AL Central Here’s Why Daniel Palka – Yes, Daniel Palka – Could Be Really Good By

The first time I ever wrote about Daniel Palka on this site, I wrote this:

Daniel Palka is about as close as you can get to a generic major leaguer. He’s a corner outfielder on a middling and entirely uninteresting (since Michael Kopech got hurt and Eloy Jimenez was kept in AAA) Chicago team. Palka is a 26-year-old rookie…. with 22 home runs! Where did that come from!? I know we’re in an age of multiple 30 home run hitting shortstops, but if you gave me 21 guesses of how many homers Palka has hit this season, I wouldn’t get it right.

Since then, I’ve been keeping my eye on Palka and his surprising (at least to me) run of being an at least passable major league hitter. Last season, Palka hit .240 with 27 homers and a .294 OBP – not great but he clearly can hit for power and that means something in today’s game.

Thing is, I’ve been doing some digging and Daniel Palka might be better than we all think.

Daniel Palka Crushes Baseballs

Baseball Savant has all sorts of awesome data on all sorts of awesome things. As I was playing around with some of it the other day, one name kept popping up: Daniel Palka.

If you sort all players in the game last year by Maximum Exit Velocity, the speed at which their hardest ball of the year was hit, Palka is 4th(!) at a little over 118 miles per hour.

In average exit velocity, Palka is 16th in all of baseball at 92.3 mph. That’s right ahead of Christian Yelich and Mookie Betts and a full mile an hour harder than Mike Trout.

Let’s keep going.

His average exit velocity on just his fly balls and line drives is 97.3 mph, which is good for 12th.

But it gets even better! Palka’s hard hit percentage – the percentage of time that he hits a ball that it travels at least 95 mph – is 16th best in baseball, ahead of Manny Machado, Justin Upton, and Trout, to name a few.

He’s 13th best in baseball in barrels hit per batted ball event – a nerdy stat that tries to quantify how squarely a batter is making contact – and he’s 22nd in baseball in barrels per plate appearance.

Basically, Daniel Palka is right up there with the league’s best in every stat that measures how hard he hits baseballs.

So why did he hit just .240 last year? Unsurprisingly, the answer is that he struck out too much – about 34% of the time per Fangraphs.





Who Hits Like Daniel Palka?

Let’s go a bit further though. Baseball Savant has a very cool player comparison feature and if we plug in Palka, we get something like this:

We can see that the hitter most similar to the left handed hitting Palka is the right handed hitting Tyler Austin, which makes some sense. Austin is a career .232 hitter over parts of 3 MLB seasons who has shown a little power and a proclivity towards striking out too much.

But if we widen the circle a little bit, we can see that all-world hitters like Giancarlo Stanton, Kyle Schwarber, and Justin Upton are pretty similar to Palka, too. (Note: interestingly, none of these guys are all that similar to Palka. There are a lot of scores in the .9’s for other players)

That says something! Stanton is the game’s premier strikes-out-too-much power hitter and Upton and Schwarber are both All-Stars that strike out too much and hit homers. There’s definitely a path to success here.

Even the other guys are useful analogs and all fit the profile of high strikeout, high power hitters.

Unfortunately, unless you’re Stanton and hitting 50 homers a year, there’s a pretty hard cap on your value when you strike out as much as these guys do, even in today’s game. More egregious than Palka’s .240 batting average is his sub .300 on base percentage. Baseball has been trending towards more three true results hitters, but walks are still one of the preferred results. If you don’t get on base at all, you’re not going to stay in the lineup long.

I checked out Palka’s BABIP, of course, and it was .308 in 2018. This makes a lot of sense – the guy crushes the ball and he’s very successful when he hits it. He just doesn’t hit it that often.

Let’s find out why.

Danel Palka Swings Through Everything

According to Brooks Baseball, Palka swung through about 30% of all the fastball’s he swung at last season, about 42% of all the breaking balls, and about 45% of all the off speed pitches. (Note: yikes)

Across the board, he swung at about half the pitches he saw last year, and that seems like a lot. Palka needs be more selective, particularly against lefties, against whom he swings and misses about 10% more than he does against righties.

I was expecting to find that there was a certain pitch type that Palka can’t handle and that pitchers were pounding that weakness. Instead, the data shows that, basically, Palka swings and misses at everything because he swings at everything.

Here’s where his power comes from:

Here’s what he swings at:

And here’s what he swings and misses at:

The story seems clear: Daniel Palka needs to stop swinging at things he can’t hit. His path to being a really good hitter is to acknowledge that he’s not a good bad-ball hitter.

Palka pulled a hamstring in late February so his action in Spring Training so far has been very limited, but he’s struck out in 3 of his 8 plate appearances so far. That sounds like the same old Palka to me.

Hopefully though, he has a big year and Palka’s is a name we get to know a bit better in 2019.

-Max Frankel