There’s Something I Ought To Tell You About Ketel Marte

Ketel Marte was one of the best 10 hitters in baseball in 2024. That’s just an objective fact – or at least as objective as facts can get in baseball. Our calculation of WAR? He was 10th among hitters. Baseball Reference has him 10th as well. Baseball Prospectus put him in seventh place. That’s not surprising; he set career highs in home runs, league-adjusted OBP and slugging, and wRC+. He played solid defense and even added a little value on the basepaths.

He was one of the best 10 hitters in baseball in 2019, too. In fact, he’s the only player to crack the top 10 in both 2019 and 2024. That’s wild. Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Corey Seager, Juan Soto, Bryce Harper, José Ramírez – they all played in both years. None of them – none! – managed the double that Marte did. This isn’t some weird defensive value issue, either: He’s the only hitter with a top-10 wRC+ in both years.

Those in between years? Don’t look too closely. Marte totaled 9.1 WAR across the 2020-2023 campaigns. He posted 6.3 WAR in each of 2019 and 2024. In that 2020-2023 span, he was 64th among hitters in total WAR. He had two seasons of roughly average offensive production in that span, and produced at a 3 WAR/600 pace instead of the 6.3 WAR/600 pace from 2019 and 2024. So it’s safe to say he’s streaky – one hitter some years, and a different guy other years.

I think that’s too simplistic, though. Here’s another thing you could say about Marte: He’s two different hitters every single game. As a righty, he’s a fearsome slugger. And batting lefty, well, he’s not quite that.

Here are some rate statistics for right-handed hitters facing left-handed pitchers from 2019 through 2024:

Of course Judge tops this list; he’s the best hitter in baseball. But after that, Marte might be the preeminent right-vs.-left hitter in all of baseball. He has the best slugging percentage against lefties this side of Judge, and he hits home runs like a slugger and strikes out like a contact king. He has a .334 batting average despite a BABIP that’s hardly outrageous – .345, for the record. Contact quality metrics back it up.

In other words, Marte is an outright superstar as a righty hitter. Last year was a great encapsulation of this. Marte hit .342/.401/.679 against lefties and launched homers in 8.5% of his plate appearances. That’s gaudy stuff, and it undoubtedly powered his great season.

The flip side? The flip side’s not bad, but it’s certainly not elite in the same way. From 2019-2024, Marte is 51st among lefty hitters against righty pitchers, with a 118 wRC+. He has league-average power and takes some walks, but strikes out more frequently than he does while batting righty despite hitting the ball with less authority. The righty-hitting Marte is a superstar. The lefty version is a dead ringer for Jorge Polanco. That’s strange, to say the least.

Ah, but there’s a reason for it. We think of switch hitters as roughly equivalent from both sides of the plate, perhaps with the volume turned up a bit on one side or the other. José Ramírez cranks dingers and spits on bad pitches no matter which side he’s batting from. Ozzie Smith laced line drives the other way, whichever way “other” meant on that particular plate appearance. Conventional wisdom would suggest that because Marte’s a masher righty, he should also be a masher lefty.

Now that Statcast is measuring swing speed, though, we can actually test that theory. And Marte isn’t swinging the same on both sides, to put it mildly. Here are the swing speeds, by handedness, for the 10 switch hitters who batted most frequently in 2024:

In plain English, Marte is generating extra power batting right-handed because he swings a lot harder. And that’s underselling it. From the right side, Marte turns into Judge and Giancarlo Stanton. Inconceivable! You might say that word, but in this case, I do not think it means what you think it means, because Marte’s righty swing is actually one of the fastest in baseball, tied for second in the league with Judge. That fast swing rate? It’s outrageous. Only Judge and Stanton got the bat head above 75 mph more frequently. Sure, every switch hitter has a dominant side, but this is something else entirely.

Is this an argument for Marte abandoning switch hitting? Most definitely not. He’s a plus hitter as a lefty, and it would be crazy to risk that excellent performance in the hopes that he can learn to hit right-on-right in the majors at age 31. It’s also definitely not an argument for him to be platooned; teams pay good money for lefties who can post a 118 wRC+ against righty pitching. Marte does that in addition to laying waste to lefty pitching. He’s a self-contained platoon, a righty slugger or lefty contact hitter depending on who’s on the mound that day.

Instead, this is an argument that you should appreciate Marte more than you do. Unless you’re a Diamondbacks fan, you probably think of him as a generically good, do-everything hitter. That’s an accurate description of his overall batting line, but his overall batting line isn’t a good description of him. No one looks at Judge and Anthony Volpe together and says, “In the aggregate, these two spots in the Yankees lineup provide average power based on average swing speed.” We only do it with Marte because it’s convention with switch hitters, but he’s far outside the normal bands of how switch hitters work.

The average fan might not realize all of this, but opposing teams absolutely do. Marte gets attacked as if he were always a righty; when opposing managers choose relievers to face him, they make an effort to turn him around to bat lefty. That’s because they’re getting scouting reports that basically say, “If he beats you righty, you have no one to blame but yourself.” I think that’s pretty dang cool – and when I watch Marte, I have a renewed appreciation for how not every hitter can be defined by their standard statlines.

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