If you’ve been named a finalist for the major end-of-season awards, then it goes without saying that you’re an excellent player who’s had a fantastic season. But not every great player gets there in the same way, do they? Each superstar has their own approach, their own massive strengths and tiny weaknesses, even if the outcomes of “greatness” are similar.

Let’s think about that in terms of where in the zone, on swings or takes, each of the finalists finds their greatest success, using Statcast run value charts available at Baseball Savant. You might just find a little more to appreciate about the biggest stars in the game – or something to watch for in 2025. Here is a look at each, and how opponents can try (and fail) to beat them.

(All visuals will show the zone from the batter’s point of view, with the color range showing ‘red is good’ and ‘blue is bad’ for the player in question. Run value gives credit for every pitch – whether put in play or not – based on how the change in count and outcome affects the win expectancy. For example, the most valuable pitch in baseball this year was Cade Smith’s four-seamer, at +28 runs, just ahead of Chris Sale’s +24 slider; the least valuable was Justin Lawrence’s sinker, at -22 runs, befitting a pitch that surrendered a .393 average and .628 slugging.)

AL MVP FINALISTS

Aaron Judge, Yankees
Avoid going low and inside.

Like almost all hitters, Judge piles up a lot of value by simply not swinging outside the zone. That’s obvious, and not surprising, though he does it better than most, collecting +75 runs just on takes outside the zone, second only to Juan Soto. “Don’t swing at the bad pitches,” the hallmark of great hitters for basically forever.

But when he does swing, or make contact, it’s pretty clear where he wants to eat -- low and inside. In those four zones -- middle-middle and -in, and low-middle and -in -- Judge was worth +52 runs, by far the most, with Brent Rooker’s +35 lagging far behind. That’s on all swings, not just all contact, so he’s got that +52 even including the times he swings and misses.

Yet as the saying goes: “Baseball is a game of inches,” and that’s true here, because there is a hole to be found (aside from the bad outcomes at low-and-and-away breaking stuff, which most every righty hitter has to deal with). When Judge swings at right-down-the-middle pitches, he is, as you’d expect, elite, with that +28 being baseball’s best.

But just above that, the top-middle part of the zone? When he swings, his -6 runs are tied for sixth-weakest in that zone. When he doesn't, he’s one of a very small number of players to pull off the nearly impossible task of not collecting negative run value taking pitches in that part of the zone, presumably due to his height. The best way to beat that game may be not to play.

Juan Soto, Yankees
Know that he won't help you at all

There’s probably a temptation here to say that “Soto can only hit balls thrown right down the middle,” given that bright red square right in the center of the zone, but that isn’t quite right, because it ignores his skill in making those pitches happen in the first place.

What Soto is really elite at is forcing the pitcher to give him exactly what he wants, by all but refusing to swing at the bad pitches outside the zone -- he piled up an incredible +75 runs in value, easily the most in the Majors, just on pitches outside the zone, and +83 if we’re just looking at takes only -- and he saw the highest rate of pitches while ahead in the count of anyone, as he spits on pitches waiting for the one he wants.

If that sounds familiar, that’s exactly what he did in Game 5 of the ALCS, fouling off four straight non-fastballs until Hunter Gaddis was forced to throw that four-seamer where Soto wanted it.

In Soto’s case, maybe it’s more instructive to show the run value on all pitches, no matter what he does on them. If you throw it out of the zone, he wins. If you throw it right down the middle, he wins. If you want to beat him, all you have to do is dot the edges with nasty stuff. No big deal, right?

Bobby Witt Jr., Royals
Work on that hole high in the zone.

In Witt’s case, there’s a clear hole high in the zone, possibly an area for improvement for 2025 -- which we point out as a possibility because we just saw massive improvement.

You can see what we mean when we compare the changes between his good 2023 and his borderline-historic 2024. In ‘23, Witt could smash mistakes down the middle, and turn on pitches inside that he could pull, but he could be beaten in the zone in most other places -- to say nothing of when he chased outside the zone, which cost him 16 runs last year.

Compared to 2023, the swings in 2024 showed a lot more red everywhere, didn't they? The chases outside the zone cost him just 1 run, down from the -16 the year before. While the middle-middle and middle-in zones stayed pretty much exactly as-is, he went off and massively improved on the big hole he had low -- that’s a 25-run improvement just on low-middle and low-inside -- as well as chasing less on inside pitches.

NL MVP FINALISTS

Shohei Ohtani, Dodgers
Try to attack his selectivity.

How do you stop a hitter like Ohtani? It’s a question opposing teams tried to solve all season.

The problem is, there’s not an obvious answer. He’s great at takes outside the zone, piling up top-10 value there (+59 runs). He’s great at swings in the zone, second only to Judge with +48 runs. But even Judge and Soto have at least one somewhat weaker area, and Ohtani doesn’t, not really. The -2 when he swings up-and-away? Big deal, basically. You can do better if you get him tight and inside, it’s just that nowhere is great.

If there’s something that stands out here, it’s the run value he loses on takes in the low-middle area of the zone. It’s not that minus-5 is that problematic, but only one hitter -- the selective-yet-light-hitting Nolan Schanuel of the Angels -- lost more value on watching pitches there. This doesn’t necessarily mean “just swing more,” as it might be that there’s certain types of pitches he watches and feels he can’t damage. But it’s a place you might want to consider.

Ketel Marte, D-backs

First of all, there isn’t one Marte. There’s two -- and they're not at all alike.

Righty Marte has a fast-swing rate of more than three times higher than Lefty Marte does; it’s not surprising that Righty Marte had a slugging percentage nearly 200 points higher, too. They're two entirely different hitters.

Lefty Marte
Attack the zone

If you have a swing that is this much slower and less powerful, it’s going to be a little harder to do damage on swings, and indeed, that’s exactly what happened here. It’s not that Lefty Marte doesn’t have any power, obviously; he did hit 18 homers from that side. But as you can see from the relatively unimpressive run value results on swings, the value here is mostly from excellent plate discipline.

(This is part of the answer to “why not just hit righty all the time,” because as Marte himself has said in the past, trying to identify right-on-right breaking balls after a lifetime of seeing those from the left side is far more easily said than done.)

Lefty Marte had a 13% walk rate, nearly double what Righty Marte had. “Not swinging outside the zone” is the primary value you see on these charts.

Righty Marte
Be careful with low pitches

Righty Marte, meanwhile, does some real damage, particularly low-middle and low-inside -- though hilariously, he’s not good on pitches right down the middle. These things can be a little fluky, because in 2023, Righty Marte was excellent on outside pitches and weaker low, but again, not great down the middle.

Francisco Lindor, Mets

There’s two Lindors too, though the difference here isn’t anywhere near as stark as it is for Marte. There is, in fact, hardly any difference whatsoever in terms of bat speed, which is a fun finding in the first year of bat tracking.

He’s been slightly better as a righty hitter over his career, though by a small amount, as he’s been solid from both sides. But: that doesn’t mean there’s no difference at all.

Lefty Lindor
Attack up and in.

There’s nothing that’s particularly standout here -- he’s good at laying off outside the zone, and competent-to-good most places in the zone -- other than the fact that when pitched up-and-in, it resulted in a whole lot of weak contact. (He had exactly one hit there as a lefty. It looked like this.)

Righty Lindor
Stay away from middle-middle or middle-in.

Lindor took nearly three times as many plate appearances from the left side as he did the right side, so it’s expected that the spread in numbers would be smaller here, but it also makes what happened here stand out. Righty Lindor hunted middle-middle and middle-in pitches that he could damage, and Righty Lindor’s pull rate of 49% was considerably higher than Lefty Lindor’s 44%.

What about the pitchers?

AL CY YOUNG FINALISTS

Emmanuel Clase, Guardians
Maybe just don’t swing.

For a pitcher who routinely touches 100 mph, Clase doesn’t actually collect as many strikeouts as you’d think, because his 24% K rate is somewhat above-average, yet not elite. What he does -- so long as we don’t overthink what happened in the playoffs too much -- is to prevent hard contact better than just about anyone, because that 100 mph cutter, in on the hands, is difficult for any batter to square up properly.

Sure, he gets his share of value on swings outside the zone, like all pitchers, but the standout thing here is that he gets elite value in the zone on swings.

Put it this way: “Allowing contact is the zone” is an area where most pitchers fare horribly -- understandably so, as we’ve excluded whiffs -- so even a top starter like Pablo López (-47 runs) or Aaron Nola (-36 runs) rate quite poorly there. The Majors as a whole, from the pitching side, collected -6,577 runs on non-whiffs in the zone. That’s a big number, but it’s as you’d expect: Throw a pitch in the zone that doesn’t miss a bat, and bad things are probably going to happen.

Clase, however, didn’t rate poorly. He was actually a positive when failing to get a miss in the zone, at +10. (Which somehow rates second-best behind Detroit’s Tyler Holton.) For most pitchers, this is a huge problem. For Clase, it’s a strength. If it’s bad for the batter when he swings against Clase (+35 runs, from pitcher’s POV) and bad when he makes contact (+14 runs) and somewhere near 50/50 when he doesn’t swing (-4 for Clase, or +4 for the batter), maybe the swings aren’t all worth it -- unless you’re Aaron Judge?

Tarik Skubal, Tigers
Can you actually beat him low?

Skubal’s elite end to 2023 made for one of 2024’s most-predictable breakouts, and that’s exactly what he did, starting with a fastball that has elite velocity for a lefty starter working with a seam-shifted changeup. No pitcher in baseball piled up more run value (+28) on pitches -- all pitches, swings or not -- in the heart of the zone, and he was especially deadly at the top of the zone, collecting +25 runs in the top three in-zone squares, also No. 1.

But what happened low? It wasn’t an issue with stealing called strikes, as that was consistently good there as it was everywhere else. Skubal allowed a .605 slugging percentage in that low-middle zone, easily the highest of any area. What it seems to be, mostly, were mistake pitches. Skubal usually lives high with the fastball, but about 2% of them ended up being low-middle, and he allowed eight hits on those 18 pitches -- including putting one in the worst possible spot to the worst possible hitter:

That’s also where a handful of flat changeups hung up -- Mauricio Dubon enjoyed taking advantage of this one -- and somehow, of the 12 sliders he put there, three went out of the park, as Royce Lewis, Tyler O’Neill, and Salvador Perez all added to their tallies. It’s a good reminder that when you throw thousands of pitches per year, even the greatest pitchers alive are going to have ones they’d like to take back.

Seth Lugo, Royals
Hope that Mr. Kitchen Sink finds the middle.

Would you believe that Lugo, who at 34 was in his second year back in the rotation after years in the bullpen, led the entire Majors in in-zone run value, at +52 runs, just ahead of Skubal, Zack Wheeler, Hunter Greene, and Cole Ragans? He was tied for second in value on in-zone swings (+28), and was sixth in value on in-zone takes (+26), and he did that with only two pitches that “stuff” metrics would call plus, his high-spinning curve and slider. His fastballs, by the eye test and metrics, are “fine,” and really more complimentary pitches.

And yet: No one in baseball got more value inside the zone, and it’s hard to think that’s not related to his kitchen sink approach, which saw him throw 9 different identifiable pitch types, though he claims it may be more like a dozen. He explained to FanGraphs how all the extra pitches -- in his opinion -- helps his best pitches.

“I’ve just learned how to use other pitches off of it to make it perform better,” he said in July. “My first couple years, with two strikes you were probably getting a curveball. That makes it easier to hit. Guys could eliminate pitches really easily. Now, having four or five pitches in their head when they get to two strikes makes the curveball perform even better.”

NL CY YOUNG FINALISTS

Chris Sale, Braves
Fear the slider.

Obviously. As we said at the top, Sale’s slider was the second-most valuable pitch in baseball this year, behind only Smith’s elite four-seamer, and while that’s not at all to discount the changeup that’s effective against righties or the pair of fastballs that are still in the 94 mph range … it’s the slider, which he actually threw more than either fastball in 2024.

You can see it even better when you split his season by batter handedness, starting with lefties, who saw four-seam/slider 85% of the time.

Against lefty batters, there’s a whole lot of “neutral” here in the zone, in that neither side really wins on much of anything anywhere, except for how deadly he is on all those sliders that get swings coming in towards the batter, from Sale’s low release point on the opposite side of the mound. You’ll be completely unsurprised to know that no other lefty pitcher collected more value on righty swings in that zone. (You may be mildly surprised to know that Patrick Corbin was tied, though.) It’s the slider.

It’s a little different against righties, as now the changeup is in play, but: It’s still the slider. See that middle-away zone, the one where he racked up +7 runs of value on swings? Sale threw 54 sliders in that zone to righty batters. Not a single one became a hit. Every single one racked up positive run value for him, aside from a few two-strike fouls, whether on adding strikes to the count or balls hit into play for outs.

Zack Wheeler, Phillies
Don’t be a right-handed hitter.

Wheeler actually had a sizable platoon split in 2024, which is to say he was good against lefties (.715 OPS) and absolutely dominant against righties (.434 OPS), which is a top-five right-on-right destruction rate of the entire divisional era back to 1969. Against lefties, he struck out nearly 3 times as many as he walked. Against righties? Nearly 9 times.

So let’s focus on that same-handed dominance, which is mostly fueled by a pair of fastballs (70% total) and a sweeper (22%), with occasional cameos from his curve and splitter.

Focus on the contact chart, first, which is all red for Wheeler on the inside of the zone to righties and especially further in than that. He compiled +19 runs in those five areas, tied for the third-most of any righty pitcher in the last five seasons, and +13 of that came off of the running sinker, which led to a whole lot of swings that looked like, well, this.

OK, so maybe you’re afraid of swinging. You’re going to be patient. Except then you go look at the takes chart, and realize that in the outer third, he piles up values on takes -- the (tied) second-most of any pitcher this year, in fact, so you end up getting tied up like this …

… and what do you even do here? He throws inside, you lose. He throws outside, you lose. Few righties have figured it out yet.

Paul Skenes, Pirates
You might have to beat him high.

Despite throwing just 133 innings, Pittsburgh’s rookie ace Skenes managed to turn in a 1.96 ERA, thanks in no small part due to a lethal combination of strikeout rate (95th percentile), groundballing (89th percentile), and damage avoidance (87th percentile in barrel rate). Throw in a better than average ability to prevent walks, and what else is there, really?

But because Skenes throws from a relatively low release angle, he’s not really your old-school over-the-top bat-misser – he’s more of an east-west with-a-deadly-splinker type. That means that he finds a lot of his value low, particularly in the two lower corners of the zone, and the lower areas outside the zone. No one in baseball, in fact, had a higher run value in those four spots than his +19 runs -- despite the fact that he threw only the 63rd-most pitches there.

So: How do you beat him? You don’t, mostly, but if you do (aside from laying off the bad pitches), it’s middle-middle and middle-up. Why? In part because it’s considerably less likely that the splinker goes there. In those two zones, it’s 57% four-seamer, and nothing else even reaches 20%. Meanwhile, in those four lower areas we just talked about, the four-seamer appears only 21% of the time.