We could finally be watching Alex Verdugo's breakout, and it might not be what you think

Ooo hello clickbaity headline, you old scoundrel!

If this Red Sox team is going to make a run in 2023 with this roster, this front office, these uniforms, and Wally the Green Monster following them around like some life-sized horror movie booger, they are going to have to surprise us even more than you are currently surprised by my beginning this article by calling Wally a “life-sized horror movie booger” in the first sentence.

But it can’t just be the totality of their work that surprises. No. Many players will need to take steps forward in their production and skill level, and some of those players will have to be unexpected. When it comes to me and this newsletter/website/whatever it is, there is really one guy I wasn’t counting on for much, and that is Alex Verdugo.

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Verdugo looks the part, and it’s not just the chains and ubiquitous grin. He has some speed, a bit of an arm, he’s got that big upper cut swing that looks like he routinely hits moon shots, and he’s quite good at putting the bat on the ball. You’d think that guy with those tools would be good. Maybe better than good. But mostly, eh, not really.

The thing about Verdugo was that he was actually not that fast. Oh sure he looked fast, but if you look at the numbers, eh, not really. His foot speed has been declining for a few years now. Also, titanic swing aside, he was not that powerful a hitter, either. He should be hitting 30 bombs a season based on that stance and swing, but again, nope. Career high of 13.

Scouts love to talk about players who look the part, the implication being that the way a player looks (tall, strong, athletic) will lead to on-field production. Sometimes that’s true, but often it isn’t. Allow me to introduce you to any number of great high school players who did diddly-squat in the minors, let alone the major leagues. And while you’re sorting through that most depressing of lists, here’s Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis, two major league All Stars (at minimum) to argue the opposite. In baseball you don’t have to look good to be good. Heck, Michael Lewis wrote an entire best seller on that premise. The Good Face is high grade BS.

Despite being more show horse than work horse, Verdugo has age in his favor. He’s just 27 this season, an age where players still can make a leap. And, surprise to me, it seems that despite both Verdugo’s past few seasons and my low expectations, he’s made that leap. But, and here’s the click-baity part, it’s not really in the way you might think.

Looking at Verdugo’s offensive stats, his slash line is much better. But the numbers underlying that are better too, and that’s the truly promising part. Lots of players get off to hot starts, and they don’t last because in the end, their underlying skills haven’t changed. The end result is often a resettling at the old level. Verdugo is different, at least so far. He’s changed in two significant ways compared with previous seasons.

Before getting into those though, I do want to point out some minor (or not so minor, perhaps) points of improvement. Verdugo has been a more passive hitter in 2023. He’s taking more pitches outside the strike zone, and indeed swinging at fewer pitches overall. Mostly he’s being far more selective about which pitches he swings at. This, you’ll agree, is good.

Here are Verdugo’s swing percentages by zone (the nine red boxes are the strike zone) for the 2022 season.

Compare that to what he’s done so far this season.

Two things stand out to me. First, fewer swings on the edges of the zone. Second, he’s swinging at fewer pitches above the zone, but also fewer pitches at the top of the zone. Verdugo (so far!) has managed to focus himself on offering at pitches he knows he can do damage on, i.e. pitches close to the center of the zone.

That’s a step forward in controlling the strike zone. Furthering that diagnosis is the fact that when he swings at pitches in the strike zone, Verdugo is making more contact than in previous seasons. To put that into a sentence that a normal person might say, he’s looking for pitches in certain locations (primarily over the plate, it seems) and making good contact when he gets those pitches.

Perhaps its a symptom and perhaps it’s a cause, but Verdugo has also increased his average launch angle. He’s still not a big fly ball hitter, but he is hitting more balls in the air and fewer on the ground. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that Verdugo’s xwOBA is way up in 2023.

OK, wait. What the heck is xwOBA? That would be Expected Weighted On Base Average, which is basebally gibberish for Good Hitting. Baseball Savant says xwOBA “is formulated using exit velocity, launch angle and, on certain types of batted balls, Sprint Speed.” Basically it’s a catch-all for everything you’re supposed to do as a hitter: hit the ball hard, on a line or in the air, and run fast after you do it.

Thing is, not everyone can do all that stuff! Last season Alex Verdugo couldn’t do it. This season he can. Why?

Part of it is developmental. Understanding the strike zone, understanding pitching, generally growing as a hitter. That’s the part that I’ve tried to cover up to this point. But part of it is something else: speed.

When Verdugo came up to the majors full time in 2019 he was an above average runner. Not a burner, not Jarren Duran, but he could run. That started to disappear bit by bit, season by season, to the point where last year his speed had all but disappeared. Baseball Savant put his sprint speed at the 38th percentile, which is fine for a first baseman or catcher, but not good for a corner outfielder.

This was bad for Verdugo’s hitting, yes, but it was especially bad in the outfield. This was the source of my (on field) issues with Verdugo coming into this season. A guy who hits .320/.390/.490 (roughly Verdugo’s current slash line) can play in any outfield corner for me any day regardless of how good a fielder they are. But a guy who hits .280/.320/.390 better be able to run and catch it. But last year, Verdugo couldn’t do… well, either.

This year is a different year though. Here are his Outs Above Average (OOA) percentile rankings, effectively how good he was defensively, since coming into the league as a regular in 2018.

2019: 81st (top 20 percent of defensive outfielders)
2020: 81st (consistency!)
2021: 10th (uh oh)
2022: 13th

It was that massive drop off that I was concerned with coming into the 2023 season. Add to that that the Red Sox were asking Verdugo to play an even more difficult position, right field instead of left, and you can perhaps see why I was losing sleep over this.

But so far in 2023, Verdugo has surprised shocked me.

2023: 91st (top 10 percent of defensive outfielders)

This is the guy the Red Sox thought they were getting years ago when they traded Mookie Betts to the Dodgers for their then-top prospect in Verdugo. Verdugo isn’t Betts. That much should be obvious by now. But these above developments in Verdugo’s game are surprising, at least to me. The steps forward he’s taken at the plate and in the field make him the leadoff hitter the Red Sox haven’t had since Betts and they replace a rather large hole in the lineup and in the field from last season that was holding the Red Sox down, namely Alex Verdugo.

I’m not ashamed to say I didn’t see that coming.

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Unfun fact I stumbled upon while writing this:

If he had played his whole career in Boston Alex Verdugo would have 41 homers (he actually has 47 career homers). But, if he’d played his whole career in Yankee Stadium, guess how many he’d have hit? 60! Insert whiny complaint about that joke of a ballpark right here.

That’s the unfun part, but the funny part of this is that that’s not even the most homers Verdugo could have hit for any one team. If all his batted balls had taken place in Houston, he’d have 65 career homers because of those silly Crawford Boxes in left field (I assume). But even that’s not the most he could have! The most is in Cincinnati where all of Verdugo’s batted balls in his career would’ve produced 70 homers.