Fangraphs put out an
article today on the AL ROY race, and went into BWJ's performance and outlook quite a bit.
Seems he needs to be more selective at what he swings at to really break out. he's officially the fastest player in the AL with a 30.4 ft/s sprint speed. The Royal parts:
Quote:
The other top prospect who could surpass Peña is Bobby Witt Jr. Like Rodríguez, Witt struggled in his first exposure to major league pitching; he put up a .216/.247/.311 (57 wRC+) slash line in April. On May 2, he hit his first home run in the majors, a sign that he had started to adjust to big league pitching. Over the last month and a half, he’s improved to a .253/.303/.513 (126 wRC+) line and has matched Rodríguez’s home run total. His batted ball peripherals support the massive power, too. Witt’s 44% hard hit rate is excellent and his max exit velocity sits in the 92nd percentile, though his barrel rate is rather low, and without the groundball issues holding Rodríguez’s back.
Witt’s aggressive approach has resulted in some inconsistent production. He’s swinging at more than half the pitches he’s seeing right now, with an average in-zone swing rate. That means he’s chasing a ton of pitches off the plate, though his whiff rate isn’t as bad as you’d expect for someone with such a swing happy approach. The result is an extremely low walk rate paired with a strikeout rate slightly above average, a combination that makes his success very dependent on the quality of his batted balls.
Witt hasn’t been nearly as good in the field as Peña or Rodríguez, though he’s now playing his natural position at shortstop with Adalberto Mondesi on the 60-day IL. He’s also the fastest man in the AL, with a 30.4 ft/s. sprint speed. He’s only attempted 12 steals and has been successful 10 times, though you might expect him to run more frequently on the normally run-happy Royals.
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