Every offseason is different, but it usually starts a similar way for Connor Joe. First he takes about a week off, not even thinking about baseball. Then, it was time for self-reflection.
When reflecting on his 2022 season, he knew he had to make a change. He didn't like the quality of his at-bats the second half of the season. His peripherals dropped off, too, and the player who was a great comeback story in 2021 -- beating cancer to become a legitimate major-league player for the first time at age 28 -- was heading to the fringe of the Rockies' roster. Coors Field was a hitter's park, but he finished with a .238 batting average and 87 wRC+. That wasn't going to cut it.
What he needed was a hitting identity.
“[It's] the intention of going to the plate and knowing I can do damage and doing damage, and going up there with like a passive approach," Joe was telling me.
Joe has found that identity this year. He's continued to have quality at-bats, work counts and not chase pitches out of the zone, but the real difference between 2022 and this year is that he has become a bona fide power threat.
Through his first 114 plate appearances this year, Joe has slashed .277/.360/.554 with four home runs, 10 doubles and three triples. His chase percentage is 13.9%, the best of any hitter that has enough plate appearances to qualify for Baseball Savant's leaderboards.He's still drawing walks, and while his whiffs and strikeouts are up early, it's been well worth the uptick in power.
It has been legitimate power, too. A year ago, Joe had an average exit velocity of 85.3 mph, which ranked in the bottom 5% of hitters. This year, he's averaging 90.6 mph, which ranks in the 70th percentile. Going by Baseball Savant's year-to-year changes leaderboard, that's the third-largest increase for any qualified hitter this year. If slugging percentage is more your speed, his 195 point jump in SLG is the sixth-largest in baseball.
This exit velocity isn't just being wasted on a bunch of ground balls, either. He's elevating it too and hitting it to all parts of the field:
While minor-league batted ball data isn't readily available, this has been a power stretch that may surprise many, but it's something the Pirates thought was a possibility when they acquired him from the Rockies this winter.
"We felt there was an opportunity there with how he was moving and getting loaded to get to some more power," Ben Cherington told traveling media in Washington recently. "And then he himself, I think it just married up the timing, because when we traded for him, he had already started to explore some of that stuff on his own. He was looking at it, we were looking at it kind of similar, and that came together. He started that work into the offseason, carried it into spring training putting himself in a little stronger position to get to some impact."
When Derek Shelton talks about Joe, he often brings up how he is going to give the team a quality at-bat. That usually means he's going to see a lot of pitches and rarely come up empty, but they knew he could be more than just a pesky out.
"If you go back, he had had stretches where he had impacted the ball like that," Shelton said. "It was the identification of 'hey, this is a guy we know can really control the at bat and make good swing decisions.' And then when Andy [Haines] started watching it, it was like alright, there's some adjustments we need to make."
For Joe, he just had to go back to 2021. His 88.2 mph average exit velocity was more than enough for Coors Field. He just needed to tap into that pop again.
“It’s not like it’s something I’m chasing," Joe said. "It’s something I’ve done before.”
Joe already did a lot of things right at the plate with the Rockies, like make good swing decisions and being a tough out, but this type of exit velo spike usually comes with a change in approach or mechanics, which is happening here.
Talking with Joe, he politely declined to get too deep into the weeds of what he's doing differently, but he did acknowledge that he has had made some changes, many of them stemming from conversations he and Haines had this winter when the hitting coach traveled out to San Diego this offseason to work with him in person.
“I think the best way to describe it is I’m allowing my body to be athletic," Joe said. "I’m making athletic moves, getting into my legs, using the ground a little more.”
Looking at video of the last two years, some of those changes are easy to spot, especially with the lower half. Let's compare his swing against two center-cut fastballs, one last year and one against the Nationals recently:
The most obvious change is Joe has closed his stance. He used to have an extremely open stance when he first broke through to the majors with the Giants, to the point that his chest was facing towards the pitcher, but last year's stance was also more open than most. That's not just in his set up, but also in his follow through. His leg kick would close his stance back up, but he would land with an open stance again.
That's not happening this year. He's starting at a more standard stance and landing in the same spot. To speculate a bit, it looks like that's helping with his heel plant, which would seem to support what Joe said about using the ground more.
There are a couple other things in that swing that appear to be new, like his hand positioning and them appearing to be closer to his body, but the lower half is probably what's worth latching onto here. This is a drastic change from where he was a couple years ago.
Going by the data-driven baseball facility Driveline's research, the spike in Joe's top exit velocities indicates that he is getting more bat speed, perhaps as much as 3 mph (though an analyst told me that in reality, it's probably closer to 1.5 mph without that complete minor-league data set to use as a comparison). Driveline's findings suggest that every mph added to a swing results in about seven more feet in batted ball distance. Joe is creating more speed, most likely due to his body movement.
Joe was looking for an identity. He found more thunder in his bat.
“Just that willingness to make changes and experiment with different things in the offseason, [it helped me achieve] my goal to go into the offseason with an open mind and allowed me to find those new places, new positions that my body really likes," Joe said. "It allowed my body to be in the most athletic spot.”
It's been quite the journey by Joe to get to this spot. He was originally drafted by the Pirates in 2014 before being traded for Sean Rodriguez in 2017. He bounced around the league as a minor-leaguer for a few years.
Now he's back where he started, with a new approach and some enticing new power numbers.
“A lot of people don’t see the nine years in between," Joe said. "Or the ’17 to ’23, the five years since coming back. It’s a long journey. A lot of grinding. A lot of sleepless nights. Yeah, I’m grateful to be here.”
