This article is going to continue my recent stretch of looking at hitting process stats to find value in hitters who we can acquire via trade or on the waiver wire. Now that most regular starters have seen 500 pitches or more, we’ve reached a point in the season where we can look at one of my favorite process stats for hitters: Process+.
If you want to learn a little bit more about Process+, then I highly recommend you check out Nate Schwartz’s article, which won an FSWA Award. The stat, created by Kyle Bland at Pitcher List, is essentially a hitter’s version of Stuff+. It’s “a combination of PLV’s Decision Value, Contact, and Power metrics formatted into one holistic number” that represents how good a hitter has been at making swing decisions, making contact on those swings, and making authoritative contact when he does hit the ball. That gives each hitter a Process Value grade as well as a Performance Value grade, which tries to represent how well they’ve done, independent of just the process.
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For today, I’m going to focus just on the Decision Value and Contact Value portions of Process+ since those stabilize at 400 pitches, while Power Value doesn’t stabilize until 800 pitches. It’s important to remember that stabilizing doesn’t mean a hitter owns that level forever, but it does mean that it’s more meaningful and “sticky” than it would have been at 200 pitches. By focusing on these categories, I’m hoping to identify hitters who are doing everything right in their approach at the plate and making a good deal of contact and meaningful contact. In the long run, those should be the hitters we want to buy in on the most.
You’ll find that many of the hitters below are rostered in a lot of leagues, and so maybe they are guys that you can trade for if the surface-level stats haven’t yet caught up. However, I hope to also highlight a few hitters who may be underrostered and could still be found on waiver wires in certain leagues.
Hitters Who Just Missed the Cut
There are a few players who made the cut in terms of one of their Decision Value or Contact Value, but fell too low in the other. All of Bo Bichette, Josh Jung, CJ Abrams, Yainer Diaz, Kerry Carpenter, and Salvador Perez had over 100 Contact Value, but not a single one of them posted over a 90 Decision Value. Some of this is that players like Bichette can make contact on a lot of pitches, so they swing at pitches out of the zone a lot, which will lower their Decision Value scores. We also…