A closer look at Pirates infielder Jared Triolo's recent hot streak

Pittsburgh Pirates utility man Jared Triolo has not been a bright spot in the lineup for most of the season. While he has provided a ton of defensive value and versatility, Triolo’s bat has been significantly lacking. He was never expected to be a middle-of-the-order hitter, but he’s fallen well short of expectations, given how well he did last year in his brief major league appearance. He also set the bar high by never posting a wRC+ below 110 in any minor league season from 2019 through 2023. 

But Triolo has been hitting much better recently. Over Triolo’s last 56 plate appearances dating back to Aug. 17, he is batting .245/.383/.490 with a .379 wOBA and 142 wRC+. He has three home runs and an isolated slugging percentage of .245. Triolo has walked nearly as many times as he has struck out, resulting in a 20% K% and BB% of 16.7% each. So, has anything changed, or is this just a small sample size fluke?

One thing Triolo is doing better is hitting the ball harder. His exit velocity is 91.2 MPH in this stretch, compared to only 88.1 MPH prior to the streak beginning. More importantly, Triolo is now lifting the ball. He has had a 24.6-degree launch angle since Aug. 17, but was below 10 degrees during the earlier portion of the season. This combination has led to his barrel rate going from 4.1% to 10.8%.

Tangible changes behind Pirates infielder Jared Triolo's progress

But Triolo should be hitting the ball harder, based on where he has seen pitches recently. FanGraphs’ heat maps show that he’s seen a lot more pitches closer to the middle of the zone. Granted, part of the reason pitchers are throwing more in the zone to Triolo could be because he is not swinging outside the zone nearly as often as before. Triolo’s chase rate over his last 60 plate appearances is only 14.5%. For reference of how low that is, Juan Soto has a 16.6% career chase rate. Prior to that, Triolo was going for pitches outside the strike zone at a 26.3% rate. Sure, Triolo is seeing more pitches in the zone, but it’s an increase that shouldn’t cause him to go from a Giancarlo Stanton rate (26.9% in the Statcast era) to below a Juan Soto rate.

Triolo has seen a ton of fastballs recently. 34.6% of the pitches he has seen recently have been four-seamers, compared to only 28.2% earlier in the season. For most of this campaign, four-seam fastballs have been Triolo’s kryptonite. He has just a .287 xwOBA and a 27.6% whiff rate this year against four-seamers. But in recent weeks, Triolo has improved that to a .343 xwOBA and 18.2% whiff % against the same pitch type.

The next question is whether any of it is sustainable. This is not the first time Triolo ended the season on a high note. Notably, though, he’s not relying on an unsustainable batting average on balls in play like last year. When Triolo ended the 2023 season with a strong September and was putting up a 178 wRC+, he had a .514 BABIP. It was only the 23rd time a player had a BABIP above .500 in 50+ plate appearances during the Month of September since 1947, and the only time a Pirates hitter has ever done so. Throughout this recent hot streak, Triolo’s BABIP is a much less extreme and much more sustainable .265. If anything, he’s getting more unlucky than lucky, based on batted balls falling for hits.

The second thing is that Triolo isn’t striking out nearly as often. Even though he hit well in September last year, Triolo struck out nearly 30% of the time with a 30.3% whiff rate. For reference, only 24 batters all this year have a whiff rate of at least 30%. The difference is most who swing and miss that often while remaining consistently productive pair their whiffs with a well above-average exit velocity. Triolo’s exit velo in the month of September last year was 90.6 MPH, which, while good, isn’t going to be among the best. This time around, Triolo is striking out 20% of the time. When he swings the bat, he is only missing 22.8% of the time.

Triolo is seeing more pitches in the zone now than last year. His in-zone pitch rate in September 2023 was 51.5%. Over this hot streak, 54.7% of pitches he has seen have been in the zone. This year, he is making far more contact on pitches in the zone (89.4% in-zone contact rate now compared to only 81.8% last year) while maintaining a good exit velocity.

Lastly, there is his weighted on-base average (wOBA) and his expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA). xwOBA doesn’t put Triolo’s current work in super high regard, but a .334 xwOBA is still above average (.316). Last year, his wOBA in September was .440, while his xwOBA was .382. Sure, that might be better, but there’s a much larger difference between .440 and .382 last year (.058 difference) compared to .370 and .333 this year (.035 difference).

With all that being said, what takeaways can we pull from Jared Triolo’s recent hot streak, other than his performance being acceptably better? One thing that is for sure is that his current run is more sustainable than the one he had at the end of last year. A batting average on balls in play over .500 was never going to last longer than a few weeks, unless his average exit velocity was that of Oneil Cruz’s or Aaron Judge’s peak.

The underlying numbers from Triolo’s recent performance show he is a .740-.750 OPS, .330-.340 wOBA batter. That is more or less the sort of hitter many expected him to eventually settle into. There are definitely some promising stats under the hood, especially compared to what he was doing earlier this year. Hopefully, he can continue to improve his game and show off some of these improvements over a larger sample size.