How Jackson Merrill Can Make His Life Easier

I worry that Jackson Merrill’s incredible rookie season has been appropriately recognized but underexamined. For any rookie to put up 5.3 WAR and finish in the top 10 in MVP voting is incredible; for a kid who was 20 years old on Opening Day and learning to play center field on the job, it’s extraordinary.

As impressive as that one-line summary is, Paul Skenes (and to a lesser extent Jackson Chourio) sucked up a lot of the shine that would have accompanied such a performance in most seasons. Shine can be hard to come by for a player on a West Coast non-Dodgers team that’s already got plenty of stars to promote.

So I found myself, in the dead of winter, contemplating what comes after the abstract for Merrill. Specifically, whether a certain nit is worth picking.

When I was a kid, I always, always, always did my homework. Mostly because if my parents found out I’d been slacking off, they’d have chained me to the radiator in the basement as soon as I got home, instead of waiting until after sundown like normal. But also because I cared about my grades, and doing my homework seemed like an easy way to pick up points.

For a hitter, walks are like doing your homework. Homework is not the point. You can be a good student, even an A student, if you blow off most of your homework. You can do your homework diligently, and still fail the class. But doing your homework, and banking those cheap points, buys room for error. Plus all that crap your teachers tried to sell you about “reinforcing what you learned in the classroom” and “building productive study habits.”

Merrill was incredible in 2024. He nearly hit .300; he slugged an even .500 and hit 24 home runs. His xwOBA, .372, was 14th in the league, one spot ahead of Freddie Freeman.

But he didn’t do his homework. At least not all of it. Merrill’s walk rate was just 4.9%, 122nd out of 129 qualified hitters. He was 12th in the league in batting average but only 61st in on-base percentage.

Might this come back to bite him? Maybe.

Since 2000, there have been 82 rookie seasons of 400 plate appearances or more by players age 22 or younger. Once I booted up this list, I realized that maybe I shouldn’t worry about Merrill too much, because he’s already keeping some pretty impressive company. Merrill’s 130 wRC+ last year was 14th out of that group, one spot ahead of Evan Longoria. If you’re a Padres fan and I told you Merrill was basically going to have Longoria’s career, you’d probably be pretty pleased with that, right?

Normally, a player only gets to hit 400 times in a season as a college-aged rookie if he’s really good, but the distribution of offensive performance actually mirrors that of the league overall; 43 out of those 82 had a wRC+ of 100 or better. While rookie performance doesn’t correlate perfectly with rest-of-career performance (Yasiel Puig was second in wRC+, while Xander Bogaerts was 74th), early returns do seem to indicate future success.

The list of 21 youngsters who posted a wRC+ of 120 or better in their rookie season includes seven future MVPs: Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, Ronald Acuña Jr., Cody Bellinger, Andrew McCutchen, Bryce Harper, and Freeman. Three others (Juan Soto, Corey Seager, and Francisco Lindor) have finished second in MVP voting but never won. Julio Rodríguez, Carlos Correa, Corbin Carroll, and Gunnar Henderson have finished in the top five in MVP voting at least once.

That’s a heady group. And one thing all 14 of them have in common is a rookie-year BB%+ of at least 80. All except Seager, Lindor, and Rodríguez bested the league-average walk rate as rookies. Merrill’s BB%+ was a measly 59.

Hitters who don’t walk as rookies can sometimes learn better habits. Nolan Arenado and Bobby Witt Jr. both had similar walk rates to Merrill when they were rookies, and I think we can all agree that both of them turned into pretty good hitters pretty quickly.

A low walk rate that’s part of a good overall output, somewhat paradoxically, bothers me more than a low walk rate that looks to be a symptom of overall stinkitude. It’s like the hitter’s getting away with something, and is in for a world of hurt once he gets caught. Here are the six rookies from the list who posted an average or better wRC+ despite a BB%+ of 75 or less:

See what I mean? Taking a look at all those MVPs, a Longoria-type career for Merrill might have undersold his offensive potential based on results alone. But if I told you there was a 40% chance Merrill turns into either Eloy Jiménez or Jose Tabata, you’d throw tomatoes at me.

And to be clear, that’s not what I’m saying. There is a path to offensive excellence without walking a lot — even a path to excellence while swinging at everything. But I’ve already mentioned Seager and Harper in this article, so you knew that already. Seager, Harper, and Merrill were second, fourth, and seventh, respectively in in-zone swing rate last season. But Merrill walks less, chases more, and doesn’t hit the ball as hard:

Now, Harper and Seager are both grown men — Harper’s been around since before Statcast, if you can remember back that far — and Merrill is still young enough that he can get stronger. Merrill could also improve when it comes to lining up his swing decisions with his strengths:

Merrill’s strongest areas of the strike zone follow a tic-tac-toe patter from high-and-outside to low-and-inside. This tracks with another minor nitpick I have about his game: He hits the ball in the air a ton, but he doesn’t pull it when he does. Merrill’s GB/FB ratio, 0.89, was in the lowest third of the league. But his pull rate on fly balls was in the bottom 20%. Not a huge deal, but it might end up being the difference between 20-homer power and 30-homer power.

The real problem, if you want to call it that, is that Merrill is weak up-and-in: a .235 SLG on balls in play from that part of the strike zone, compared to .818 up-and-away. And yet he swung at 81% of pitches up-and-in but just 57% up-and-away:

Moreover, Merrill’s contact rate up-and-away was the lowest in any part of the strike zone.

It bears repeating that these are minor deficiencies. Merrill could fix absolutely none of them and end up being a first-division starter in center field for the next decade. But his performance as a rookie put him on a short list populated by MVPs and future Hall of Famers. If Merrill can refine his swing decisions just a little bit, that’s his ultimate potential.

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