The Athletics’ Jacob Wilson is having a weird season
If I told you there was a player in Major League Baseball who had one of the highest chase rates in the league, had some of the worst hard contact metrics, and never walked, what would you expect his batting average to be?
Somewhere around the Mendoza line? Maybe if he was lucky and had a super high BABIP he could sneak into .250 territory? Now, what if I told you he was batting nearly .350. Among qualified hitters, that player, with zero bat control ranks 11th in MLB in batting average.
The Athletics’ shortstop Jacob Wilson has always been a high-average hitter. He hit over .400 across two seasons in the minors after all. However, his method of approach is baffling.
Plate discipline? What’s that
The best contact hitters in baseball more or less share a lot of the same traits. Steven Kwan, Luis Arraez, Jung Hoo Lee, all of them strike out very little, hit the ball to all fields, and are very patient at the plate. Wilson follows the first two rules, but treats the third like a five-year-old treats a ‘No running’ sign at the local pool, like it doesn’t exist.
Steven Kwan’s on-base percentage in 2024 was 76 points higher than his batting average that same year. Luis Arraez’s was 32 points higher. And while we haven’t seen much from Jung Hoo Lee given that he was injured for most of 2024, his OBP in 2025 is currently 72 points higher than his average.
Wilson’s batting average and OBP are much closer together. In fact, they’re the same number. That’s right. Across 61 plate appearances this year, Wilson has not walked a single time. Where Kwan and Lee each boast a walk rate of at least 6%, Wilson sits at 0.0%. Where Kwan, Arraez, and Lee each swing at fewer than 50% of the pitches thrown their way, Wilson is taking his bat off his shoulder 59.1% of the time.
It’s especially bad out of the zone. Wilson is chasing an enormous 38.4% of pitches thrown out of the strike zone to him. That ranks in the 8th percentile among MLB players. For even more perspective, Javier Baez, known for his lack of plate discipline, is chasing 32.2% pitches outside the zone. Yet while Baez is striking out 22% of the time, Wilson has struck out just three times all year, good for a 4.9% rate.
Contact metrics
So clearly, if Wilson is chasing a lot of bad pitches and still getting hits, he must be making great contact, right? In a normal world, that would make perfect sense. In Jacob Wilson’s world, that’s a ridiculous assumption, and we should be ashamed of ourselves.
In today’s MLB, a player’s potential as a hitter is often boiled down to their bat speed and hard-hit rate. Wilson does not excel in either category. He ranks in the 16th percentile of MLB hitters with a 29.3% hard-hit rate. He ranks in the ninth percentile with an average exit velocity of 85.1 mph. But those aren’t even the most shocking metrics.
Jacob Wilson has the absolute slowest average bat speed in MLB. This man is the antithesis of everything MLB scouts look for in a hitter, yet he’s hitting .344 with an .852 OPS.
Is he beating out little dribblers with his blazing speed? No. He ranks in MLB’s 48th percentile in sprint speed. Is he getting extremely lucky? Not really. His expected batting average is .338. He’s just unlike anything else in MLB currently.
What to make of Wilson
The cynics of the world would probably argue that Wilson is bound to come back to Earth, but he’s been doing this his entire career, and he’s never fallen off. Through two full years in the minor leagues, Wilson only ever drew 20 walks, and he had a .401 batting average with eight home runs to boot.
Some people break all the rules and still find success. Wilson is a weirdo, a freak, an anomaly that shouldn’t work but does anyway. His Baseball Savant page is chaotically magnificent. The man isn’t average at anything. He’s either one of the best in the league or one of the worst, nothing in between.
But that’s what makes baseball incredible. As much as statisticians and analysts like to boil the game down to numbers, sometimes all that math accounts for diddly-squat. Sometimes people are just ballers.
By the way, I don’t know where to bet on the AL batting title or what Wilson’s odds are but that’s definitely something I’d keep an eye on as the season progresses.
