Hello Viva El Birdos! I am excited to break down some Cardinals hitters today, but I wanted to briefly introduce myself. I have been reading VEB for well over a decade at this point and credit this site’s
writers and commenters with much of my education in baseball analytics. I appreciate the quality that this community expects and will do my best to provide thought-provoking content. While I was vaguely aware of baseball and the Cardinals in the late 1990s, I became a diehard fan sometime in 2001. I mention the timing of my fandom because I can be, at times, disgustingly optimistic about the Cardinals. Despite the last three years, my time following the birds has been largely defined by winning, a productive farm system, and a competent front office. I will try to keep my enthusiasm in check, but I am quite excited by the energy and direction Chaim Bloom and team are bringing. Now, let’s talk about hitting!
In an interview with Randy Karraker, Bloom explained his view on what hitters need to be successful and broke it down into three buckets: 1) What do they swing at, 2) how often do they hit it, and 3) what do they do when they hit it. He goes on to say that if you do all 3 of those things at an elite level, you will be an elite player. If you do two of them, you will play for a long time. If you only do one of them, you better do something else well on the other side of the ball. Framed more concisely, swing decisions, contact, and damage are the three vectors on which he is evaluating hitters. This might seem obvious, but this framing stuck with me as a very clear way to think about how and why hitters are having success. Rob Cerfolio (and I think Chaim Bloom too) have frequently referenced finding a player’s “superpowers” and improving the parts of their games that allow them to leverage their outlier talents. With this framework in mind, I took a stab at quantifying how the current Cardinals are performing relative to the league in each of these areas.
What are the best ways to quantify swing decisions, contact, and damage? I am curious to hear if there are other suggestions, but here is what I came up with:
Swing Decisions: I calculated the total number of correct decisions a player made on a percentage basis. Out of 100 pitches, how often does a given player swing at the strikes and take the balls? Corey Seager led MLB players with over 300 plate appearances, making the correct decision 74.1% of the time. Given that Seager has a stat named after him (SEAGER: for SElective AGgression Engagement Rate), I feel good about this metric overall.
Contact: For contact, I decided just to look at in-zone contact. I can see arguments to look at overall contact or something that incorporates out-of -zone contact as well, but I think this starts bleeding into the swing decision portion of things. A player that rarely swings at a ball outside the zone is going to have a better overall contact rate than a player with the exact same contact ability that swings at more pitches outside the zone.
Damage: Ultimately I settled on xwOBACON, which is simply a calculation for the expected damage on balls put in play (so it excludes strikeouts and walks). This was the hardest one for me. We could look at exit velocity metrics, but this would reward players like Jordan Walker who smoke ground balls but aren’t getting the ball in the air enough to build real production on contact. The “barrels metric”, which incorporates exit velocity and launch angle, is close to what I am looking for but it is too noisy when looking at single season player performances. Nick Allen and Chandler Simpson had 0 barrels in 2025. While I don’t dispute that they are not particularly powerful hitters, it probably isn’t reflective of their true talent to expect them to never barrel a baseball.
Having settled on these three metrics, I scored every player that accrued at least 300 plate appearances in 2025. Finally, to give us an easy way to compare players, I converted the metrics to grades similar to the 20-80 scouting scale where 50 is average, 60 is one standard deviation above average, and so on. Below are the top players in the damage, decision, and contact categories.
To illustrate this, take Aaron Judge and his 91 grade damage score. Judge had an xwOBACON of .590 (!) compared to the average of our cohort, .374. The standard deviation of the metric is .052, putting Judge a whopping 4.1 standard deviations above average.
Before we look at the Cardinals hitters, here are the top 3 and bottom 3 in the MLB for each category.
And finally, here are how the Cardinals’ batsmen stack up:
A few things that surprised me when looking at this:
- Victor Scott is making elite swing decisions. If he can somehow level up his contact or damage half a grade, maybe a league average hitter is in there somewhere?
- I was surprised to see Nootbaar score below average on the swing decision grade. This is, of course, driven by his low swing % at balls in the zone (55.4%) as he is still elite at laying off pitches outside the zone (21.5%). There was a lot of talk going into last season about how Nootbaar could level up if he could become more aggressive on hittable pitches. While his in-zone swing % ticked up 1.4% 2024 to 2025, his out-of-zone swing % increased 4.5%. This is not a sustainable tradeoff and illustrates just how hard it is to make even small adjustments at the big league level.
- Nolan Gorman has a playable (ish) decision and contact profile IF he is impacting the ball at an elite level on contact. I am less optimistic about his chances of offsetting the lack of contact given his relatively modest exit velocities. Gorman’s 104.7 90th percentile exit velocity is right around the league average of 105.1.
- Willson Contreras is the only player that is a full plus grade at doing damage on contact. Herrera is close but he gets to his excellent production with a balanced skill set. In fact, Herrera and Burleson are two of only 25 players to be average or above in all three areas.
- Jordan Walker has a bad combination of swing decision and contact ability (duh), but his lack of ability to do damage when he does connect may be an even bigger problem. Despite having the fourth highest 90th percentile exit velocity in the bigs last year, he is dead-on average at doing damage with his contact. James Wood and Oneil Cruz are similar hitters in some ways with their high exit velocities and low launch angle approaches. I am curious to dig into what Walker needs to do to get his production closer to Wood than Cruz.
Breaking down players in this way leaves more questions than answers. Which areas are reasonable to expect a player to improve? Intuitively, it seems like with reps a player like Walker could improve his swing decisions. Could Victor Scott do push-ups all off-season with Randy Arozarena and improve his exit velocities to become a real offensive threat? Masyn Winn has close to average max exit velocity numbers. Does he have another gear to level up his game? I am not sure, but there is some talent to work with, and hopefully we have the right support structures in place to support some devil-magic-fueled breakouts.
