Mighty Righty Tommy Edman

A certain joke has been making the rounds for a while now. It’s really simple. It goes, “Tommy Edman, power hitter? [Pause for laughter].” I made this joke myself during the Tokyo Series. If and when the joke is actually funny, it’s because Edman doesn’t have the traditional look or profile of a power hitter. That kind of incongruity makes a great premise both for jokes and for a startlingly high proportion of children’s movies. A switch-hitting, 5-foot-9 utility player who wants to be a power hitter is roughly as quirky as a rat who wants to be a gourmet chef, a robot who wants to find love, or a snail who wants to be a race car driver.

Edman never reached double-digit home runs until he got to the majors, and he has still never hit more than 13 in a season. However, I think it’s time we changed our inflection. Tommy Edman is a power hitter, or at the very least, he’s half a power hitter. That might come as a surprise, even to those of us who have been rooting for him (and thinking of him as Cousin Tommy) ever since his debut in 2019.

All three of those home runs are from this year, and all three were hit harder than 108 mph. Edman’s eight homers this season are tied for sixth in baseball. He also ranks 27th among qualified players in slugging percentage (.514) and 16th in isolated slugging percentage (.271). However, it goes without saying that a hot start like this won’t last forever. Edman is hitting the ball hard, but his bat speed is still well below average. He’s succeeding by pulling tons of balls in the air, and while I would love to see him hold onto those gains like high-contact guys Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner before him, we’ll have to wait and see where things settle. For that reason, I don’t necessarily want to focus on this power surge. I want to think bigger.

Let’s start with Edman’s bat speed. As I mentioned, he’s currently netting out in the 20th percentile, but the splits are what first caught my eye. As a lefty, Edman’s 68.4 mph bat speed would put him in the 10th percentile, next to Jose Altuve. But as a righty, his 73.7 mph mark would put him in the 78th percentile, next to Matt Olson. In other words, more than two-thirds of the league fall somewhere between Edman’s righty and left bat speeds! The graph below comes from Baseball Savant.

It’s not just that Edman tends to swing harder as a righty. The distribution is narrower, too. As a lefty, he makes a bit more contact and is more likely to take weaker swings. As a righty, he’s almost never taking weak cuts. On the graph, his weakest swing as a righty is stronger than his average swing as a lefty! It’s not just the swings, either. It’s the results. These are Edman’s career numbers.

It’s not unusual for switch-hitters to have more power from one side or the other, but that is an unbelievable gap. I was curious about how it stacked up historically, so I ran a few Stathead searches, looking for every player who has batted at least 500 times from both sides of the plate. (As a note, the numbers are slightly different than the ones above because Edman has batted right-on-right 66 times over the course of his career, and you can’t search Stathead just for all right-handed PAs. The stats below compare stats when the batter has the platoon advantage, throwing out those 66 PAs in Edman’s case.) Here are the biggest gaps of all time in terms of isolated slugging percentage.

There’s Edman in fourth place with a difference of 106 points of ISO. Not only that, but among players who are better from the right side, he’s got the biggest gap ever recorded. No switch-hitter in baseball history has ever slugged so hard from the right side while slugging so gently from the left side. However, that’s not even the most interesting detail about this chart.

Edman’s ISO from the left side is .123. That works out to a 71 ISO+, and while that’s definitely bad, it’s nowhere near the lowest number on the table. His .228 ISO as a righty works out to 137 ISO+. On both the good and bad sides of the table, Edman’s mark is the fourth highest. My point is that Edman’s appearance on this table is due more to his power as a righty than to his weakness as a lefty. If that didn’t make my point, maybe this will. Once again courtesy of Stathead, here are the most powerful switch-hitters of all time when batting right-handed against left-handed pitching (min. 500 PA).

There’s Edman tied for second place with Ketel Marte, right behind Mickey Mantle. Yeah, that Mickey Mantle. I will now pause for a moment so that you can reassemble your exploded head. He ranks fifth in slugging and 15th in OPS. Although he has just 67 total home runs, Edman is, somehow, one of the most powerful switch-hitters of all time when it comes to facing left-handed pitching. We don’t need to limit ourselves to switch-hitters either. Since his debut in 2019, Edman’s .228 ISO against lefties ranks 42nd in baseball, right between Ronald Acuña Jr. and Mike Trout. Yeah, that Ronald Acuña Jr. and that Mike Trout. He ranks 35th in terms of slugging percentage against southpaws, right between Fernando Tatis Jr. and Willson Contreras.

This whole article is a celebration a fun fact, and I get that in a way, it’s a bit of a bummer. Edman has this incredible skill that we should absolutely celebrate, but because it only kicks in about a third of the time, hitting well from the left side is much more valuable than hitting well from the right side. Edman has a 100 career wRC+, with 686 career PAs against lefties and 2,003 against righties. If those numbers were reversed, he’d have a 115 career wRC+ and, probably, a few All-Star appearances under his belt. Still, what a fun fact! From the right side, Edman really is one of the game’s legitimate power hitters, and it’s allowed him to carve out a great career for himself. He’s put up a five-win season, and his 17.2 WAR rank 40th among position players since 2019. The fact that he doesn’t look the part makes it all the more fun.

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