Profiling Thomas Saggese

Let’s dive into the numbers to see what we should expect out of Saggese’s first MLB stint

Thomas Saggese is one of the top prospects in the St. Louis Cardinals system but he hasn’t been in the Cardinals system for very long. He came over from the Texas Rangers at the trade deadline last year as one piece of the Jordan Montgomery deal and then proceeded to put up a 168 wRC+ in 33 games with Double-A Springfield.

Considering that he put up a 132 wRC+ in Double-A while he was in the Rangers organization, it’s fair to say that he full deserved his top prospect status coming into the season.

Entering the season, I had Saggese ranked as the 4th best prospect in the system, behind Masyn Winn (who is no longer a prospect), Tink Hence, and Tekoah Roby. That put Saggese ahead of Scott in my estimation.

So it’s a funny coincidence that, while Scott was the first of the two to reach the majors, Scott is also the player who was sent back to the minors when Saggese got called up to St. Louis.

A promotion to the majors is an incredible achievement of its own accord but it’s even more incredible when we consider just how poorly Saggese began the year. This next tweet shows just how much Saggese improved over the course of the year to get himself into the position he’s in today:

Not every top prospect crushes it and Saggese certainly seemed like he was trending down at the start of the year. That all changed in a hurry come July and now we’re in a position to discuss Saggese as a major league contributor.

So, with that in mind, I want to take a look today at Saggese’s numbers in Triple-A and see what they can tell us about who he is as a player and what we might be able to reasonably expect out of him.

Batted Ball Profile

I want to start with Saggese’s biggest strength and that’s his batted ball profile. The 22-year-old doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard as he actually set a new max exit velocity of 108.4 mph after making his MLB debut. In Triple-A, that figure was 108.2.

That’s pretty much the top end of his exit velocity range and that’s not particularly high so we can safely conclude that Saggese doesn’t have immense raw power.

So how, then, did he hit 20 home runs in Triple-A this year and 26 in the minors last year? It’s because his batted ball distribution is incredible.

For starters, Saggese does a great job of recording sweet spot events. For those of you who don’t know what that means, it means that Saggese hits a ton of batted balls with a launch angle between 8 and 32 degrees.

Why is that important, you might ask? Because those are the launch angles that lead to the best results on contact. Intuitively this makes sense. Those are line drives and fly balls and those are the kinds of batted balls that lead to the most productive results.

The numbers bear this out too. This year batted balls hit with a launch angle between 8 and 32 degress have a wOBA of .677.

So just how good is Saggese at finding the sweet spot?

In the minors this year, he posted a sweet spot rate of 37.8% which is over 4.5 percentage points better than the league average of 33.2%. It’s not too hard to project him to be above average at this particular skill in the majors.

That’s one of the keys for Saggese moving forward.

Another one of his strengths is his ability to pull his fly balls and, frankly, this is a skill that he is elite at.

In Triple-A this year he pulled 37.8% of his fly balls which is well above the MLB average of 27%. In fact, only 14 major league hitters have posted a pulled fly ball rate better than that this year.

Can Saggese sustain that level of consistency at the highest level? That remains to be seen. But this is really his calling card and it will be what drives his production going forward.

Pulled fly balls are important because, like with sweet spots, they are the kind of batted ball that produces elite results. When hitters have pulled their fly balls this year, they have put up a .731 wOBA. When they have gone up the middle or the other way, that figure drops to just .217.

That’s a huge difference and it explains why Saggese has been able to hit for so much power despite having mediocre exit velocities. So it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that the 22-year-old has hit 16 of his minor league home runs to the pull side this year.

Some may look at his exit velocities and be disappointed but he is certainly someone who is capable of providing more production than his raw power profile might indicate.

Swing Decisions

While Saggese does a great job with his launch angle and batted ball distribution, he really struggles when it comes to swing decisions and this is what I’m most interested to watch the rest of the season.

Saggese expands the zone way too often and his willingness to chase isn’t matched by a proportionate willingness to swing and away in the zone.

What I mean by that is that Saggese is kind of aggressive in the zone but he’s really aggressive outside of the zone. His in-zone swing rate was 70.3% in Triple-A which is certainly above average but not too far above the league average of 67%.

His chase rate, on the other hand, was a whopping 37.3%, which was well above the 28.5% MLB average. That’s even higher than Alec Burleson’s chase rate this year (34.7%) and he is a notorious free swinger.

So this is a clear area of weakness for Saggese and it’s something that he’s going to have to clean up or he might struggle immensely in his first exposure to major league pitching. One thing in particular that can get Saggese into trouble is a propensity to chase breaking balls.

He has chased 42% of breaking balls thrown outside the zone this year and has a wOBA below .200 and whiff rate above 42% when doing so.

Perhaps paradoxically, though, he’s not actually a bad breaking ball hitter. And I want to edit that statement to say that he’s not a bad non-fastball hitter. I say that because Saggese has hit 13 of his 20 home runs against non-fastballs. The exact breakdown is 7 against sliders, 1 against curveballs, and 5 against changeups.

This is the kind of thing that Saggese does so well:

That might not be what you would expect from someone who seems to get fooled by breaking balls enough to chase them over 40% of the time but that’s simply the kind of hitter that Saggese is. He’ll chase and whiff against those pitches but he also does a great job of getting his bathead around on breaking balls and hitting them for extra base hits.

This was also true last year when Saggese was in Double-A and it was especially obvious because pitchers simply didn’t throw him fastballs last year, likely due to how well he was hitting the ball.

So, weirdly enough, I’m expecting Saggese to take some bad swings and a bad approach to breaking balls sometimes but I’m still expecting him to be a good enough hitter against them to make up for it.

So what’s my point here! It’s that his swing decisions are concerning and that he may get eaten alive by major league pitching until he learns to improve his plate discipline but he’s actually a good breaking ball hitter and I expect that skill to show up at the major league level.

Defense

The Cardinals thought enough of Saggese’s defense to test him as the full time shortstop in Memphis this year and he handled the move pretty well. He hasn’t always looked the most consistent but he can make rangy plays and show off enough arm strength to throw runners out from deep in the hole.

That gives him the ability to play shortstop. How good of a shortstop he can play remains to be seen? Is it more of a Brendan Donovan shortstop or Paul DeJong?

The good news for the Cardinals is that the Cardinals won’t have to find out because of Masyn Winn. So that means a guy who can play shortstop can slide to a less demanding defensive position and be a legitimate asset. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen so far with Saggese.

He has made a number of highlight plays so I’ll just include a couple of them here.

We obviously need to see more than a few excellent plays and some good early numbers to trust Saggese as a truly plus defender but it is notable that the eye test and the numbers go hand-in-hand so far with Saggese earning 1 DRS and 2 OAA in just over 50 defensive innings.

I’ve consistently been a little higher than some when it comes to Saggese defense but even I wasn’t expecting to see this level of performance so far. I’m a bigger believer in the bat than the glove so if the glove can be an asset then we could be looking at a quality major league player in Saggese.

Final Thoughts

The more I have watched prospect and player development, the more I have dabbled with the idea that launch angle consistency and batted ball optimization are some of the most important skills a hitter can possess. That’s due in part to the value of hitting line drive and fly balls and pulling the ball in the air but it’s also due to the difficulty that many players have in learning how to elevate the ball or pull the ball consistently.

So when I look at a player like Saggese, I love that he can already do those things and that his batted ball profile is the obvious strength in his game. He’s probably never going to ‘wow’ us with his power but he can certainly hit 15-20 home runs over the course of a season and perhaps more at his peak.

He’s also a sneaky good breaking ball hitter and a sneaky good defender which bolsters his profile even more. He may struggle with swing decisions and that is something he’ll have to work hard to improve but Saggese is a prospect I like quite a bit and I’m glad the Cardinals are letting him get some exposure to the majors this year.

Thanks for reading.