Wait, Bryce Harper Swings How Much?!

Every morning, I go to FanGraphs and pull up a few leaderboards. One of my favorites these days shows trailing 30-day plate discipline statistics. Ever since Michael Harris II dug himself a huge hole by swinging at everything and then dug himself out of it by swinging some more, I’ve been checking to see whether he’s reined in his swing-first tendencies. Never fear, he’s still up there hacking — his swing percentage ranks 18th in the majors over the last month — but this isn’t an article about Harris. Here are the top 10 hitters in baseball by swing percentage over the last 30 days:

This generally isn’t a ranking you want to be at the top of. Ezequiel Tovar is on there because he’s never seen a slider he doesn’t like. In the aggregate, this group is hitting horribly over the last month. But there are two exceptions to that statement. Ozzie Albies is having a resurgent stretch, and as you can see from his low swinging strike rate, he’s operating pretty differently from the rest of this group. That’s neat, but Albies also isn’t the focus of today’s article. No, that would be Bryce Harper, who seems to defy everything I know about patience and power.

Sluggers wait for their pitch. I’ve known that for as long as I’ve followed baseball. I grew up on Barry Bonds’ perfect idea of the zone, A-Rod and David Ortiz taking tough pitches off the outside corner, Albert Pujols walking more often than he struck out. And this isn’t some SEAGER issue, either. That metric is about measuring controlled aggression, the ability to swing frequently without bad chases. Corey Seager’s career chase rate is 27.1%. The last time Harper showed that much restraint was 2018. How does he do it?!

One way that Harper does it is by maximizing the value on his early-count swings. “Oh, that was the one pitch he’s going to get to hit all at-bat” is mostly just a cliché, but only mostly. Sometimes pitchers throw bad pitches! Plenty of the time, in fact. Command is so freaking hard. Guys miss the zone with 3-0 fastballs all the time. No one is trying to throw Bryce Harper something right down the plate, and yet pitchers frequently do.

If you strip out three-ball counts and two-strike counts, what you have left is hitter behavior when the count doesn’t contain heavy incentives (to take a walk or avoid a strikeout). What does Harper do when the count isn’t forcing his hand? He swings. The league swings at about two thirds of middle-middle pitches in those counts. Harper swings at 83% of them, the sixth-highest rate in the majors, and he’s seen around 300 such pitches this year. In other words, we’re talking about 50 extra swings at crushable pitches in good counts as a result of his aggression.

A Harper swing in a favorable count is something to behold. The man does not get cheated. When he unleashes on these middle-middle offerings, 22.3% of his fair contact is barreled up. That’s roughly double his usual rate; in other words, he’s going after these pitches because they’re easier to smash, and he’s also selling out to smash them.

If you think about Harper’s game as a function of maximizing these swings, his extremely high swing rate starts to make a lot more sense. Why was Bonds’ plate discipline so important? Because it forced pitchers to throw him something to hit. Harper is just cutting out the middle man. Forget working the count leverage to your favor and then inexorably squeezing the pitcher into making a mistake; Harper will find the mistakes where they are.

That sounds great in theory. For many players, though, Harper’s plan would be underwear gnome-y. Step one: Swing at good pitches. Step two: … Step three: Profit. Every enormous strapping slugger would love to flail away at pitches over the heart of the plate in good counts. The problem is that pitchers don’t throw those, or they throw so many breaking balls that swing-happy hitters are perpetually in two-strike counts, or any number of potential complications. The issue, in other words, is that “just mash the cookies” doesn’t work if no one offers you any cookies.

I’m confident that pitchers don’t want to throw Harper these gimmes. The data show that, in fact. He sees fewer middle-middle pitches in these counts than anyone else in baseball, a mere 22.3% of the time. The rest of this list is populated with remorseless hackers (complimentary) like Nick Castellanos and Jose Altuve. In other words, pitchers are doing their level best to avoid throwing these pitches to Harper.

You can imagine that being a big problem for him. Forget the count-based version of the statistic I gave you there; only Altuve and Oneil Cruz see a lower rate of pitches over the heart of the plate, period. And like every hitter, Harper doesn’t do as much damage when pitchers avoid the most dangerous part of the strike zone. Over the past four years, a large enough sample that I’m comfortable treating it as a good representation of his talent, location has a lot to do with Harper’s outcomes:

Okay, so we’ve got a puzzle: Harper sees pitches to hit less than anyone else in the majors. He does most of his damage on those pitches, though. It’s the classic slugger’s conundrum. Bonds and his modern-day compatriot, Juan Soto, take the gold standard approach: Simply learn which pitches aren’t strikes and don’t swing at them. Eventually, the pitcher will have to enter the strike zone. What are you going to do, walk Bonds or Soto every time? (Tempting!) Batters see pitches over the heart of the plate a third of the time when they’re ahead in the count and only 20% when they’re behind.

Could Harper pull that plan off? Probably. From 2015 through 2021, he ran solid chase rates and swung less than the league average, racking up a 148 wRC+ and a ludicrous 17% walk rate over that time frame. But if you have Harper’s swing, you probably want to use it, and he’s changed his plan of attack to emphasize full-effort cuts over everything else.

Say these things together in your head, and you’ll see the potential issue immediately. Almost no one swings more than Harper. Almost no one sees pitches to hit less frequently than Harper. It’s one thing to swing a lot if you’re Ezequiel Tovar, a slap hitter who opponents would rather stuff with hittable pitches than risk issuing a free pass. All pitchers want to do when they see Harper is avoid him, and yet he’s up there acting like he’s taking batting practice.

You probably won’t be surprised to know that Harper’s monomaniacal aggression on crushable pitches comes with some chase issues. When he sees pitches outside the strike zone early in the count, he swings at a whopping 36% of them. The league average there is 23%. That’s a natural tradeoff; to get off so many swings at hittable pitches, hitters have to accept some bad swings where they’re fooled or read location incorrectly.

The whole puzzle works anyway. Why? Because even though Harper chases too many bad pitches, his reputation as a masher keeps pitchers from attacking the strike zone, and early-count pitches outside the zone are great for Harper, even if he swings at a few too many of them. Sure, Harper’s rate of swings per pitch out of the strike zone is high, and so too is the rate at which he sees pitches out of the zone. On the other hand, he still doesn’t swing at even half of them, and he’s almost never taking strikes. As a result, he’s been ahead in the count more frequently than the average hitter this year despite his chase-heavy ways.

Harper’s weirdo approach works because the cost of those early strikes isn’t particularly high when compared to the benefit of teeing off on an easy one. His gambit has paid off handsomely, in fact. Think of it this way: He sees pitches over the heart of the plate at a first-percentile rate. But 49% of his batted balls come from those pitches, a mark that’s in the 33rd percentile across baseball. His extreme aggression, then, is about converting a fixed supply of mashable pitches into as much damage as possible.

Early in the count, that’s fine. Harper has more swings and misses than your average hitter, but he has fewer foul balls and fewer taken strikes, so he progresses through counts at an average rate. In two-strike counts, however, his approach has a weakness. Swings and misses get a lot more costly with two strikes, whereas foul balls aren’t as bad. Meanwhile, everyone swings more, so no one’s taking called strikes. If Harper continued to sell out for middle-middle pitches, he might end up with a ghastly strikeout rate.

But Harper doesn’t have a ghastly strikeout rate. He has a simple fix: He just stops swinging at such an extreme rate. For 2025 as a whole, Harper’s swing rate is the 10th highest in baseball, and his chase rate is in the 90th percentile. When he gets to two strikes, though, he chases far less often. His chase rate dips to the 60th percentile, part of a restrained approach with two strikes. His contact rate shoots up – he whiffs on 60% of his chases before two strikes and only 40% after reaching two strikes. That’s very much unlike the league as a whole, which has a 47% chase whiff rate before two strikes and a 44% chase whiff rate with two strikes. Harper just becomes a new, contact-capable hitter when it suits him.

In other words, Harper’s swing-first nature is tricking us. You might think that he’s up there seeing red, swinging out of his shoes and letting the chips fall where they may. But that’s not what’s going on. Harper has great strike zone judgment, and a great ability to absolutely destroy balls in the strike zone. For someone with those two standout skills, a hybrid approach is ideal. He’s taking the big swings when the downside isn’t bad, then turning into a more selective hitter when the count makes that decision more valuable.

So in the end, why does Bryce Harper swing so much? Because pitchers are pretty much begging him to. The more they stay away from the heart of the plate, the more aggressively he hunts the few middle-middle gifts that are left. It might not make sense at first, but if you’re as good as Harper, you can make seemingly impossible things work. How’s that for a conclusion?