Where Did Bobby Witt Jr.'s Pull Power Go?
After a monster 2023 season that the Royals rewarded with a huge contract, Bobby Witt Jr. is even better this year...except for one thing.
With great power comes great responsibility. Okay, this isn’t about Spiderman, but the general sentiment is sort of similar. Bobby Witt Jr. signed the most lucrative contract in the history of the Kansas City Royals, and with that comes increased scrutiny. It would be easy to see his .320/.367/.547 line and see that the superstar has somehow taken one more step. And in so many ways he has. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something puzzling about the start of his 2024 season that I can’t help but wonder what’s going on. Witt isn’t pulling anything for power.
No, that’s not an exaggeration. He has pulled literally one pitch farther than 300 feet. It was his eighth inning double on Tuesday night to give the Royals an insurance run. We’re now 32 games into the season. This is a small sample, but not small enough to ignore. Is it making him a bad player? Absolutely not. He is still an elite player; one of the best in all the game. So why am I wasting internet bandwidth on a topic about something Witt isn’t doing well when he’s doing so much? Because with great power comes great responsibility. We’ve been over this.
Let’s start with a little context. Even before he broke out as a superstar, Witt had immense pull power. We all remember the grand slam against Jhoan Duran last season to walk off the Twins, but I even think not infrequently about a home run he hit in spring training in 2021 on a similar pitch (though not as hard) that went over the berm. He hit 50 home runs in his first two big league seasons combined and 34 of them were to the pull side. And you can see they weren’t cheap shots either.
The average distance on these home runs was 409 feet. His farthest, in June of last year, traveled 442 feet. Here’s his overall spray chart from 2022 and 2023 combined.
So you can see that he does like to use the opposite field, and that’s great. He fills up the right field line and right-center and there is a noticeable amount of blank space in left field. I think it’s a good point to make that he has never been a guy who uses the pull side as his main means of offense. But you can also see that he has driven the ball even beyond the home runs he’s hit and that’s what I’m wondering about. Take a look at this year’s spray chart.
