[Do not start another article with every year, do not start another article with every year] ……. EVERY YEAR there is a backup catcher who has some sort of explosion. It’s not an actual explosion as it relates to fantasy, but it’s the kind of explosion where they’re hitting double-digit homers while only getting 330 plate appearances. What makes these folk heroes so memorable is how much their hometown broadcaster loves them. Each time they came out of the 3rd inning with a single to put their team up 1-0. The two broadcasters are exclaiming that the team has just finished the division for the first time in 10 years. When the season ends, he says, “I can’t believe I drafted Alec Bohm and ended up with a lot of players like Pedro Pages”
What is really going on here? Is Alec Bohm struggling so much that he couldn’t hit more homers than a guy who got +100 in fewer plate appearances? Is Pedro Pages Cal Raleigh secretly but not getting playing time? The answer to the first question is yes (sorry, Alec Bohm), and the answer to the second question is painfully obvious, looking at the overall ratings (although Pedro Pages may be more like the 2026 version of Cal Raleigh). So if their ratings aren’t great, meaning they’re probably not big hitters, how are they still getting dingers? This is where I want to introduce the concept of “Kyōshin” from the Japanese baseball video game Power Pros.
Kyōshin literally means “strong swing”, but in the US version of the Power Pros video game, it was called “Big Swing”. It was a hitter’s ability to greatly reduce his hitting area (where he can make contact with the ball) but greatly increase the hitter’s power *when* he makes contact. There is a similar feature in MLB: Show where users can prioritize communication or power through the Communication/General/Power options.
The theory is that these backup catchers have bad ratings but a lot of dingers always use the kyoshin option, even hitting twice. These guys play maybe one game in a row, and even after a few at-bats they can get a pinch hit by the starter if the game is close. Given their limited opportunities, they will keep slipping as the main character tells Joaquin Phoenix to do in the movie Signs (2002):
To dig into this theory, I started by looking at wOBACON, which is simply a player’s wOBA but only when they put the ball in play. A player with a low wOBA but a high wOBACON would probably mean that he swings and misses a lot, but does a lot of damage when he *does* put the ball in play. Taking a look at some of wOBACON’s top performers among backup catchers over the past two years:
I mean, this list is perfect. Almost all guys are at or above average in wOBACON in the league (league average around .366), but well below league average in actual wOBA (league average around .312). So most of these guys weren’t great, unless they were putting the ball in play where they became league average hitters. So next, we need to test the swing speed to see if these players are really Swing Away Merrills.
To test this, I looked at the total bat speed of all +800 players tracked since public bat tracking data became available in 2023, and compared their average bat speed to their 2-strike bat speed. The average player swings the bat slowly at 1.0mph when hitting twice, which makes sense since he obviously prioritizes contact over power. However, there was a small group of players who didn’t slow down their bats with two hits, and two of them were on our first list: Korey Lee in 2024 and Riley Adams in 2025. Here are the differences in each of the 9 backup catchers:
So almost all but two were above average (below the 50th percentile) in their “swing away-ness” which I think showed that these players had a method that matched the result. They really didn’t change the way they were swinging the bats twice, wanting to do damage and not being afraid to strike.
Finally, now that we have the data, we can show the top 20 Swing Away Merrills in the league this season, as well as the 20 greatest. [not sure what to call] Shy Away Derek(?) *slows* bat speed for two strikes:
2026 Swing Away Merrills
An all-or-nothing player like Colson Montgomery or Matt Wallner makes a lot of sense, but it’s also interesting to see smaller players like Victor Osuna II or Alex Freeland, who you’d think would be more cautious of contact. It’s also funny to see Pedro Pages go around trying to match Alec Bohm in homers.
2026 Shy Away Dereks
It is very interesting to see Shohei Ohtani on this list. This could be a result of guys like Soto and Ohtani having such high bat speed that they don’t need to swing as fast to do damage. It’s also interesting to see that there are actually backup catchers like Austin Hedges and Tyler Heineman. Are they the opposite of those traveling catchers who are just trying to do damage, instead of looking to put the ball in play, move the runner, do all those good John Smoltz teammates? I guess there’s no way to know (without asking them, of course).
