Pitchers Didn’t Fear Alex Bregman in 2024: Here’s How He Can Scare Them Again

On Monday night, the baseball world found out that Alex Bregman would be joining the Red Sox on a three-year, $120-million contract with opts-outs after each of the first two seasons and an as-yet-unreported amount of deferred money. Over the coming days, we’ll be looking at this news from every angle, but today I’d like to stick to the one that matters the most. Let’s talk about what Bregman can do on the field. Say he opts out after one year. What should we expect him to do for the Red Sox during the 2025 season?

Bregman has a shelf full of hardware, but he’ll turn 31 before the season starts. He has a career wRC+ of 135, meaning that he’s been 35% better than the average hitter over the course of his career. However, he peaked in 2018 and 2019, when he put up 157 and 167 marks, respectively. If we only look at his numbers since 2020, his wRC+ is 124. If we were just expecting him to keep doing what he’s doing, we would pencil him in for a 120 wRC+ in 2025. However, his 2024 season featured a couple red flags – some of which almost certainly kept him from getting the huge long-term deal that he was hoping for. So let’s answer the question: Who is Bregman right now?

In 2024, Bregman’s .319 xwOBA was the lowest he’d ever run since he broke into the majors. Let’s talk about why, and whether we should expect it to bounce back in 2025. Bregman has never possessed light-tower power. He has played his entire career in a ballpark with a short porch in left field (which won’t change in 2025), and he’s made the most of that by pulling the ball in the air with great frequency. He’s also run excellent walk and strikeout rates throughout his career, because he has elite plate discipline and great bat-to-ball skills. He rarely chases and rarely whiffs. As Sarah Langs noted, he’s the only player with a whiff rate in the 94th percentile or better in every season since 2018. However, part of that equation changed in 2024. Despite a pristine career walk rate of 12%, in in 2024, that number fell all the way to 7%. The last time Bregman was below 11.7% was 2017, his first full season in the majors. There are a few reasons for this change. Let’s start with the most obvious.

Bregman’s chase rate has been creeping up for the last few years, but in 2024, it jumped all the way to 23.6%. Now, that’s still way below the league average rate, but it’s an enormous increase. He used to be quite literally one of the best players in the game at avoiding bad pitches. According to Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric, which measures selective aggression – attacking hittable pitches in the zone and avoiding bad pitches outside the zone – Bregman ranked in the 99th percentile in 2022 and the 94th percentile in 2023. In 2024, he dropped all the way to the 53rd percentile. His once elite swing decisions had fallen nearly to the league average.

Normally, when a player shows themselves more likely to chase, they end up seeing fewer pitches in the strike zone; if you’re the pitcher, why throw a hittable pitch when you don’t have to? Generally, there’s a balance there: the more scared of you a pitcher is, the less likely they are to throw a strike. However, if you have a great eye, you force the pitcher’s hand: they have to throw you strikes. With his optimized contact and razor-sharp batting eye, Bregman gave pitchers no choice. He routinely ran zone rates well below the league average, and because he never swung at pitches outside the zone, he ran some of the highest walk rates in baseball. However, that brings us to our next big change. The VIP treatment ended in 2024. Pitchers no longer seemed scared of Bregman. They started attacking him in the zone.  

Bregman’s 50.7% zone rate was higher than 71% of all qualified batters. If you drill even deeper and look at pitches over the very heart of the plate, Bregman’s rate was 28.4%. That mark was higher than 88% of all batters (minimum 1,000 pitches seen). The other names at the top of those lists are not inspiring: Brice Turang, Alex Verdugo, Andrew Benintendi. These are players who don’t instill any fear in the pitcher. It’s certainly not where you want your brand-new slugger to be. There’s one reason in particular for this change: Bregman really struggled against fastballs in 2024, and fastballs tend to be thrown over the plate more often than breaking balls or offspeed pitches. Bregman ran a .324 wOBA and .335 xwOBA against four-seamers and sinkers. Both of those numbers were the lowest he’d ever run in his entire career, and as a result, 53.2% of the pitches he saw were fastballs. That’s the highest rate of his career.

The interesting thing is that there is still plenty of reason to fear Bregman. His bat-to-ball skills are still intact; he ran an absolutely elite contract rate of 87.2% in 2024. Even against fastballs, his 8.7% whiff rate was among the lowest he’s even run. And he actually hit the ball much harder in 2024. His 40.1% hard-hit rate was the highest mark of his career, and more advanced metrics like 90th percentile exit velocity also shows that he was hitting the ball harder. His average bat speed of 71.4 mph put him in the 41st percentile. He also launched a 109.1-mph home run in August, just the second ball of his career over 109 mph.

Clearly, Bregman’s top-end power is at or near the best it’s ever been. Maybe that’s a result of seeing all those pitches over the heart of the plate; he saw that pitchers were throwing the ball over the plate, and he attacked, running a career-high 44.9% swing rate. We should be watching his zone rate and his performance against fastballs very closely this season. They will be big indictors: are pitchers afraid of him, or are they coming after him? If Bregman can no longer be counted on to walk at least 12% of the time, that is a big blow. In 2024, when his walk rate fell to 7%, his on-base percentage fell by nearly 50 points. He nearly made up for it with his increased power output, but the real benefit of a high walk rate is that it raises your floor. It’s the reason that even when Juan Soto seems like he’s having a down year, he’s still one of the best hitters in baseball. Getting on base is so important; it’s just hard to be a bad hitter when you’re running an elite walk rate. A Bregman who can walk that often doesn’t have to hit the ball the hardest he’s ever hit it in order to remain successful. In order to do that, he’s going to have to change the way pitchers think of him. And In order to do that, he’ll have to go back to hammering fastballs.