Bryson Stott Is Still a Work in Progress

Bryson Stott began this season with a 17-game hit streak, marking a new Phillies franchise record to start a season. Eleven of those games were multi-hit efforts, culminating in 29 hits across his first 81 plate appearances. He’s added a handful of hits since his streak ended on April 18 and his overall line now stands at .339/.368/.459, good for a 126 wRC+. His early season success has been one of the few bright spots for the Phillies as they deal with a a variety of woes.

While Stott’s hot start is being at least partially driven by some fortunate results when he has put the ball in play — his BABIP currently stands at .417 — his success is also the culmination of a number of adjustments he’s made since making the Opening Day roster as a rookie last year. His initial exposure to the big leagues didn’t go very well. He collected just four hits across 31 plate appearances and was demoted to Triple-A on April 20 after playing in just nine games in the majors. Upon getting recalled on May 8, he continued to struggle until making an adjustment to his swing.

Here’s an example of his swing from April 2022:

His stance is pretty open and he uses the combination of a toe tap and a long stride with a slight leg kick as a timing mechanism as the pitch is delivered. Those swing mechanics obviously didn’t work very well; he made contact on just 73.8% of the pitches he swung at in April and struck out in 32.3% of his plate appearances.

Now here’s an example of a swing from late May 2022:

The stride and leg kick are gone. His front foot stays firmly planted through his swing, simplifying what had been some fairly noisy mechanics. From June 1 through the end of the season, his contact rate jumped up to 86.2% and his strikeout rate fell to just 16.5%.

One of the reasons a batter would quiet his swing mechanics would be to put himself in a better position to react to varying speeds and pitch shapes. An exaggerated timing mechanism like Stott had when he first debuted would theoretically get him on time with the fastballs he’s seeing, but leave him vulnerable to offspeed and breaking pitches:

Not only did Stott improve against every pitch type after making his adjustments, he started absolutely crushing breaking pitches.

Finally, here’s a look at his swing from this April:

His stance is a little more closed, but he’s maintained the same simplified approach he introduced last summer. He did try to tinker with his swing this spring, hoping to reintroduce a toe tap into his mechanics to regain some of his power. That obviously didn’t pan out and he entered the regular season with the same swing that brought him so much success during the second half of last year.

If you wanted to boil down the ups and downs of Stott’s career so far, this graph does a pretty good job of it:

Stott’s offensive production has ebbed and flowed with his contact rate, which is unsurprising since he doesn’t run a high enough walk rate to buoy his wOBA when the hits aren’t falling in. If you break up Stott’s career into three distinct chunks based on his swing mechanics, we can start to see exactly how he’s improved his approach:

Stott’s overall swing rate has stayed pretty stable, though he is chasing pitches a bit more often since making the big change to his mechanics last May. Here you can see just how drastically his contact rate improved after making these changes, and it’s been even better this year. Unfortunately, an increased chase rate seems to be an unintended side effect of this new approach. In an article by Matt Gelb of The Athletic this week, Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long mentioned that Stott’s new swing mechanics have him so confident, he’s swinging at pitches he might not have before because he’s in a good position to put his bat on the ball no matter where the pitch is located. That’s a big reason why his strikeout rate has bounced back to just over 20% this year after he was able to cut it down so much last summer.

Making more contact is one thing, but if the quality of that contact is poor, then it’s not going to do much good. Luckily, Stott has also made some strides in improving his results when putting the ball in play:

His contact quality improved with his swing change but it’s gotten incrementally better this year as well. His hard-hit rate is up over the league average now, though he’s putting the ball on the ground more often than ever. Still, his expected wOBA on contact is up and he’s clearly enjoying the results of that added hard contact.

It’s a credit to Stott for identifying his issues last year after getting sent down to Triple-A and then putting in the work to improve his mechanics, approach, and results. If there’s something to be concerned about, it’s that he’s making all these tradeoffs with his adjustments. Yes, his contact rate is now among the league leaders, but he’s chasing pitches more often and making contact with pitches outside the zone far too frequently to produce optimal contact. Yes, his contact quality has improved, but he’s hitting it into the ground too much and hasn’t shown much power with his retooled swing. This version of Stott is certainly better than the one that debuted on Opening Day last year, but there’s still tons of room for improvement. The good news is that he’s aware of those issues and has already attempted to address some of them this spring. That kind of self-awareness and willingness to learn and adjust is important for any major leaguer. It’s a great sign that Stott has already taken them to heart.