The Incredible, Extreme Present and Inscrutable Future of Matt Wallner

I’m excited about Matt Wallner. You’re excited about Matt Wallner. Everybody’s excited about Matt Wallner. Since his return to Minnesota on Jul. 7, he’s running a 191 wRC+, which means that he’s been almost twice as productive at the plate as the average batter. Over that stretch, the only players who have hit better than Wallner are Aaron Judge, Bobby Witt Jr., and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. That’s some good company.

The Forest Lake native is very much a one-weird-trick kind of hitter, and that trick is interrogating the structural integrity of a baseball. Since his callup, he ranks first in hard-hit rate, first in barrel rate, second in average exit velocity, and sixth in average bat speed. Wallner is a big, strong man who takes big, strong swings, and the ball jumps off his bat like it’s a sentient being whose sole desire is to get as far away from him as possible. We’re going to take a closer look at Wallner’s unbelievable summer and what we should expect going forward.

Let’s start with past performance. If you combine the last three years, Wallner now has just a bit under a full season’s worth of playing time at the big-league level. Over that stretch, he’s slashing .250/.368/.512, with 26 homers, good for a wRC+ of 147.

Want to hear something strange? Wallner has had eight different stops in the minors, and while he was always an above-average hitter, he only ran a wRC+ of 150 or better in one of them. That’s not usually how things work. Most hitters don’t breathe a sigh of relief when they go from facing Triple-A pitching to big-league pitching. Even after his incredible run in the big leagues last year, it would have been completely unreasonable to expect Wallner to do what he’s doing now. What he’s doing now is completely unreasonable! He’s running a near-.400 BABIP, the highest in baseball, a sign of unsustainability if ever there was one. While his current performance should absolutely change our idea of Wallner’s ceiling, we should expect him to come down to Earth. It’s just going to take some time to find out exactly where his performance will settle.

One thing that I find both fun and encouraging is that pitchers are already scared of Wallner. You know the standard adjustment dance when a rookie comes up: Pitchers pound them with fastballs, and then once they prove that they can hit the fastball, the league starts attacking them with bendy stuff. If they prove that they can lay off the bendy stuff, then pitchers have to formulate a more nuanced plan of attack. If you were worried that Wallner is just succeeding because his up-and-down journey over the last couple years left him unfamiliar to big-league pitchers, who in turn just challenged him with fastballs, don’t be. Wallner has already passed that phase. So far this season, 44% of the pitches he’s has seen this season have been fastballs. Of the 400 players who have seen at least 500 pitches this season, that puts him in the 19th percentile. Likewise, his 47% zone rate puts him in the 11th percentile, and if you look just at the heart of the plate, he’s in the 9th percentile. Pitchers don’t want to throw him fastballs, and they’d rather hope that Wallner chases a bad pitch than attack him in the strike zone. (Yes, I realize that I should have written a whole article just about his zone rate, so that I could've titled it "Balls to the Wallner"). The good news is that (although he’s chasing more than he did in his previous stints with the Twins) Wallner isn’t biting. He’s running a better-than-average chase rate, while still being aggressive when he gets a pitch that he can drive.