How Rob Refsnyder Figured It Out

Through Rob Refsnyder’s first six seasons as a big-league ballplayer, he’d run a really good walk rate, and, well, that’s about it. From 2015 to 2021, Refsnyder got just 614 plate appearances, the equivalent of one full season, spread over six years. He batted .224 with six home runs (and that sparkling 10.7% walk rate), for a wRC+ of 71. Combined with roughly average defense, that gave him a WAR of -1.0. Over those six seasons, 554 different position players made at least 600 PAs. Out of that group, Refsnyder’s WAR ranked 533rd. By any measure, he had been one of the worst players in baseball. Then Refsnyder signed with the Red Sox, and something happened.

In 2022, Refsnyder made a career-high 177 PAs and he put up a 146 wRC+. That’s right, he more than doubled his career wRC+, and he was the best hitter on the entire team. He batted .307, kept his wonderful walk rate, and all of a sudden, he was a slugger. He doubled his career total with six homers, and despite running a career slugging percentage of .308 to that point, he put a .497 mark. Despite taking a step back in 2023, Refsnyder raked again in 2024. He has been a completely different hitter since he came to Boston. Over the past three years, he’s got a 122 wRC+, and he’s turned into a left-masher, going from an 83 wRC+ against left-handed pitching to a ridiculous 153. What happened that instantly turned Refsnyder into a great hitter, and can he keep it going in 2025? Those questions just took on renewed urgency, because, as MassLive’s Chris Cotillo reported last week, the Red Sox are widely expected to pick up Refsnyder’s one-year, $2-million club option and Refsnyder is eager to return.

Since he arrived in Boston, Refsnyder’s chase rate stayed exactly, but he added nearly four percentage points to his swing rate on pitches inside the zone. He still takes his walks, but he’s now more aggressive when he sees something he can hit. I know that sounds small, but it’s actually made a huge difference. According to Statcast, on pitches right over the heart of the plate, Refsnyder’s swing decisions cost him 37 runs before he joined the Red Sox. In the past three years, those decisions have gained him three runs. That’s a swing of 40 runs! Plate discipline isn’t just about laying off bad pitches; it’s also about making the most of good ones, and Refsnyder has been much better at that.

Refsnyder has been hitting the ball harder too. His hard-hit rate has climbed from 37.7% to 40.3%, and his best speed, which measures his average exit velocity on the hardest 50% of his batted balls, has climbed from 90.7 mph to 91.9. Neither of those jumps is enormous, but they do take Refsnyder from solidly below average to solidly above average. But it’s not just about how he hits the ball; it’s also about where he hits it. Refsnyder’s swing is more geared toward line drives and fly balls, the balls on which a hitter can do real damage. Here are the numbers on those air balls:

As you can see, Resfnyder hit them much more often, and when he did, he hit them a lot harder. Their hard-hit rate jumped nearly 13 percentage points. He also started pulling them much more often. That helps explain why his wOBA started catching up to his expected wOBA. Expected stats don't account for spray angle, and since ballparks are deeper in center field, balls hit to center tend to underperform their expected stats. Pulling the ball will lead to better results, all the more so when you’re a right-handed hitter who just moved to Fenway Park. Take a look at Refsnyder’s spray charts from before and after he joined the Red Sox.  

Look at the difference in left and center field. Before he joined the Red Sox, Refsnyder rarely hit the ball deep to left. Now he’s driving the ball into the gap and ripping doubles down the line. Refsnyder is lifting the ball and pulling it like he never did before. Amazingly, all it took for him to start lifting the ball was…to stop trying to lift the ball.

Back in 2022, David Laurila interviewed Refsnyder for FanGraphs about what had changed during his breakout season. It’s a really insightful interview, and I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I’m going to pull some quotes. “In 2016, I had about 150 [big-league] at-bats without a home run,” Refsnyder said. “That was kind of when a lot of get-the-ball-in-the-air stuff was going on, so I saw a hitting coach and we worked on getting more loft. That backfired. In 2017, I was pretty much dog crap. I felt really off in the box. I had no chance up there.”

Refsnyder explained that selling out for a power approach had messed up his swing. “Basically, I was out of sequence,” he told Laurila. “I was too tilted back — my head was behind my core — and I was entering the zone way underneath plane, which made my room for error miniscule. I couldn’t stay on the off-speed. My barrel was rolling up through the hitting zone. My swing wasn’t flat, at all. I think if you look at guys of my stature, they usually need to have a flat-through-the-zone swing.” Refsnyder was trying so hard to lift the ball that he was off balance, and his bat was coming through the hitting zone at such a steep angle that he had to time everything up perfectly in order to hit the ball hard. Let me show you what he’s talking about.

If you have a flatter bat path, your bat will match the trajectory of the ball. Because you’re swinging along the same plane, you have a lot more margin for error. You could time your swing so that it hits the ball’s trajectory behind the plate or way out in front, and you’d still hit the ball. With a steeper swing (or swing that’s steep in the other direction, chopping down on the ball), your bat is only on plane for a short amount of time, so you absolutely have to time it up perfectly. As Refsnyder mentioned, his swing was way too steep, which meant that he had to be perfectly on time for the fastball, which meant that he was always too geared up to be able to lay off a breaking ball. These days, the ideal swing is somewhere between these two extremes. You want to be able to get on plane with the baseball, but you also want to be able to lift it. Refsnyder’s swing was so out of whack that once he stopped trying to lift the ball so much, he actually lifted it much more. His barrel rate more than doubled, from 3.4% to 8%.

“I really don’t know why [it’s taken so long],” Refnsyder said. “I mean, I’ve never stopped working along the way.” However, it makes plenty of sense. Refsnyder started adjusting his swing in 2018, but he bounced from team to team and didn’t get consistent playing time, so he was forced to make incremental changes with a series of new hitting coaches. Things started to click in 2021, and before the 2022 season, he went to Driveline Baseball to work on his bat speed. Ever since, he really has been a different hitter.

There’s one more factor that we need to address, and that’s batted ball luck. Over the past three years, Refsnyder has run a BABIP of .352, fifth-highest in baseball (minimum 700 PAs). While he does seem like a different hitter since he joined the Red Sox, we probably shouldn’t assume that he’s going to get quite so many bounces. On the other hand, his xwOBA over that period is just five points below his wOBA, so Statcast doesn’t think he’s gotten that lucky. We should also keep in mind that for all of Refnsyder’s career, we’re still talking about a pretty small sample size. He’s 33 years old with nine years in the majors, but there are more than a dozen players with more plate appearances in the last two years alone than Refsnyder has over his entire career. Refsnyder’s always going to be a bit of a mystery, but as long as he’s able to keep hitting line drives in the gap – and getting his walks, of course – he’ll do just fine.