I Want TJ Friedl. I Don’t Want to Play Around.

Baseball suffers from the same fundamental contradiction as every spectator sport. It is an entertainment product, a work of narrative nonfiction, if you like. A compelling narrative must adhere to certain norms and strictures; even when expectations are subverted, the audience responds best when those expectations are built up first.

The players and managers who act out the on-field drama, and the front office personnel who hire and direct them, aren’t in the business of storytelling. They’re in the business of problem-solving. That problem: How to put runners on base and, once there, to advance them home. And to prevent one’s opponent from doing the same.

The more we know about this problem, the greater detail in which it’s studied, the greater the risk that a solution will emerge. There might be more than one way to skin a proverbial cat, but if one method emerges as the most efficient, everyone will adopt it. And what’s the fun in that?

Earlier in my career, I took part in Inefficiency Week at The Ringer. This group project was the brainchild of my assigning editor at the time, Ryan O’Hanlon, then a Kurt Suzuki superfan, now a leading soccer analytics writer, always the most annoyingly skilled contrarian I’ve ever had the misfortune of befriending.

Ryan’s working thesis was this: The relentless pursuit of efficiency stamps out the variety that makes life compelling. As a staff, we applied this concept to the deep pass in football, the shrinking network television season, and those shifty-eyed lunatics who listen to podcasts in fast-forward.

My contribution: An examination of the three true outcome-heavy brand of baseball that pervades the major leagues, then and now. This was hardly a novel insight; the term was nearly 20 years old when I wrote that article. And the article itself came out eight years ago this August.

But after nearly another decade of strategic and pedagogical give-and-take between hitters and pitchers, the juiced ball, the shift ban, the pitch clock, the sticky stuff crackdown, and the downstream effects of the sign-stealing scandal (I was amused to look back and remember that Carlos Beltrán and Mike Fiers both talked to me for this article), strikeouts and home runs are still the working currency of baseball.

When I say TJ Friedl is the weirdest player in baseball, I don’t mean that he rejects this binary entirely. He topped out at a career-high 18 home runs in 2023. His career strikeout rate of 15.5% might be low by today’s standards, but one-time AL strikeout leader Jim Rice had a career punchout rate of 15.7%. This is not some Luis Arraez-type total rejection of modernity; Friedl is still to some extent a man of his time.

But only to an extent. Friedl is a low-bat-speed contact hitter (15th percentile bat speed, eighth percentile hard-hit rate, 89th percentile contact rate) who is interested in getting on base by any means necessary. In 2023, his best season, he hit .279 with 18 home runs and 27 stolen bases, but he also goosed his OBP to .352 by getting plunked 10 times and tapping out 17 bunt singles. And in 556 plate appearances that year, Friedl didn’t ground into even one double play.

Friedl had a horrendous 2024 campaign, marred by hamstring injuries and broken bones in his wrist and thumb, as well as a precipitous drop in BABIP. Friedl’s down year was, I believe, a major factor in the Reds’ record regressing by five games from 2023 to 2024.

But he’s back on track in 2025, and weirder than ever.

In 2023, Friedl’s batting stance was extreme: left foot on the back line of the box, with one of the 15 most extreme open angles in baseball. In 2024, he brought his feet slightly closer together and closed up his stance a few degrees, and suffered the results I just mentioned.

But after he got healthy, Friedl kept with it in 2025, and he’s hitting .292/.381/.419. It’s possible this is the result of batted ball luck that’s as good in 2025 as it was rotten a year ago, but I’m not sure.

As you might expect from someone with such an open stance (27 degrees might be closed for Friedl, but it’s still Rafael Devers-like compared to the norm), Friedl pulls the ball a ton.

There’s nothing in his spray chart that’s hit remotely far to the opposite field. And insofar as Friedl ever makes hard contact, he doesn’t do it to the opposite field. Out of 247 hitters with 100 or more balls in play this year, Friedl is 229th in average EV to the opposite field. His average exit velo to the pull side is 8.1 mph more than his average exit velo the other way, the 52nd-largest drop-off out of those 247 batters.

The biggest change in Friedl’s batted ball profile from last year to this year is that he’s hitting fewer fly balls; his FB% has dropped from 27.9% to 19.8%, the sixth-biggest year-on-year decrease in the league.

A normal hitter would view that as a negative, but Friedl is a left-handed hitter with good bat control, a history of being one of baseball’s best bunters, and a guy who can steal a base. Maybe he can make that Jake Mangum action work. Friedl does have a .358 batting average and .343 BABIP against the shift this year, but he’s not pumping groundballs through holes on the left side of the infield. On the contrary, his pull rate on grounders is 62.8%, the highest mark of his career. More than that, Friedl’s legs appear to have been sapped by his hamstring injuries; his top-end speed isn’t what it was in 2023.

However, he is hitting more line drives. Not hard line drives — Friedl’s HardHit% on liners is less than 50% — but he’s increased his LD% to from 17.5% to 24.3%. Even in 2023, he wasn’t cracking the 20% mark.

He’s also getting better input on his batted balls. Friedl was already a selective hitter, but in 2025 he’s chasing just 18.1% of pitches outside the zone, down from 24.0% in 2024. That makes him one of the 10 choosiest qualified hitters in baseball.

What happens when a hitter has a line drive rate of 20% or better, a chase rate of 25% or less, and a contact rate of 85% or more? He usually has a good season. There are nine qualified hitters this year who fit those criteria.

I didn’t know when I ran that search that I was about to end up with a list of hitters who are the most overrepresented in FanGraphs’ editorial content relative to their performance, but what are you gonna do?

Within that group, only Kwan has a lower average EV and HardHit% than Friedl, but Friedl also has a 52.8% pull rate. That’s second in this group behind only (that’s right, good guess) Paredes. Lee (42.5%) is the only other one of the nine with a pull rate over 39%.

So here we have an extremely high-contact, low-exit-velo hitter who never chases and never swings and misses. Plus, Friedl is still doing all that grinder stuff. He’s been hit by three pitches and has a league-leading five bunt hits.

I don’t want to call a hitter with a mid-80s contact rate and a .380 OBP “inefficient,” because he clearly isn’t. But he’s delightfully unorthodox, and once again he’s finding creative ways to win.