Strong Start

Swollen Schanuel, Flukey Betts.

I’ve noticed I tend to root for two things when I watch ball:

1. For something that has never happened to happen, or

2. For something that has never happened to continue never happening

It’s kind of a coin flip which option I’ll end up rooting for. I never know which it’ll be until my heart tells me. Anyway:

DAY 5 Of The 2025 MLB Season
I got some excited texts on March 31 because Nolan Schanuel hit a ball hard.

Last summer, I wrote about Schanuel’s apparent inability to hit a baseball 105 mph, despite Schanuel being a very large man at a power-hitting position. I built a complicated spreadsheet simulating how he’d be different if he were stronger—2 mph stronger, 5 mph stronger. I wrote about it and moved on; or did I? I did not. Every day I checked to see whether Nolan Schanuel had hit a ball hard, secretly and psychotically hoping he wouldn’t.

But there were signs this spring that things had changed. He hit two tracked balls in spring training that were the second and third hardest-hit balls of his career, at 104.9 and 105.0 mph. And the large man was visibly larger. He’d gained somewhere between 15 and 25 pounds, apparently replacing his “don’t sit down all day” exercise routine with something more traditional.

In the first three games of the regular season, his average swing speed was 69 mph. That’s not elite, but it’s 4 mph faster than his swing had been in 2024, when he was in the league’s second percentile for bat speed. And, on the fifth day of this season, in his fourth game, he put it altogether: he hit a baseball not 105, not 106, but 109.8 mph. As my vet once said about our cat: What a big boy!

During the blog days, there was a trope about the player who showed up to spring training proclaiming that he was in the best shape of his life (BSOHL). Ben Lindbergh, among others, examined such proclamations to see whether they foretold actual performance changes; for hitters, at least, they didn’t. I’m not surprised, even if the players were being sincere. Performance is a very complicated journey. A player’s subjective sense of his body in February doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s going to be better at picking up the split-finger in April, or mentally strong enough to get through a June slump, or less likely to get hit on the hands by a running fastball and lost for the season in August.

But we now have lots of statistical signposts on the way to performance, including bat speed. The player’s physicality itself can be measured.

Nolan Schanuel said he showed up in better shape. Some numbers show it. Already, five of the seven hardest hit balls of his life—including those tracked in spring training—have come this year. That took less than a week. Performance itself will take all year, of course.

It’s surprising that a problem like “big man can’t swing hard” was solved with something as simple as “make him bigger.” To a layman like me the swing looks almost identical this year, though “Schanuel said he focused on improving his bat path over the winter.” If the swing is longer it is almost negligibly so, according to Statcast. In the videos I’ve watched frame-by-frame, the faster-but-not-longer swing this year has actually enabled him to initiate his swing one frame later, which presumably has its own benefits for recognizing pitches.

So far—tiny sample!—this hasn’t turned Schanuel into a star or anything, though his average exit velocity has gone from the 7th percentile to the 39th. Last year he was a league-average hitter overall, which is not very good for a first baseman. I estimated that the balls he hit in 2024 would, if increased across the board by 5 mph, have produced a 75th percentile hitter. Some fly outs would be homers; more grounders would sneak through; the opposite-field gaps would open up for him; and soft line drives like the one below would transform into hard line drives like the one slightly further below:

90 mph single against Sonny Gray (2024)

98 mph double against Sonny Gray (2025)

My calculations might be tested, if Schanuel really is 2 or 5 mph stronger. Or—because a swing is a complex system involving many tradeoffs—those calculations might be preempted by other developments, if Schanuel’s harder swing leads to more whiffs or fewer squared-up pitches or an oblique injury. So far—tiny sample!—none of that has happened, either. Amusingly, so far, Nolan Schanuel is notable different but basically the same:

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DAY 6 Of The 2025 MLB Season

Mookie Betts was trying to turn a double play, he lost the grip on the ball, he decided to try to throw it anyway, the ball went where balls very rarely go: