Alec Burleson did some interesting things at the plate during the 2025 season. He improved his wRC+ from 106 to 124 while rewarding the Cardinals front office for their continued faith in him. It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Burly. After a rough start to the 2025 season, things came to a head when Oli Marmol called him to his office for a fictitious meeting on the morning of May 3rd.
Marmol: Hey Alec, thanks for coming in. Can I get you a drink or something to eat?
Burleson: No, thanks coach, me and the boys just got some barbeque and I am stuffed.
Marmol: Are you joking? It’s nine in the morning.
Burleson: *Blank stare*
Marmol: What barbeque place is even open this early… Nevermind. Hey, Brownie and I were wondering if you could stop swinging at every ball that is thrown within 5 feet of you?
Burleson: Umm yeah I haven’t been seeing the ball real well, but I am working on some stuff in the cages..
Marmol Interrupts: Alec, I know you are seeing the ball fine. Yesterday you hit a pitch that bounced twice. Like, I would understand if it were a dirty slider or something but we are talking about a 2-0 fastball here.
Burleson: I know, know. I saw it well out of his hand and I thought if it caught the lip of the grass and bounced a little higher I could slap it left..
Marmol: Ok Alec, I know you think it fun to swing the bat, but I am asking you, no begging you, please, can you just see what it is like to watch a borderline pitch go by? Even if you think you can hit it, just see what it’s like.
Burleson: Yes, coach Marmol.
Swing percentage is exactly what it sounds like, total swings divided by total pitches seen. Burleson was 8th among all qualified hitters in baseball in swing percentage in 2024 at 55.7%. That is not inherently bad. Jackson Merrill ranked 6th that same year while putting up a 130 wRC+. If we zoom out a little further and look at qualified hitter’s aggregate swing percentage between 2020 and 2025, only Jackson Merrill and Bo Bichette have run a 120+ wRC+ while swinging more often than Burleson. The thing that sets Burleson apart from these other free swingers is his ability to make contact on pitches both inside and outside of the zone. Sticking with our 2024 baseline, Burleson made contact with 73.6% of pitches outside the zone which ranked 11th out of 129 qualified hitters. Making contact with pitches outside the zone is not always a bad thing, but when combined with how often Burly swung the bat, that is a lot of contact on pitchers pitches baked into his statline.
To start 2025, Burleson seemed to be making a concerted effort to be more disciplined in his approach, but the results were not coming. He was running a 52.8% swing percentage on May 2nd when his statline bottomed out at a 67 wRC+. Burleson played both ends of a double header against the Mets on May 4th picking up a couple of hits and his first home run of the year. Over the next 110 games, Burleson would crush baseballs to the tune of a 137 wRC+, which was good for the 25th best in baseball over that time period. He did this while lowering his swing percentage to 48.3%, now quite close to the major league average of 47.6%. The below chart shows the rolling 40 game average swing rate and wRC+.
In the aggregate, Burleson dropped his swing rate by 6.6% year-over-year, which is the 12th largest drop in baseball over the last five seasons. This was a core part of the change in approach that the Cardinals were hoping to see and that Burleson was able to execute. I wanted to dig into what the benefits were of this more passive approach. Burleson upped his walk rate by over 1%, which is an obvious positive, but how did the more selective approach affect his quality of contact? Moving forward, I will look at his last 110 games when everything seemed to click in 2025, compared to his overall 2024 statline.
Burleson improved his xwOBACON from .351 in 2024 to .402 in 2025. xwOBACON measures a player’s expected weighted base average on contact, so it tells us how much damage a player is doing on their balls in play. For reference, the major league average is .368, so this moved Burleson from below league average to comfortably above. I was curious if Burleson was getting to this improved quality of contact by simply swinging at more pitches in his hot zones than in years past, so I created a heat map based on location shown below.
This chart is from the catcher’s perspective and shows that Burleson’s sweet spot was the low and inside portion of the strike zone. It is interesting that he hit pitches down the middle both low and high better than he did middle-middle. That could just be a one year blip, but good hitters need to take care of business on these pitches that are usually a missed spot. Next, I overlaid the change in swing percentage year-over-year on the same heat zones shown above.
Burleson swung at 84% of pitches thrown right down the middle in 2024 and only 74% in 2025 which is represented by the -10% above. What I was hoping to see was a clean correspondence where Burly upped his swing percentage in the red zones and reduced it in the blue, but things are never that simple. Burleson actually swung less at pitches in his two hottest zones, down the middle low and down and in.
What Burleson did accomplish with his more selective approach was increase his average exit velocity from 89.4 MPH to 90.9 MPH. That 1.5 MPH difference might not sound like much, but it is the difference between the 24th and 93rd best exit velocity among qualified hitters. The next chart again shows the increase in average exit velocity year over year by area of the strike zone.
The first thing that jumps out is the significantly reduced damage on pitches away. This was more than offset by Burleson absolutely destroying pitching middle to middle in. This tracks when looking at how Burleson performed on pitch type year-over-year. The one area Burleson took a significant step backwards in 2025 was on non-breaking offspeed pitches (mostly change-ups and splitters).
If I were to guess based solely on this data, I would say Burly is sitting on a specific pitch or location and trying to unload on it to the pull side more than he has historically. Obviously, we want to see hitters with no weaknesses, but if this data is a true reflection of a change in approach, it seems like a good trade-off to me. Burleson’s problems historically have not come from a lack of contact ability or bat-to-ball skills, but on making too much weak contact relative to his ability.
I am excited to see if Burleson can solidify his gains or continue to make improvements. I will be watching to see if his swing rates go down even more, and if so, does he see a corresponding increase in power. What would the shape of Burleson’s production look like if he continued the progression from last year? I know these two players have nothing in common on the surface, but Ketel Marte gets to his production in a very similar way but with an added layer of discipline.
