here’s Seager:

So was that high home run a red herring? Just call me Sherlock Holmes, because the game is afoot. Obviously, Abrams is a wildly aggressive swinger. The numbers don’t lie. But he’s not a bad-ball hitter the way that some swing-happy sluggers are. Here’s one way of thinking about it. Consider all of Abrams’s contact that didn’t come on pitches over the direct heart of the plate. He put 247 such balls into play last year; 280 major leaguers put at least 100 of them into play. Out of that group, Abrams was 227th in wOBA on those batted balls, in the 19th percentile league-wide.

If I were in the 19th percentile league-wide at something, I’d try to do that thing as rarely as possible. But of course, Abrams swings at a ton of those balls. He’s 25th out of 238 major leaguers who saw at least 1,000 such pitches in swing rate, the 90th percentile. In other words, he’s swinging at everything but making very little impact, that outrageous home run notwithstanding.

The worst part? Abrams has plus power – just not in the outer reaches of the zone. When it comes to wOBA on pitches that he puts in play over the heart of the plate, he’s in the 90th percentile league-wide. In other words, he’s incredibly powerful, but only in his nitro zone. That makes sense to me intuitively. I don’t see a massive power hitter when I look at Abrams; he’s not built like Joey Gallo or Pete Alonso. He’s powerful because he generates a ton of swing speed, but the source of that is more quickness than brute force. To make that work, he needs the ball to be placed centrally.

When you look at it that way, you can reclassify Abrams’ loose swing approach. He swings a lot not because he’s doing much with the bad pitches, but because he really wants to swing at pitches over the plate, and so he swings a lot overall. Those swings at bad pitches are just loss leaders, essentially. He’s taking little L’s on bad pitches so that he can stack up big wins on meatballs.

Sound reasonable? It does, but anything can sound reasonable when I ignore numbers and pitch it to you qualitatively. The truth is that Abrams is so swing-happy that it hurts. Think of it this way: If we turn everything into percentiles and make higher better, Abrams is in the 19th percentile for damage on contact when he swings at mediocre pitches and the 10th percentile (higher means a lower swing rate) for swinging at those pitches. His combined percentile score between these two categories is 29. That’s quite poor. How poor? Here are the 10-worst hitters by this metric, along with their 2024 wRC+:

Abrams had the best performance of the group by far. It’s so hard to be a good hitter if you swing this frequently at pitches that a) often get called balls and b) you aren’t capable of hitting hard. You can do one or the other. Rafael Devers chases far too frequently, but he crushes those pitches when he makes contact. Isaac Paredes does almost no damage when he makes contact on pitches outside the heart of the plate, but he doesn’t swing too often in those regions, and the tradeoff works just fine. But both? No way.

It would be one thing if Abrams were one of the best power hitters in the game on pitches over the heart of the plate. He’s awesome, no doubt, and far more bruising than his frame and position would suggest – but he’s not Yordan Alvarez or Aaron Judge. He was 49th out of 172 players when it came to total run value produced over the heart of the plate last year. That’s really good! It’s one spot behind Elly De La Cruz, three ahead of Manny Machado, and six ahead of Francisco Lindor. He’s ahead of Salvador Perez when it comes to bombing away on pitches down the middle, even.

The problem? He was 140th out of 172 on everything else. It weighed him down enough that he was just OK offensively last year despite smashing 20 homers while striking out less frequently than league average. But the gains are almost certainly going to come on the off-the-center-of-the-plate end of the equation. If he can improve just to middle of the pack on everything other than the white hot center of the strike zone, there are huge gains to be had. Taking a few extra balls does wonders for your OBP; it’s a lot easier to chase less frequently and walk more than it is to suddenly hit for more power when you’re already hitting for a surprising amount of power.

Can Abrams make this change? Does he even want to? I don’t know the answer to those questions. I can tell you, anecdotally, that he’s swinging a ton in spring training, but he always swings a ton in spring training. Many players do. But I can’t tell you if Abrams is going to tamp down his aggression on marginal (or worse) pitches, because I don’t know how that change would affect his approach on drivable pitches, his bread and butter.

If hitting were easy, more people would be good at it. This adjustment is difficult, and it’s risky too. The current iteration of Abrams – aggressive to a fault, relatively powerless against pitches off the center of the plate – is already a league-average hitter. The more pressing concern, from an immediate improvement standpoint, is defense. Statcast graded him as the worst defensive full-time shortstop in the majors last year. He had a bad season on the basepaths, too; he stole 16 fewer bags than he did in 2023 while getting caught eight more times. Improve on those two things, and he could approach All-Star status without improving at the plate.

Changing his approach at the plate could unlock new heights for Abrams – but there are no guarantees, and the growing pains might be sharp. Maybe he really does need that swing-happy approach around the margins to make sure he takes enough swings at the cookies. Maybe pitchers won’t cooperate and he won’t walk more despite a better approach. There are ways this can go wrong.

But if we’re talking about Abrams as a franchise cornerstone, we have to think bigger on the offensive end. His current mix of skills and approach feels capped. When you give away so much value by swinging at bad pitches and not doing enough when you put them in play, the math just doesn’t work. So if you’re counting on an Abrams breakout, pay attention to the fringes. If he’s either laying off those pitches or hitting them for extra bases, something interesting might be going on.

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