Paul DeJong has Leveled Up

Last year, Paul DeJong felt a lot like a create-a-player from a video game. Someone turned the power knob all the way up, spared a few points for ‘league average shortstop defense,’ and that was just all the points they had. DeJong was really interesting last year to me as a fan of baseball, but also as a thought experiment. While he improved somewhat at the end of the season, he spent a good chunk of last year running a strikeout rate around 30% and walking something like never. It felt like a great wager with the baseball gods- is it possible to be a good hitter if you strike out as much as anyone in baseball and walk as little as anyone in baseball? DeJong managed it last year, but he only got there by hitting a ton of home runs and running an insanely high BABIP. By xwOBA, he was essentially a league-average hitter, and it was all too easy to imagine pitchers taking advantage of his free-swinging ways and expanding the zone more and more until he simply couldn’t keep his production up.

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