Harrison’s Hot Start: Is Bader’s Bat to be Believed?

There’s some BABIP luck here, but also some encouraging underlying improvements

In recent offseasons, the Minnesota front office has made it a point to roster a right-handed hitting outfielder who can play a platoon role when Byron Buxton is healthy and be a semi-regular center fielder when Buxton is injured. Sometimes that strategy has produced (Michael A. Taylor: 21 homers, 2.0 fWAR in 2023) and sometimes it hasn’t (Manuel Margot in 2024).

When the Twins signed Harrison Bader to a one-year deal with an option for 2026 this past winter, the consensus was that they’d found their next player for this role and that Bader was a perfectly cromulent candidate to fill it. Across his eight big league seasons, Bader had established himself as a wonderful defensive outfielder with a below-average bat that wasn’t so bad you couldn’t live with it.

Through last season, Statcast credited Bader with preventing 68 runs with his defense since he debuted with the Cardinals in 2017. His 76 outs above average mark was the 2nd-highest total of any outfielder over that span.

That glove work came with a collective .242/.306/.392 triple slash line that was about 10 percent worse than league average by wRC+ and the occasional pop (71 homers) and speed (94 steals). Put those together with typically solid overall baserunning, and Bader provided about 13 wins above replacement, averaging about 1.5 wins per season.

Minnesota Twins v. Baltimore Orioles — Bader has long been known more for plays like this, than for his work with the lumber

More recently, though, Bader’s bat had been a bigger drag on his overall value. Since 2022, he’d hit only .239/.284/.360 (79 wRC+), getting on base less often and hitting for less power, despite playing in the hitter’s havens in Cincinnati and the Bronx in 2022 and 2023.

Naturally, then, Bader has come to Minnesota and been, arguably, the Twins’ best overall player through the first quarter of 2025. Through games played on May 16, he’s appeared in 39 games, taken 125 plate appearances, and produced a .300/.384/.464 slash line, .376 wOBA, and 146 wRC+, which all led the team. Toss in 4 homers, 4 steals, and his typically excellent defense, and Bader has already accumulated more WAR in 2025 (1.5 fWAR) than he did all of last season (1.3 fWAR).

This is the time of the season when it’s fair to wonder if a hot start is more than a few weeks of good fortune. Let’s examine Bader’s profile and see if there are reasons to believe he’s elevated his offense.

Obligatory Note About Sample Size

It’s important to remember that data describes the past, not predicts the future. What we’re saying when we say, for instance, that the strikeout rate for hitters stabilizes at 60 plate appearances is that we can have confidence that his strikeout rate over those (now past) plate appearances is a good reflection of his talent level at that time.

That’s different than saying we can expect that strikeout rate to be his new normal and he will perform the same way for the rest of the season. A statistic is highly reliable if it produces similar results under consistent conditions. That’s an important qualifier to acknowledge because the future conditions are almost certain to be different. Opposing pitchers might adjust, the player might play through a nagging injury, have something off the field happen, or have to deal with many other potential things that affect human performance.

That said, some skills, especially those most in a player’s control, like swinging the bat fast or approach adjustments, tend to be strong indicators. Only time will reveal if any differences in Bader’s game we might uncover in the next few sections have staying power and position him to keep having this kind of success.

Peripheral & Expected Stats

Let’s begin with some of the most common peripheral numbers:

There’s a bit of a mixed bag here. Notably, Bader’s walk rate this season is double what it’s been the past three seasons. He’s also hit for more power, reflected by his isolated slugging mark. To state the obvious, both are good things for offensive production.

On the other hand, there’s some indication he’s gotten lucky. He’s running the 12th-highest batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in MLB and outpacing his career mark by 74 points. Similarly, his expected batting average and slugging percentage, which are based on exit velocity and launch angle measurements by Statcast, are in line with the past several seasons.

Let’s dig into the plate discipline first, and then return to the production on balls in play.

Approach & Discipline

The doubling of Bader’s walk rate coincides with a noticeably less aggressive approach at the plate. He’s swung at 42.7% of the pitches he’s seen this season, down almost 4 points from last season and about 6 points from the season before that. Swinging less often, no doubt, helps him chase pitches out of the zone less.

At the same time, Bader has maintained his swing rate on pitches in the zone and his hittable take rate hasn’t changed much — both of those, which contribute to his career high SEAGER mark (described here), suggest he’s simply doing a better job avoiding swinging at bad pitches while picking out good ones to go after at about the same levels.

That gain might be enabled by some changes Bader has implemented to his setup in the batter’s box. In the visuals below, comparing this season and last, you can see that Bader has narrowed his stance significantly and closed it slightly, while setting up about 3 inches deeper in the box:

That’s pushed his average point of contact back toward home plate about 4 inches. In the simplest terms, that means he’s giving himself a little more time to make his swing-take decisions, which might be helping him identify and lay off those chase pitches.

We can see how that’s played out by looking at heatmaps of his swing rate against pitches in different locations around the strike zone:

These reveal that Bader has done a better job laying off “pitchers’ pitches” up and in, down and in, and just off the plate away.

Contact Quality and Bat Speed

Turning back to batted balls in play, Bader’s isolated power (slugging percentage minus batting average) has been increasing little by little over the past few years. This season’s .164 mark is his best since 2020 and 2021 — the last seasons he was a net positive with the bat. Many other contact quality metrics support the gains in ISO:

Since 2022, he’s made significant gains in exit velocity, hard hit rate, barrel rate, average bat speed, and fast swing rate (i.e., the fraction of his swings better than 75 mph).

The 2023 season is the first for which bat tracking data is available, and Bader’s 70.8 mph average bat speed was around the bottom third of the league. After gaining a couple of ticks, he’s in the 64th percentile this season.

EV50

Still, it’s worth putting context around Bader’s exit velocity. While he’s made major improvements in that category since 2022, his 87.6 mph average this year is only in the 21st percentile. That juxtaposition is a good opportunity to explore the limitations of using this metric.

Tom Tango of MLB Advanced Media has repeatedly pointed out that using the average exit velocity of all batted ball data for hitters can be misleading because below a certain point, differences in exit velocity don’t make a difference. If a batter hits the ball 60 mph or 40 mph, they are functionally the same — an out, despite their 20-mph difference. But, there can be major differences in outcomes if a batter hits the ball 90 mph or 110 mph.

Tango suggests instead using the average of a batter’s fastest 50% of balls in play. If a hitter improves the quality of their best contact, they are likely to see meaningful gains in their production. When we apply that thinking to Bader’s data, we can get a picture of how he’s generating these improved results:

Harrison Bader contact quality of 50% hardest hit balls in play

Swinging the bat faster, more often, has enabled Bader to increase the quality of his best struck batted balls. The average exit velocity of those is nearly 5 mph better this season than in 2022, and a fifth of them have been barrelled, about three times more than in 2022. His ability to pull his best contact in the air has more than doubled since 2022.

— — — — —

Let’s return to the question at hand — has Harrison Bader leveled up with the bat?

Like almost everything in this wonderful game, multiple factors are at play. Bader has enjoyed some good batted ball fortune so far in 2025. That has certainly helped boost his top-line results.

However, on the other side of the ledger, he’s also made some positive improvements in his plate discipline and the quality of his contact. Those developments seem to be supported by adjustments in his stance and approach, and steady gains in his ability to swing the bat fast.

I don’t think it’s likely that he’ll continue to lead the Twins on offense. But there are good reasons to think he won’t be 20% below average offensively like he has been the past three seasons.

This version of Harrison Bader has a good shot at being an average, or perhaps a touch above, offensive player. Combine that with his stellar defense and solid baserunning, and the Twins have a real strength (and plenty of surplus value) in their fourth outfielder.