Around this time last year, I wrote about how Matt Olson was having a really weird season for the Braves, his first in Atlanta as he replaced departed franchise mainstay Freddie Freeman at first base. The short version: Olson was somehow performing great, mediocre and poor all at the same time, putting up numbers that seemed to contradict each other.
Now, nearly a year later, he's having another really weird season for the first-place Braves, just in a different way.
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Olson's 2023 season so far as been a study in extremes: strikeouts, walks and home runs. While he's not at a Joey Gallo level of the Three True Outcomes, he's reached a level that's almost unprecedented in his MLB career to this point, making this his second straight season of eyebrow-raising results.
Let's address all those whiffs first. Olson is missing pretty much every kind of pitch, most of them way more than he did last season, when he reached a career-high 170 strikeouts. Pitches in the zone. Pitches out of the zone. Fastballs, breaking balls, changeups — he's swinging through them with exceptional frequency in 2023.
His overall whiff rate — meaning the percentage of swinging strikes during his plate appearances — is 34.3 percent, which is the highest of his career outside of the pandemic-shortened and overall strange 2020 season (34.8). On pitches in the strike zone, Olson makes contact about 71 percent of the time (league average is 82 percent), also his lowest rate outside 2020. When he chases balls out of the zone, he's hitting them around 55 percent of the time (league average: 58 percent), which, you guessed it, is his worst rate ever apart from 2020.
Here's are his basic whiffs rates this season, along with his previous, non-2020 full-season highs:
Fastballs: 34 percent (31 percent)
Breaking balls: 41 percent (36 percent)
Offspeed: 27 percent (28 percent)
This all adds up to a strikeout rate of about 30 percent — again, the highest of his career apart from 2020 — and 88 total punchouts, most in MLB. For context, the MLB league-average strikeout rate is about 22 percent.
Olson and hitting coach Kevin Seitzer have cited mechanical issues that slow down his swing as the main culprit behind his unusually high rate of whiffs, but finding even a semi-permanent solution remains an ongoing process.
But with all those cool breezes during Olson's at-bats, it would be reasonable to assume he's having a bad offensive season, ala 2020 (.195 average; .734 OPS). But he's actually having a good offensive season, even bordering on great.
Despite all the swinging and missing, Olson still leads the Braves in homers (18) and RBIs (45), and carries an .848 OPS and 126 OPS+ coming into Tuesday. That's all well above average. Here's a partial list of players whose OPS is below Olson's: Fernando Tatis Jr., Wander Franco, Mike Trout.
See? Weird, again.
A big reason for those strong offensive numbers is because when Olson does make contact, he tends to crush the ball — and better than ever. His average exit velocity this season is 94.3 mph, which is well above league average (88.4 mph) and the highest of his career. His hard-hit percentage is nearly 55 percent, also his highest ever. Also important: His fly ball rate is a career-high 35 percent.
So it's pretty simple: As weird as Olson's whiffs-rockets dichotomy might seem, players who consistently crush the ball when they make contact tend to be solid contributors. And players who hit lots of balls in the air tend to contribute lots of gappers and homers, which have been a big part of Olson's offensive story in 2023.
But another big reason for that near-All-Star-level OPS is because Olson still takes his walks, hence his team-leading 45 free passes this season and a career-high (not counting his cup-of-coffee 2016 season) walk rate of 15.1 percent.
So, yes, Olson is still a quite valuable hitter, which is why he continues to bat second in a Braves lineup that ranks second in MLB in OPS (.798) and first in the NL in on-base percentage (.333).
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If Olson's latest weirdness continues, he'll fly past those 170 strikeouts from last season and finish with a whopping 216. But he's also on pace for 44 homers and 110 RBIs. You'll take that from a No. 2 hitter anytime. Heck, you'll take that from a cleanup hitter anytime.
As I pointed out in last season's column, Olson has traditionally been a stronger hitter in the second half, though that took a bit of a hit in 2022 thanks to a ride on the struggle bus for much of August and September. But, and this was an important but, from Sept. 19 through the end of the season Olson caught fire and had an OPS of 1.072. He rode that into the postseason, when he had a 1.363 OPS and was one of the Braves' only strong performers in their NLDS loss to the Phillies.
If Olson sticks close to his career norms, or even if he has a second half similar to last season, he'll continue to contribute plenty to the Braves' offensive prowess — with or without a ton of strikeouts.
So just like this time last season, there's nothing "wrong" with Matt Olson. He's just experiencing another extended weird-baseball happening. And also like last year, Atlanta still needs his bat in the lineup — even if you'd swear it has a hole in it.
