The Current Identity of Justin Turner in Baseball

You’re surely familiar with the trope of aging sluggers who sell out for pull-side power because they can’t catch up to the fastball like they used to. They need to start gearing up to swing earlier, forcing them to guess what pitch is coming instead of reacting to what they see. They hope that extra homers will offset the extra whiffs that come when they get fooled by slower stuff. The interesting thing about this trope is that its strategy is very similar to the one that swept through the entire baseball world roughly 10 years ago. Justin Turner was a leading light of the launch angle revolution, the movement that emphasized getting on plane early, attacking the ball out front, and pulling it in the air. Essentially, that movement turned the last refuge of an aging slugger into the mainstream way of hitting.

At 39, Turner is now an aging slugger himself, with a wRC+ that has fallen in each season since 2020. His swing is already optimized, and now that he’s largely relegated to designated hitter, his 106 wRC+ doesn’t quite cut it. A cursory look at his stats might tell you that Turner’s been unlucky this season. After all, he’s running his highest xwOBA since 2021 and his highest walk rate since 2018. Meanwhile, his BABIP is the lowest it’s been since 2011, and his wOBA is nearly 30 points below his xwOBA. Unlucky, right?

Here’s the problem: Turner’s 30.6% hard-hit rate and 87.1-mph average exit velocity are not just career lows, they’re miles beneath his career averages of 39.6% and 89.8 mph. Turner’s popup rate has also ticked up. If your quality of contact gets drastically worse, luck probably isn’t the thing that’s driving down your BABIP. But there’s still that pesky xwOBA to worry about. Why hasn’t it plummeted along with Turner’s barrel rate? The answer is that Turner is running a 32.4% line drive rate, his highest since 2018. xwOBA loves line drives for the same reason that hitters love them: Line drives usually turn into hits. But Turner is coming by those line drives differently than he ever has before.

Since the beginning of the Statcast era, batters have pulled their line drives around 37% of the time. Turner was right around or slightly below that league-average pull rate. But now that he’s hitting more line drives, he’s also hitting them much softer and pulling them much more often.

A similar, though less extreme fate has befallen Turner’s fly balls.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to work, and I know that because I learned it from Justin Turner. Coming into the season, the concern was whether Turner could still catch up to the fastball. His performance against them has been dropping for years now. So far this season, it’s dropped just a hair more, but a new problem has emerged. Turner has also been terrible against breaking balls. He’s whiffing against them more, popping them up at an alarming rate, and he has yet to barrel up a single one.