I’ve got good news for you, Padres fans. Manny Machado is hitting the ball as hard as nearly anyone in baseball*. Seriously! Take a look at this leaderboard:

Yeah! There’s our guy, fourth in the majors, absolutely pummeling the ball. No Aaron Judge on this list. No Juan Soto or Shohei Ohtani or Gunnar Henderson. Machado’s outdoing them all. Never mind that pesky asterisk up above. He’s totally fixed. Though speaking of, what is that asterisk about?

*: Exit velocity on groundballs only

Oh. Huh. I guess that’s why the list is missing all those great hitters, and instead has dudes barely hanging on or getting demoted to Triple-A. Thunderous power doesn’t mean much if you’re hitting the ball straight into the infield grass. That explains this confusing trend:

If you just looked at his average exit velocity, you’d think Machado was surging this year. Even if you looked at the average of the top half of his contact, it’s better than the last two years. But he’s not hitting the ball any harder when he elevates, and he’s elevating less than ever. The result? Fewer homers and doubles, and a lower ISO.

Maybe you’ve seen this chart before, but it’s worth repeating when we’re talking about this. Adding velocity to grounders doesn’t do much to affect production on those grounders. Here’s wOBA bucketed by exit velocity, league-wide, since the shift ban in 2023, split between ground and air contact:

In other words, hitting the ball harder on the ground just doesn’t pay that much. Hit a grounder at 90 mph, and you’re looking at a .204 wOBA. Ramp it up to 100 mph, and you’re only up to .314. For reference, the average wOBA on contact in this time frame is .368. Taking it from 90 to 100 only goes from terrible to bad.

Meanwhile, smashing your elevated contact is juicy. At 90 mph, the league has produced a .198 mark, essentially identical to grounders. At 100 mph, that balloons to a .571 mark. That’s just short of Aaron Judge’s league-best .579 wOBA on contact this year. Adding power is great – as long as you can get the ball in the air.

Can you get good results by hitting grounders at truly ludicrous speeds? Definitely. At 105 mph and above, grounders did better than the average ball in play. But at 105 mph and above, elevated contact is far more valuable. Charts like this are the reason hitters are trying to put the ball in the air more.

Machado has played virtually his whole career with a fly ball approach. It fits his game perfectly. He’s capable of demolishing the ball, but he’s often happy to lift and pull at less than a truly maxed-out swing because that turns his power into homers so easily. He has a good sense of the strike zone and average bat-to-ball skills. Mix that all together, and you get Machado’s career line – more walks than average, fewer strikeouts than average, and a batted ball mix heavy on pulled home runs.

That covers what’s gone wrong. A better question: Why has it gone wrong? There are four ways this can go. There’s the innocuous explanation. Machado started the season hurt, and he’s back now, so everything will be better. Well, everything will be better assuming his recent injury is just a minor one.

There’s some promising evidence on this front, though it’s too early to tell for sure. He’s been elevating more frequently since May 15, and prospering while doing so. Is this a hot streak or a return to form? They’re indistinguishable until we get more evidence.

Another possibility: This is just age-related decline. I’m skeptical of this one. It just doesn’t really fit with the available evidence. Machado is still swinging impressively hard. His eye at the plate hasn’t declined. Look at those air contact numbers and top 50% EV numbers; nothing about this season seems different from the previous ones. If this is aging, then we should all be so lucky.

A third option is there’s been a change in approach. Maybe Machado is targeting pitches that he puts on the ground more frequently, or maybe he’s changed his swing to prioritize ground contact. I’m not an expert in this, but I watched a lot of video of Machado while writing this article, and I have to tell you, I don’t see much in the way of changes. Here’s a pulled grounder from 2023:

And from 2024:

I tried to work out similar camera angles and pitch locations, and the swings look identical to me. Location-wise, he’s swinging slightly more at pitches down in the zone and slightly more at sinkers – those two effects are strongly correlated, after all. But these effects are tiny compared to the variance that comes with playing baseball and facing different opposing pitchers. If he’s made a change in his approach, it’s one so minute that it looks like random noise.

That leaves one last option: Nothing significant has changed, and we’re just looking at the slings and arrows of outrageous variance. Honestly, that seems pretty reasonable to me! Here’s a graph of Machado’s 10-game rolling groundball rates over the past five years:

He’s had short stretches like this before. Two of them in the same year is undoubtedly bad, but I don’t see much trend there, and if you’re pattern-matching, his last 10 games look like a return to form anyway. Match this story with our first possible explanation – Machado’s early-season injury was preventing him from using his normal approach – and we have a compelling story. Maybe the best projection for him on a going-forward basis is that he’ll continue to be Manny Machado, just like always, despite the weird statistical line he’s accrued so far this year.

That said, I’m willing to change my opinion if Machado continues to pummel the ball on the ground, and I have some potential worrisome evidence to that end. Machado has squared up 54.4% of his grounders this year, and only 47.4% of his elevated contact. Squared-up rate is a new Statcast metric that measures whether a hitter imparted nearly all of the potential force of his swing to the ball – at least 80% of its theoretical maximum exit velocity, to be precise. In other words, he’s more adept at transferring his maximum power on grounders than line drives and fly balls.

That’s the opposite of the pattern that hitters exhibit in aggregate. League-wide, 50.4% of grounders have been squared up this year, while 61% of aerial contact has been. In other words, most hitters are catching the ball flush more frequently when they lift. Machado is doing it more frequently when he hits the ball downwards. That’s a worrisome sign, to say the least; it’s just simple logic that you’d prefer the league’s pattern to Machado’s.

The only problem with this data: I have no clue what Machado’s splits looked like last year. It’s one thing to say that his method sounds bad. It does sound bad! But without context, it’s hard to know exactly what this means. Maybe Machado’s squared-up rates were even worse last year. Maybe he succeeds despite that generically scary sounding batted ball distribution because he does other things well. Maybe this kind of thing varies enormously from one year to the next, or even from one month to the next.

I apologize for how wishy-washy this all sounds. That’s part of the drawback of analyzing partial seasons of new data sources. I truly don’t know whether Machado’s grounder-heavy 2024 is part of an overhauled swing, a new limitation of his game, or just business as usual. I’ll be keeping an eye on whether he starts connecting more solidly when he puts the ball in the air – but more than anything, I’ll be watching for more data, of any type, to see what’s going on.

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