Why Jose Miranda Handles Righties So Well—and How He Could Get Better

[Matthew Trueblood]

Whenever a new stream of information about the way baseball is played at the highest level becomes available, it reveals something new about a facet of the game we've always sought to understand better. What have we learned this week?

Image courtesy of © Matt Krohn-Imagn Images

It's been a week since Statcast released public-facing data on batter's box position and contact points for batters throughout the league. It's been a fascinating new source of insight into the pitcher-batter confrontation, and it's also just a fun toy. We've seen, for instance, how Willi Castro's extreme proximity to the plate continues to his tendency to get hit by so many pitches, or how Ryan Jeffers makes a major change of approach when he reaches two strikes in the count. 

More epiphanies await, though. For instance, we can break down where a hitter sets up and where they tend to make contact with the ball (or, at least, where their swing path would lead them to do so; the theoretical intercept point is tracked even when the batter whiffs on the pitch) not only by count, but by the handedness of the opposing pitcher—and doing so tells us much about how contact points interact with platoon splits. I wrote a piece introducing this idea at a more basic level at our sister site for the Boston Red Sox Monday morning; check that out here.

Last season, the Twins had some of the right-handed hitters who handled right-handed pitching best, in all of baseball. As a whole, after adjusting for park effects, their righties hit righty hurlers 11% better than average. Carlos Correa (.884 OPS), Byron Buxton (.859) and Jose Miranda (.856) were each at least 45% better than a typical righty when facing same-handed pitchers. For Correa and Buxton, that was still worse than their overall numbers, meaning they were even more dangerous against lefties—but Miranda was actually considerably better against same-handed hurlers.

The idea of a hitter with true-talent reverse platoon splits has been largely rebuffed throughout the sabermetric era, and with good reason. The only modern hitters to retire with better numbers against same-handed pitchers over long careers were extremely unusual lefty batters Ichiro Suzuki and Kelly Johnson. It's just not how baseball works. You hit opposite-handed pitchers better, because their breaking stuff moves toward you instead of away, and because you can usually pick up the ball sooner and clearer out of those pitchers' h ands.

Now, though, we have a new way to see the question of platoon skills, and Miranda is an instructive example. His average contact point against righty hurlers is 6.7 inches in front of home plate. For context, the average right-handed batter's contact point in those matchups is just 3.4" in front. Some of the righty batters who handled righties best last year shared that trait with Miranda—they go get the ball well in front of home. The 25 best righty batters against righties last year averaged a contact point 4.1" in front of the plate, despite the fact that (in general) there are diminishing returns once you get some distance from the average: you're likely to be too early on a lot of balls.

The edge for the righty who catches it out front, when facing same-handed hurlers, is that they can get to the ball before it's finished dipping below the zone or sliding off the plate away. There's danger in that ability, since it sometimes prompts such hitters to make bad swing decisions and chase too many of those pitches, but being able to get the barrel to a slider before it reaches a location where that kind of barreling-up would be impossible is a skill, rooted in that natural (or organically practiced) contact point. Hitters whose swings do best when they go get the ball early anyway make it harder for same-handed opponents to sneak a breaking ball past.

Miranda captures all of this nicely. He chases too much for his own good, but still managed to pull the ball in the air at an above-average rate in 2024. He makes more contact than you'd expect, based on the pitches he sees and swings at, and does a good amount of damage on breaking stuff. Where he struggles—and this is another layer to examine when it comes to contact points and platoon skills—is with offspeed stuff from lefties. On those pitches, Miranda was below average last season, which is why he doesn't crush lefties the way you'd expect such a competent righty batter to. His swing is about going and getting the ball, not waiting for it, but that often means jumping at a changeup that would have faded out of the zone, or seeing it right in terms of location but having to decelerate the swing to make contact.

Contact point informs plate discipline, but doesn't determine it. To figure out how well a batter will handle both same- and opposite-handed batters, you need to assess their swing decisions and their swing itself, understanding that they're related but distinct. Miranda's vulnerability to lefty changeups might be fixable, if he can learn to tone down his aggressiveness against them. He might even do well to move his own contact point deeper against lefties, as most hitters do. Right now, he belongs to a small set of players (guys like Christopher Morel, Tyler O'Neill, and Randy Arozarena) who both catch the ball out front from the right side and let it travel deeper against righties than against lefties. 

Unlike those guys, though, Miranda has one more wrinkle: he's a full-extension hitter. In addition to seeing where a hitter tends to strike the ball relative to the front edge of the plate, we have data on how far their contact point is from their center of mass. Of the 294 batters who swung at least 500 times in 2024, Miranda ranked 23rd with a contact point almost three full feet (35.3") away from his center of mass. It's hard to stay back on the changeup and hit it hard if your swing is designed to make contact with such a big stride and long forward swing.

Miranda has a (excuse the pun; it's halfway intended) twin elsewhere in the league to whom we can compare him, for these purposes. Austin Riley, the slugging Atlanta third baseman, sets up at the same depth in the box, averages almost identical contact points against both lefties and righties, and gets almost identical extension from his center of mass at contact. Yet, Riley not only holds his own against righties, but lays waste to lefties. On offspeed stuff from lefties, specifically, he was 5 runs better per 100 pitches seen than Miranda in 2024, according to Baseball Savant.

How? There are two reasons. First, Riley stands about three inches closer to the plate, which makes it easier for him to get the barrel to outside pitches. This is a mixed blessing, though. Riley had his hand broken when he was hit by a pitch last year, and just had a similar scare near the end of spring training. Miranda could and should stand a bit closer to the plate, but the nature of swings like these is such that each inch of such movement increases the risk of a pitch running inside that the hitter can't avoid taking in a vulnerable spot.

The other difference, of course, is this.

Miranda probably won't ever have Riley's power, so the ability to blast off on that lefty changeup even as one gives up a little bit of bat speed might never be there. Again, we see an interplay between a swing path (in this case, more in terms of the forward-sweeping arc of the swing from its start to the contact point, and less about the matching of pitch trajectory in the vertical plane that we usually mean by this) and another skill, this time power.

There are still confounding factors, then, when we try to read platoon skills and glean as much intelligence as possible about a hitter's profile by looking at their contact points. Nonetheless, these insights are invaluable. Why does Miranda handle righties well? Because he catches the ball out front, with a swing that remains controlled and adaptable. Why does he struggle to match the production you might hope to get from such a hitter, against lefties? Because his plate discipline and power are each a bit less impressive than those of similar hitters who do better. These nuggets give us something to watch and root for. If Miranda does scoot a bit closer to the plate, that might matter. If he makes better swing decisions on the outer edge, that might matter, too. And when Rocco Baldelli writes Miranda's name into the lineup regularly against righties, even at the expense of Edouard Julien or Mickey Gasper, we can understand that it's because of physical data that underpins and reinforces the outcome-centered numbers around his platoon splits.

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[thelanges5]

His bat to ball skills and his propensity to chase make for a lot of weak contact. Just because you can get the bat on a bad pitch doesn’t mean you should. 

[DJL44]

Great article

[LambchoP]

It's nice he doesn't strike out much but he never walks and produces lots of weak contact. If he could improve his pitch recognition and start driving some pitches for more power it would sure help out the lineup until Lewis comes back.

[Linus]

The guy has to stop swinging at everything or he will never make it. He has no plate discipline and pitchers know it. 

[tony&rodney]

Has his swing plane increased in angle and/or gotten longer? Right now, Miranda looks overmatched at the plate.

[jkcarew]

Trying hard with the Austin Riley comp. The only thing that makes Riley good offensively is his power numbers. Not particularly good commanding the K zone, not a great OPS. And Miranda, as stated (and depicted in graph), seems like he’s incapable of developing anything beyond league-average power. So far, he’s below that…including pedestrian power numbers against righties.

To have significant value, he’s either got to have much improved power or much improved BA/OBP. Either is starting to seems akin to a pulling-rabbit-from-hat scenario.