Pittsburgh Pirates: This is Not the Real Ke’Bryan Hayes

Pittsburgh Pirates third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes’ season, on the surface, has been poor. But he’s much better than those numbers suggest.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have a highly talented player manning third base. That’s Ke’Bryan Hayes, who has some of the most promise among all young players currently in the league. While his defense is outstanding and he has a ton of raw power, his season, as a hitter, has been pretty disappointing.

Through 353 plate appearances, Hayes is batting just .254/.320/.367 with a .302 wOBA, and 89 wRC+. His offensive numbers have been below the league average. We know that. But this isn’t reflective of his potential as a top-of-the-line-up bat.

Hayes has the raw power to become a 20+ home run a year kind of hitter. He has a 90.2 MPH exit velocity as well as a 46.2% hard-hit rate. That falls right in line with guys such as Javier Baez (90.6 MPH/46%), Nick Castellanos (89.8 MPH/45.8%), and J.T. Realmuto (90 MPH, 45.5%). Among the 53 qualified players with an average exit velocity of 90 MPH or higher, just 5 have fewer than 15 home runs this year. 5 of the 38 batters with a hard-hit rate of 46% or greater have less than 20 home runs.

Yes, I know. Hayes wasn’t a big-time power hitter in the minor leagues. His career minor league ISO was just .122 and his best single-season high was .161. None of that screams 20+ home run potential. But Hayes has added a fair amount of raw power since then.

Hayes was projected to be a 40-game power kind of batter in 2018, but that has jumped to a projected-50 grade now. He’s already surpassed FanGraphs original grade with a 45-current game power grade. So what’s holding him back? Why hasn’t he been able to slug those long balls yet? Well, a major factor has been him hitting way more ground balls than he ever did.

Hayes has a 56.8% ground ball rate this year. Since 2010, there have been only 87 other seasons where a player had both 300 plate appearances and a higher ground ball rate in a single season. His 24.6% flyball rate is also very low, and his line drive rate sits below 20%. Hayes’ single-season high ground ball rate in at least 300 plate appearances in the minor leagues never even reached 50%, and the highest was 46.4% in 2019. Still well over 10% lower than what it currently is at. Even then, Hayes finished his season off batting .313/.368/.438 with a .352 wOBA, and 107 wRC+ in the final month of the season.

Luckily for Hayes and the Pittsburgh Pirates it looks like the team may have found something that may work for him. He’s batted .364/.389/.394 with a .341 wOBA, and 114 wRC+ throughout September so far, batting mostly in the leadoff spot. Marty pointed this out as well. Now Hayes is hitting more line drives (23.1%), but his ground ball rate is still astronomically high at 61.5%.

Very clearly, Hayes is getting the base hits he previously wasn’t because of the low line drive rate. But the raw power hasn’t fully translated into home runs yet with the big reason being a whole lot of ground balls still.

The problem with Hayes isn’t that he isn’t powerful. Clearly, he has more than enough raw power, as evident by his hard-hit numbers, to be a power threat. But he still has a batted ball result line that looks like when he was more of a singles hitter back in 2015-2017. Currently, the league average line drive, ground ball, and flyball rates are 20.7%, 43%, and 36.3%. That’s very similar to the rates he put up in the minor leagues, but with less raw power. Even if he can reach the league average rates while keeping a similar hard-hit profile, he could easily be the .280/.350/.480 hitter with 18-20+ home runs, and 35+ doubles kind of player many were expecting after his great showing in late-2020.

In my opinion, this isn’t the real Hayes. He’s hitting way more ground balls than he ever has. A lingering hand injury throughout the season probably hasn’t helped either. Heck, it may be the cause for this lack of fly balls or line drives. Whatever the issue is, the point remains that the chances that we keep seeing the version of Ke’Bryan Hayes that we’ve seen this year are slim.