These 9 hitters have made changes for the better

There are things that definitively increase a hitter’s likelihood of success -- we've defined the term "hard-hit rate" for a reason -- but even the Aaron Judges and Shohei Ohtanis among us eventually have to deal with the brutal reality of being a baseball player: You can hit that ball as hard as you want to, but have little control over your results. When you break hitting down to its molecular level, the only thing anyone really has control over is when they’re going to swing the bat.

This early in the season, statistical improvements are especially delicate, but if they can be linked to a change in approach, they start to feel a lot more concrete. With that in mind, here are nine players whose adjustments have improved their results in the early going.

Stats are through Saturday, May 4.

Adley Rutschman, Orioles
Swing rate: +7.4 percentage points
Rutschman, consciously or not, has preempted a potential issue with his usual approach. There is a point at which patience can become a hindrance to a hitter -- Rutschman had a great year in 2023, but he also took the fifth-most called strikes in all of baseball. His increased chase rate this year might raise some concerns about him straying from what works for him, but the fact that he's still seeing the ball well enough to hit .321 is more than enough to indicate he's not lost. His on-base percentage has taken a bit of a hit in the meantime, but considering that he walked 92 times last year, he has a long way to fall before that becomes a concern.

Ryan Mountcastle, Orioles
1st pitch swing rate: -10.7 points
Mountcastle, to be clear, has had a ton of success swinging at the first pitch; he's a .376 hitter with a career 1.074 OPS in 0-0 counts. That being said, pitchers will exploit a guy who they know is going to swing early, and last year, of his plate appearances that extended past the first pitch, he was down 0-1 in 61.1% of them. Across MLB, 56.9% of those plate appearances went to a 0-1 count. It doesn't sound like much, but considering that the difference between a 0-1 count and a 1-0 count for a hitter is about 40 points on the old batting average, it wasn't helping. This year, the proportion of his plate appearances in which he's been immediately behind in the count is down to 57.6%, and he is, as of this point, working on the highest full-season average (.293), on-base percentage (.344) and slugging percentage (.491) of his career.

Anthony Volpe, Yankees
Whiff rate: -7.9 points
Volpe, often to his detriment, took a lot of big hacks in his rookie season. So, over the winter, he worked on shortening his swing path, and even as he continues to work out the kinks (remember that we're still talking about a 23-year-old), the improvement has been obvious even to the naked eye. He's seeing more pitches -- 4.2 per plate appearance vs. 3.9 in 2023 -- and added just over 40 points to his batting average, up to .252 as of Saturday.

Salvador Perez, Royals
Whiff rate: -11.7 points
To be clear, Perez is the same free-swinging guy he's always been. But keep in mind just how often he swings -- his 58.6% overall swing rate is among the highest in baseball and his chase rate ranks in the second percentile of qualifying hitters -- and then consider the following. He's made contact on 90.7% of his in-zone swings and 69.4% of his chase swings. Just for a sense of scale, MLB's average chase contact rate is 43.7%. Where do you go, when faced with a hitter like that? Evidently, no one's sure, because he has a .339 batting average and an OPS of .985.

Riley Greene, Tigers
Chase rate: -6.8 points
Greene has gone from good to invaluable in a matter of one season, and part of his growth as a hitter has been his steadily improving eye. It goes without saying that it's easier to hit a ball in the strike zone; in 2024, hitters actually have an 8.7% barrel rate against in-zone pitches, compared to just 2.6% on chased pitches. Greene, after slashing his chase rate from an already above-average 26.5% in 2023, has a barrel rate ranking in the 97th percentile at 18.3% through Saturday's action, a good seven-point improvement from last season, hence the extra 100 points on his slugging percentage (.547).

Starling Marte, Mets
Chase rate: -6.0 points
Possibly the last man you'd expect to see on a list like this, but there is a reason he's here. Marte, in a disappointing 2023 season that was interrupted by migraines and a severe groin injury, posted a 37.4% chase rate. That ranked in the eighth percentile among qualifying big leaguers and was his personal highest since 2016. His 31.4% chase rate through Saturday's action is still quite high, but here's the thing -- when he hit .301 with an 132 OPS+ from 2021-22, he had a 31.5% chase rate. Regardless of how it compares to the rest of the league, a return to normalcy, eye-wise, should be reassuring to the Mets, who would love to have him healthy for more than a couple of months.

Alec Bohm, Phillies
Chase rate: -8.0 points
To watch Bohm over the past few seasons has been to watch a legitimate star develop in real time at the Major League level. He's long since proven he can hit. Now he's refining, and he just keeps getting better. Bohm ranked in the 93rd percentile with a .290 expected BA last year; slashing both his chase rate and his whiff rate (-5.2 points from 2023) has his xBA up to .321 (97th percentile).

Brice Turang, Brewers
Whiff rate: -8.6 points
Turang had a tough rookie season (.218/.285/.300), but his strengths as a hitter were still pretty evident -- even for how poor his contact was, he did make a lot of it. Rather than going for the complete overhaul, Turang doubled down on what he's historically done well and now has one of the lowest whiff rates in baseball (12.9%, 96th percentile). Evidently, all that contact is working in his favor, given that he's currently hitting .305.

Ketel Marte, D-backs
Swing rate: +7.6 points
Marte's manager, Torey Lovullo, noted that Marte seemed "hungry" this spring. We're not sure if this was what he was talking about, but it does line up. Marte doesn't really fit any archetype as a hitter -- he has some pop, very nearly won a batting title, has a good eye but doesn't always take his walks, we could go on -- so this is more a matter of looking at his results, and his 50.9% hard-hit rate and 93.1 mph average exit velocity would both be career highs by a significant margin. His distribution of extra swings has been fairly even between in-zone and out-of-zone pitches, but even if this adjustment was as simple as "swing hard in case you hit it," you can't really argue with the results.