Max Muncy has stopped swinging at balls, and now he looks like one of the best hitters in the entire league.
Sounds simple enough, right? Sure, it’s easy to sit at home on your couch and yell at your TV: “Why’d he swing at that?!” But with velocity and pitch movement at an all-time high, even the best hitters in baseball are regularly whiffing at balls nowhere near the strike zone — and I promise you, you’d be flailing at those pitches, too.
Muncy, meanwhile, has taken this part of his game to a whole new level in 2021. Through Wednesday’s games, Muncy had swung at just 15.7% of pitches he had seen out of the strike zone, the lowest mark in baseball and just a shade lower than that of Juan Soto, a decent hitter in his own right. That 15.7% mark, if held throughout the season, would be the lowest by any qualified hitter in baseball since Daric Barton in 2010, the year he led the AL in walks with 110.
Plate discipline has always been Muncy’s thing, even long before his bona fide breakout with the Dodgers in 2018. Approaches of this caliber often manifest in high walk totals, and that has been true for Muncy since the beginning of his baseball journey. He walked a lot in his two summers playing in the prestigious Cape Cod League against the best collegiate competition around. He walked a lot in his three seasons at Baylor University. He walked a lot in the minors before the A’s first called him up in 2015.
And of course, he has walked a lot as a Dodger, most notably in the team’s 2020 postseason run, when he walked 20(!) times in October, tied for the second-most in a single MLB postseason, behind only 2002 Barry Bonds. Muncy has picked up right where he left off so far in 2021, leading all of MLB with 42 walks.
The walks are cool, but simply walking a lot does not make you one of the best hitters in the game. Sometimes hitters with Muncy’s approach can be considered too passive at the plate. Walks are nice, but you also have to be able to do damage when you finally get a pitch to hit. It’s not just about running deep counts; it’s about getting to 3-2 and then doing stuff like this:
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