Article: Another Look at Connor Wong’s Sudden Offensive Explosion

[Davy Andrews]

Connor Wong came out of nowhere to be one of the best offensive catchers in baseball in 2024. What should we expect from him in 2025?

In 2024, Connor Wong put up a .280 batting average and ran a 110 wRC+. That made him 10% better than the average hitter. And because the average catcher – for whom defense is much more of a priority than offense – ran a wRC+ of just 91, it made Wong nearly 19% better than his counterparts behind the plate. He even ran a 17-game hit streak before the All-Star break. It was a huge departure for Wong, who came into the season with a career 77 wRC+ and .231 batting average, and it seemed to portend good things. After all, although he’s 28 years old, 2024 was just Wong’s fourth overall season and second full season in the big leagues. On the other hand, Wong’s profile had some clear indications of batted ball luck. How much of his 2024 breakout should we expect to carry over into 2025?

If this question sounds familiar, that's because it is. Alex Mayes wrote about it a month ago, and it's definitely worth your time to go back and read what he wrote. However, I wanted to take a second look at it because, as the recent addition of Blake Sabol made clear, the Red Sox are not going to be adding significantly in the catching department this season. Connor Wong is the starter, and whoever ends up as the backup will come into the job with little to no pedigree. The answer to the question of whether Wong's breakout is at all sustainable is going to have an outsized effect on Boston's season. If he goes back to running a 78 wRC+ and represents a black hole in the lineup every game, the Red Sox will have a hard time looking like a playoff contender.

Let’s take the bad news first and look into batted ball luck. First, Wong ran a .348 batting average on balls in play. Among players who made at least 450 plate appearances in 2024, that was the seventh-highest mark. Nearly everyone else in the top 20 fell into one of two categories. The first group was Guys Who Hit the Ball Super, Duper Hard, and it featured names like Aaron Judge, Marcell Ozuna, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.. The second group was Guys Who Are Super, Duper Fast, and it featured names like Elly De La Cruz, Oneil Cruz, Jarren Duran, and Julio Rodríguez (and as you might have noticed, most of these super-fast players also hit the ball very hard). Wong is not in either group. He’s well below average in every contact quality metric, and while he has good speed (excellent for a catcher), he’s not a burner. Most projection systems expect Wong to run a BABIP around .315, and so should we.

Next, we need to look at wOBA and xwOBA. wOBA is a metric that takes a player’s overall batting line and puts it on a similar scale to batting average, and xwOBA calculates the same number, but instead of looking at the actual results, it looks at the player’s launch angle and exit velocity to tell you the wOBA the player should have expected to run. From 2023 to 2024, Wong improved his xwOBA from .274 to .288, which is a good sign. However, his .330 actual wOBA was more than 40 points above that expected mark. The results said Wong was hitting like Giancarlo Stanton, but his exit velocity and launch angle sad that he should have been hitting like Anthony Volpe. Among players with at least 400 PAs, that 42-point gap was the second-highest in baseball, which is usually an indicator that the player is due to come back down to earth.

xwOBA disliked Wong so intensely for a reason that I mentioned earlier: he did not hit the ball hard. His 86.5-mph average exit velocity was a huge step back from the 89.1 he put up in 2023, and it put him in just the 11th percentile. Likewise, his 34.5% hard-hit rate put him in the 20th percentile. These are extremely bad numbers. However, I think they undersell Wong just a little bit. If you look at his 90th percentile exit velocity, usually a better gauge of a player’s overall power, he was definitely worse in 2024 than he was in 2023, dropping from 105.5 mph to 104.1. However, even that second mark still put him in the 56th percentile. Wong mishits a lot of balls, which hurts his overall EV numbers, but when he really connects, he can hit the ball hard.

In another encouraging sign, Wong has so far given some indications that he possesses a skill that tends to allow players to overperform their xwOBAs with some consistency: he’s been great a pulling the ball in the air. xwOBA only predicts how well a player will hit based on their exit velocity and launch angle; it ignores their spray angle (whether they pull it, hit it up the middle or the other way). That’s the right call, as spray angle is a lot more random than those other two factors. However, there are a few players who possess a sort of cheat code when it comes to beating wOBA. They specialize in pulling the ball in the air – think Isaac Paredes, José Ramírez, and Alex Bregman – and because ballparks are shorter down the line than in center, puled balls in the air end up creating tons of damage. Those players are able to consistently overperform their xwOBAs. Wong has only had two full seasons, but in 2023, his pulled fly ball rate put him in the 64th percentile, and in 2024, it put him in the 77th percentile. And keep in mind that because he’s hitting at Fenway Park, those pulled air balls are even more valuable. If he can keep that trend going – and that’s a big if – Wong might have a chance of continuing to beat his underlying numbers.

Before we get too hung up on balls in play, however, I want to make sure we appreciate the biggest change in Wong’s game. Form 2023 to 2024, he slashed his strikeout rate from 33.3% to 23.4%. That’s a huge drop, and it took Wong from one of the most strikeout-prone players in all of baseball to nearly approaching the middle of the pack. How did he do it? For starters, he cut his chase rate from 34.5% to 29.5%. Once again, that’s an enormous drop. He also made a big improvement inside the zone, swinging more often and making more contact when he did swing. To be clear, all of those numbers are still worse than average. However, they are really encouraging, because these kinds of plate discipline gains tend to be sticky from year to year. They mean that Wong might have better plate discipline and contact skills than we thought.

So after looking at all these factors, what should our takeaway be? Wong made much better swing decisions and got much better at putting the bat on the ball. He was hitting the ball softer, but he was also optimizing his contact. When I look at all of the numbers, I keep trying to figure out what the ideal version of Wong should look like. According to Statcast, his 72-mph bat speed is right around the league average, but even after making way more contact in 2024, his whiff rate and squared-up rate are well below league-average, as are his exit velocity numbers. Wong has the bat speed to hit the ball harder, but even after a big step forward, his bat-to-ball skills are bad enough that he rarely makes solid enough contact to get to his power. If he’s going to keep succeeding, he’ll have to keep pulling the ball in the air, and I don’t think one or two seasons is enough of a track record for us to expect that. Common sense tells us to expect a step back next season, and the projection systems see Wong putting up a wRC+ around 90. I think it’s fair to say that if he outperforms that mark, we should consider his 2025 season a success. As for his defense, I’m sure we’ll be writing about that soon enough.

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[moonslav59]

Great article. I loved it.

I sure hope he improves his defense. He looked like he got worse on D, not better, in 2024.

I think Narvaez may play more than some think, due to his plus D and a little power. I see Sabol as Gasper-like.