Hello again, and welcome to another edition of the monthly exit velocity report. This is the third edition of our report looking at the biggest changes in EV from month to month. Three hitters with some of the biggest changes on each side will be examined to see if their results match their batted ball output, and what owners should be doing with that information.

I’ve specifically looked at changes in fly ball and line drive exit velocity. All hitters considered had at least 30 batted balls of those types in each month, and velocity data has been obtained from Baseball Savant on Thursday, July 6th.

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Risers

Josh Reddick (OF – HOU): 95.7 mph (+7.4 mph)
Reddick had a monster June, slashing .389/.410/.625, but only hit two home runs and drove in just 10. What’s going on here? Well, for starters, Reddick missed just over a week in the middle of the month with a concussion and only just made our batted ball cutoff with 32. Smaller samples will naturally produce more extreme changes like this, so it’s not surprising that Reddick produced the biggest positive change in June, and of course the limited playing time had some impact on his counting stats.

That shouldn’t take anything away from the fact that the Astros outfielder is hitting extremely well. Just six of the 32 batted balls came off the bat at less than 90mph, and 12 of them were hit over 100mph. A second reason for the relatively low homer production is the change in launch angle, with more than a three-degree decline, going from almost 27 degrees in May to 23.5 in June. That range is the exact area where home run probability really starts to jump. The Statcast data shows that at 100mph, 19% of batted balls go for a home run at 23 degrees, jumping to 50% at 27. Reddick hit five homers in May with a fly ball percentage north of 50%, but he also hit just .255.

The Astros have also been fairly sensible about using Reddick against left-handed pitching, and he had just nine plate appearances in total against southpaws in June, compared to 70 against righties. Reddick’s career wRC+ is 118 vs RHP and just 80 vs LHP, and this season he’s had the platoon advantage 83% of the time, his highest mark since his 2011 season with Boston.

Houston’s lineup is so deep that they can afford to essentially keep Reddick away from left-handers, so while he’s in a great position to succeed and he’s an excellent play when a right-hander is starting, don’t expect him to produce monster counting stats because he’s unlikely to find his way into everyday at-bats.

Corey Seager (SS – LAD): 97.3 mph (+6.5)
Last month, we told you not to worry about Seager despite him appearing in the negative half of this article. Kudos to anyone who bought low. The Dodgers shortstop hit five home runs with a .990 OPS in June.

Seager is one of the best examples so far of what it looks like when an elite hitter has an unlucky month and is just ever so slightly missing his pitches. May saw him hit a lot of extremely hard ground balls and just miss barrelling up some pitches. In June, all the hard contact in the air that Seager produced in April came back, with 65.8% of his fly balls and line drives leaving the bat at over 95mph, almost identical to his April mark.

The 23-year-old has maintained his improvements in discipline, swinging at less than a quarter of pitches outside the zone and walking at a 13.6% clip. He is an elite line drive hitter potentially on his way to an even better season than 2016 hitting in the heart of one of the league’s best lineups.

Avisail Garcia (OF – CWS): 99.8 mph (+5.5)
Garcia’s overall line still looks great after three months of baseball, especially for someone you paid almost nothing for. The White Sox outfielder is still hitting over .300, at .317, and slugging .509. On the other hand, he has a .381 BABIP, a walk rate below 5%, and is swinging and missing 16.3% of the time. His performance has definitely tailed off since his hot start, with his OPS dropping each month so far, coming in at just .784 in June despite these gaudy Statcast numbers.

There’s no doubt that Garcia can hit the ball incredibly hard. His 99.8mph FB/LD exit velocity in June was third in the league, just one mph behind Aaron Judge, who, in case you missed it, has just a bit of power. Eighteen of Garcia’s 31 batted balls in the June sample were hit at over 100mph, including three over 110mph. He’s made a clear adjustment to be more aggressive in the count, swinging at the first pitch almost 50% of the time and averaging just 3.44 pitches per plate appearance, which is how he can swing and miss so much and still not strike out at an unsightly rate. He’s often not making it deep enough into plate appearances for three strikes to go by.

If you’re thinking that 31 sounds awfully similar to another low batted ball total already mentioned from Reddick, you’d be right. Unlike Reddick, Garcia’s small sample doesn’t come from injury but from two major issues: those strikeouts, which made up 23.4% of his plate appearances; and his ground ball rate, at 54.1% in June, and barely different from May’s 53.5%.

Garcia just doesn’t hit that many line drives or fly balls, and that’s why he’s still only at 11 home runs despite having the bat speed to hit more. His approach doesn’t look all that sustainable and pitchers have adjusted to throw him fewer first-pitch strikes as the year has gone on. His batting average will be at the mercy of his luck on those ground balls and unless he can somehow combine a more disciplined approach with his ability to make very hard contact, it’s hard to see anything but further regression coming.

Fallers

Andrew McCutchen (OF – PIT): 90.4 mph (-6.6)
I really didn’t come into this intending to pick two of the same players as last month, but Seager and McCutchen had such extreme changes in their data that it was impossible not to include them. After excelling by Statcast but not his surface stats in May, McCutchen was an obvious buy-low recommendation. Then he went out and hit like an MVP in June, and his exit velocity data has bizarrely got much, much worse.

Some clues about what’s going on here lie in the range of McCutchen’s outcomes. He isn’t a Statcast-busting machine, routinely hitting above 110mph. Even in May when he topped our list of risers, his max EV was 108.6mph, and in June it was 104.5mph. A few extremely low EV batted balls have also had a large effect on the overall average, with two liners and a fly coming in at below 65mph, including a 59mph line drive.

What’s more important with McCutchen is the type of batted balls he was hitting; a ton of line drives. The Pirates star hit 25 in May, with the BIS data at FanGraphs also measuring his line drive percentage as an elite 27.8%. When you combine that with a walk rate over 15% and a strikeout rate of just 11%, you have a recipe for success.

There was luck, too. His BABIP on ground balls was .423 in June, a stark contrast to his extremely unfortunate .111 in May, reflecting just how extreme changes in batted ball luck can be from month to month. McCutchen has an excellent approach this year, with improved contact and chase rates, and he seems to be healthy. He doesn’t need top-end exit velocity to succeed with this many line drives, and he still has more than enough power to hit one out on a regular basis.

Curtis Granderson (OF – NYM): 91.1 mph (-5.4)
Like McCutchen, Granderson started off incredibly slow and has seen his numbers rise rapidly since. His .395 OPS was arguably the worst performance of any major league regular in April, but his OPS jumped to .874 in May and then a huge 1.153 in June. However, much like McCutchen again, the Statcast numbers seem to suggest he wasn’t hitting the ball anywhere near as hard last month.

This is again partly another situation in which the player isn’t at the extreme high end of EV when he makes optimal contact, but in another way what’s driving this change is the opposite of McCutchen’s approach: Granderson went fly-ball heavy. 23 of his 35 batted balls were flies, and the Mets outfielder was looking to pull everything into the right field seats. Per FanGraphs, 56.3% of Granderson’s fly balls were pulled in June, comfortably the highest percentage of his career.

As a result, his average FB/LD launch angle jumped to 29.2 degrees, and it’s not essential to hit the ball at 105-plus at that angle. At 100mph exit velocity, 44% of all balls hit at that angle have turned into home runs, and that rises to 50% if the angle is lowered just slightly to 27.

Granderson’s always been a fly ball hitter, but this year’s 51% would represent a career high, as would his contact rate. It’s possible that, at 36 and with an atrocious first month in which he pulled the ball just 37.9% of the time, he’s trying to hit the ball a little bit less hard and instead focus on making solid contact to the pull side where he still has enough power to get the ball out. He also won’t maintain his June HR/FB rate of 25% and the batting average will remain low, but with his power returning, he’s able to take more walks and can certainly still be an asset in OBP leagues for a little while longer, as long as the nagging injuries that have bothered him lately don’t cut too deeply into his playing time.

Albert Pujols (LAA – 1B/DH): 91.6 mph (-4.4)
I could have talked about Granderson’s Mets teammate Jay Bruce, who’s also down almost five mph, but Bruce has always been kind of a streaky guy and Pujols’ overall line is so concerning that it seems more pressing to examine him over Bruce, who has been just fine. June saw Pujols hit .196/.235/.308, making his already disappointing line even worse. The multiple MVP-winning slugger now has both the highest strikeout rate and lowest walk rate of his career.

Pujols can still hit them out, but that seems to be happening increasingly infrequently, even in what appears to be one of the most home-run friendly leagues of all time. He did hit almost half of his 48 flies and liners over 95mph, but many of them were not struck at the optimal angles, with his average launch angle up over 30 degrees in June. In fact, even his 600th home run, a grand slam off Ervin Santana, was fairly fortunate to get out of the park. It was just the second time since the advent of Statcast that a ball hit at 100mph and 42 degrees has cleared the fence, out of 27 such batted balls.

To make matters worse, Pujols is the game’s slowest runner, so he’s not going to be able to put up anything close to a league-average BABIP, and he’ll underperform stats like xwOBA that don’t factor in speed, with doubles turning into singles, and singles turning into outs as a result of his diminished speed. He’s chasing outside the zone more often than ever before, with an O-Swing% of 33.7%, but unlike Pujols of old, the bat’s not fast enough and he’s not selective enough to go after the pitches he can make contact with, meaning that his O-Contact% is just 63.1%. It’s an awful combination and one that’s not only making these Statcast numbers worse, but also putting him in worse counts and contributing to that diminished plate discipline.

A 16.3% strikeout rate is actually very good for 2017, but not when you can’t even hit .250, or walk a ton, or hit 35-to-40 homers. The Angels seem to think he’s still great in the right situations; he’s certainly been performing much better in high-leverage spots this year, and he has 53 RBI as a result. Maybe he really is able to save himself for those spots and somehow adjust to perform better than he normally is. Sadly, RBI is just one category, and fantasy owners just aren’t getting enough from Pujols elsewhere to justify his presence on a lot of rosters.

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Darius Austin is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Darius, find his work at BP Wrigleyville, Friends with Fantasy Benefits, Banished to the Pen and Bat Flips & Nerds and follow him @DariusA64.