Patiently waiting for Chourio to find patience
Jackson Chourio is off to a good start. He’s cooled over the past few days, but after his ugly 0-fer on Opening Day, he got hits in each of his next 14 games. He leads the Brewers with five home runs, and going into play on Wednesday, he was sixth in the majors with 45 total bases, one behind Aaron Judge.
But there’s one thing that Chourio has not been doing, and that’s taking walks. And when I say he hasn’t been doing it, he really has not been doing it: when he walked to lead off the bottom of the first on Tuesday night versus Detroit, it was his first walk of the season. After his 0-for-4 performance on Wednesday, Chourio now has one walk in 86 plate appearances. His 1.2% walk rate is lower than some players who played in the 1870s, when it took nine balls to walk a batter.
So how much of a problem is this, really? There are a couple of things to consider, and we’ll also give some historical context for players who are notoriously walk averse.
What is he swinging at?
The first thing to consider here: is Chourio swinging at balls, or is he just hyper-aggressive on balls in the zone? Well, he’s certainly not shy. Chourio is swinging at 77.6% of pitches in the zone, which currently ranks 11th among qualified hitters. But Chourio is also swinging at 40.7% of pitches that are outside the zone, which is 10th among qualified hitters. Overall, only Boston’s Ceddanne Rafaela and Colorado’s Hunter Goodman are swinging more often than Chourio, who has swung at 59.9% of the pitches he’s seen.
Given how often he is swinging, Chourio doesn’t have a terrible swing and miss rate, even on balls outside of the zone. He is a very, very talented hitter, so he feels confident swinging even if he may not know exactly what he’s swinging at, and he’s good enough that he can make solid contact even when he maybe shouldn’t.
I worry, though, that this will lead to problems. Last season, Chourio was in the 26th percentile in chase percentage and 31st percentile in walk percentage (6.8%). That’s not good, but it’s not horrible. However, this season he is in just the fifth percentile in chase rate and third in walk rate. His strikeouts are up; he’s striking out 24.4% of the time compared to 21.1% last season.
I’ve no doubt that Chourio is aware of this. Given the way the broadcast has been talking about him the last few days, it seems obvious that it’s a topic of conversation around the team. My guess is that the coaches kind of told him to do his thing as long as he was hot. But over his last four games he’s just 1-for-17, and I’d expect the first adjustment will be to take a few more pitches.
What can history tell us?
The second thing to consider here is historical context. Baseball history is riddled with immensely talented hitters who had no patience, and while many of them had good careers, there’s a particular career arc that concerns me. Let’s take the example of Vada Pinson.
Pinson, like Chourio, was a phenom. He made his major league debut at age 19 for the Reds in 1958, and, like Chourio, was 20 in his first full season. He came out of the gates on fire: as a rookie in ‘59, Pinson hit .316 with 20 homers, 21 stolen bases, nine triples, and he led the majors with 131 runs scored and 47 doubles. He had 6.5 WAR and made the All-Star Game. He led the league in doubles again in 1960, and then in 1961 he finished third in MVP voting when he hit .343 and led the majors with 208 hits. When he was 24, he led the league in hits again and finished with 37 doubles, 14 triples, 22 homers, and 27 stolen bases. He was a superstar.
But what Pinson didn’t do was walk. He walked 55 times in his rookie season for a 7.8% walk rate, but it declined from there; 6.7% in 1960, 5.9% in 1961, and after a brief rebound back to 6.7% in 1962, it declined further. By the mid-1960s, Pinson was walking less than 5% of the time. For his career, he had a 5.5% walk percentage.
Here’s the issue. When you’re hitting .343, like Pinson did in 1961, it’s not that big a deal if you walk only 39 times in 660 plate appearances; you still have a solid .379 OBP because you have so many hits. But as a player ages and his physical skills diminish, that very small gap between batting average and OBP becomes a much bigger problem. Pinson, since he started so young, put a lot of miles on his body quickly; he played at least 154 games in every season from 1959-1967, but you could see that wear and tear take a toll by the mid-60s. His batting average dropped to .266 in 1964, and while he still hit with some pop, that meant his OBP dropped to just .316. For most of the second half of his career, Pinson struggled to keep that OBP above .300. To a lesser degree, Ichiro Suzuki dealt with this same issue; a perfect example of a hitter so talented that he never needed to walk, Ichiro never walked over 51 times in a season aside from his second year in 2002.
What plate discipline does for a player is that it makes them slump-proof. Set aside the Ted Williams approach for a second — the idea, essentially, that you can do the most damage by waiting for your specific pitch and not swinging at anything else (an approach that also served Barry Bonds, and now Juan Soto, well). Even if you’re not fully committing to the 20% walk rate like those guys are, a hitter with plate discipline can continue to be effective even if his bat goes quiet. Chourio doesn’t have that right now. If he slumps, he’s not contributing offensively. When Soto slumps, you can still count on him getting on base once or twice a game and helping the team that way.
The good news? There are examples of players turning this around. I’ve been thinking a lot about Vladimir Guerrero (Sr.) lately. Vladdy was a notorious hacker as a young player; he would swing at everything, but he was so talented a hitter that he could get hits on absurd chases. Check out this video if you want proof.
As a rookie, Guerrero had a 5.4% walk rate, and it wasn’t much better in 1998, his first full season. He was obviously a stud; that year he hit 38 homers and 37 doubles, but he took only 42 walks, for a 6.2% rate. But this kicked up a notch in 1999 to 8.2%, and by 2002 Guerrero’s walk percentage rose to 11.8% and then even higher to 13.5% in 2003. That would have ranked fourth in baseball in 2024, which is sort of a shock to a lot of people who remember him as the guy who would swing at pitches that bounced.
The biggest reason why Guerrero’s walk rate improved is because he was as good as he was. Hall-of-Fame sluggers don’t get pitches down the middle, so the more bad pitches you see, the less you’ll swing. Chourio’s talent speaks for itself, and I think this will start to create a solution; as he does more and more damage on pitches in the zone, he’ll have no choice but to lay off the inevitably larger number of pitches he sees outside the zone.
But I do also think someone should just kind of leave a copy of Williams’ book in Chourio’s locker. I totally respect going for it when you’re hot, and I recognize that he is only 21 years old. I also should point out that Vada Pinson, my cautionary example, finished his career with 54 WAR and 2,756 hits; he has a borderline Hall of Fame case. If Chourio had a career like Pinson’s it would be a rousing success.
I’m just trying to think a little bigger. I do expect that Chourio’s patience will improve, not just this season but over the next several years. I remember seeing him play in Appleton when he was 18, and I remember him imitating the Soto Shimmy when he took a close pitch. I think that desire is in there, it’ll just take a bit for it to manifest. And if there’s one thing we know about Chourio, it’s that he is capable of making drastic improvements over the course of a single season. Maybe plate discipline will be his next big leap.