The most feared hitter in the game may be one you're overlooking

It feels more than a little odd to say that Yordan Alvarez is underrated, because he’s an AL Rookie of the Year Award winner (2019), a three-time All-Star, and the owner of a career OPS+ of 165 -- which is a top-5 mark through age 27 in the integrated era, with the names ahead of him merely being Frank Thomas, Mike Trout, Mickey Mantle, and Albert Pujols.

Put it another way: Is this good? It seems good.

But in an American League full of Judges, Sotos, Witts, and Hendersons, it feels like he’s simply not getting the recognition of many of his peers – perhaps because he just so consistently does this, year after year. “Great hitter: still great” isn’t exactly an attention-grabbing headline, we admit.

Yet Alvarez still rates among the top hitters in the entire sport, for all the reasons you know, not least of which is the near-certainty that he’s going to finish 2024 with a fourth consecutive 30-homer season, and he might be one of the very few hitters to manage a .300 batting average while doing it. We could spend hours just reciting the numbers on the back of his baseball card, really, or gawking at scoreboards he breaks.

But what about the reasons you don’t know? Let’s dive deep on a pair of reasons that help illustrate why one of baseball’s best mashers is exactly that. (All stats below are through Tuesday.)

1) Alvarez might create his own bad defense.

No, we’re not talking about what happens during the infrequent occasions when Alvarez puts on a glove, where he offers a surprisingly valuable throwing arm that doesn’t quite make up for his lack of range. We’re talking about what happens to the unfortunate defenders who are tasked with trying to turn Alvarez rockets into outs.

They don’t, as it turns out, do that job very effectively.

Take a look at Statcast’s Outs Above Average metric, which is generally used to identify which fielders are doing their jobs well. This year, that’s Marcus Semien, Jacob Young, and Bobby Witt Jr., which all makes sense. You can use it to see which pitchers are getting good fielding support, too; Chris Bassitt, Nathan Eovaldi and Aaron Nola have much to thank their defenders for.

You can do it for batters, too, keeping track of how fielders do against them. For example, when Alvarez grounded to Bo Bichette in July, and Bichette’s wild throw allowed Alvarez to reach second base, the opportunity was graded as one a shortstop makes 82% of the time. Bichette didn’t, so he got -.82 on his seasonal OAA. We know that, and we know that Alvarez was hitting at the time.

If we do it all from the batter’s point of view, we can see which batter has had the most negative fielding value from those defenders against him.

• -9 Alvarez
• -9 Aaron Judge
• -8 Max Kepler
• -8 Josh Bell

It's Alvarez, who has had fielders playing at -9 OAA when he's at the plate. On the other end, you’ll see that Randy Arozarena, Anthony Volpe, Corbin Carroll, and Wyatt Langford have all faced excellent defense, and all four have had their struggles at points this year, which may go towards explaining part of that.

But OK: maybe that’s a fluke. Batters don’t get to choose which fielders they face, and there’s not a great deal of influence a batter has on the ball after they hit it, and maybe Alvarez had little or nothing to do with Bichette airmailing that throw. Witt, for example, saw +10 OAA defense last year (excellent) and -3 OAA this year (below-average). You wouldn’t expect this to be all that ‘sticky’ year-to-year for batters.

Except if you look at 2023 ...

• -13 Joey Meneses
• -9 Alvarez
• -9 Kerry Carpenter
• -9 Jonathan India

There, again, is Alvarez. At -18 OAA, he’s seen the weakest quality of defense against him over the last two years, and it gets harder to believe it’s entirely a fluke when you see that.

But Alvarez, for all his other gifts, is hardly fleet of foot, ranking in the bottom 20 percent of Statcast’s sprint speed. He’s not exactly forcing fielders to make poor, rushed throws due to his blazing speed. So what is he doing?

One way to answer that is to look at where those plays are, and it’s overwhelmingly in the infield, where -16 of those -18 OAA have come. Outfielders perform roughly at average against him, but infielders? It’s a wreck, and you can see that if we split by position

• First base: -7
• Second base: -3
• Shortstop: -5
• Third base: -1

Sometimes those are straight errors, like when he hit a ball right through Ozzie Albies last season.

But mostly, they’re marked as hits, like when Zack Gelof couldn’t corral a hard-hit grounder this May:

Or when Ketel Marte tried the same thing last September:

Or when Joey Gallo managed to turn this one into a double:

They’re not all lasers to the right side – do enjoy the Giants being unable to communicate on this pop-up to short left field, or the absolute flukishness of a hit gained because Red Sox pitcher James Paxton injured his calf earlier this month and couldn’t cover first base – but there sure are a lot of plays that do look like this 112 mph rocket shot through Jorge Polanco recently, too.

The numbers back that up. Over the last two years, when he’s hit the ball 100 mph or harder, infielders are -9. When he’s hit it 99 mph or softer, they’re just -3. They're happier when he's not mashing it.

So is it a skill, the absolute fear put in the hearts of defenders standing in front of a ball hit by one of baseball’s terrifying lefties? It's difficult to look past the fact that the man he's tied with here is Judge, of all people, who is no stranger to crushing baseballs.

Yet as the saying goes: once is by chance, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern. For now, it’s merely interesting. If it happens again in 2025, then maybe it’s something more than that. Maybe Alvarez really would be The Most Fearsome Hitter Alive.

2) It is all but impossible to force him to make a bad swing.

Again: He’s one of the best hitters on the planet. He doesn’t often look bad.

But pitchers are really good, too, and even the most elite hitters have their moments, like Vlad Guerrero Jr. last year.

That’s a “sword,” a metric introduced this year which aims to quantify the most uncomfortable swings in the game based on forcing the hitter to take an incomplete swing at considerably low speeds. It should be unsurprising that Corbin Burnes, George Kirby, and Dylan Cease are atop that list for pitchers this season – all being elite-level pitchers – and we’ve tracked nearly 4,000 such swings so far.

All the great hitters have been fooled this badly at least a few times. It’s happened to Juan Soto 20 times, including this one against Bryan Woo. Shohei Ohtani? Eight. Aaron Judge? Six. All told, 528 hitters have been charged with at least one sword, which is to say “almost everyone in the game outside of Yordan Alvarez.” Everyone who has swung the bat at least 600 times has one … outside of Alvarez. (Cincinnati's Jake Fraley is also over 500 swings without one, to be fair, but he's still nearly 200 swings behind Alvarez.)

This isn’t more important than the hits, the homers, the slugging, the OPS, any of it. If Soto can be fooled that many times, then it’s clear that even the best hitters in the world aren’t perfect at all times. But only one, at least with this many swings, hasn’t had a single such bad moment charged against him. You already knew Alvarez was an elite swinger. Here, though, he stands alone.