Carson Williams is a highly touted prospect in the Rays system with an interesting offensive profile who has been able to produce offensively during his minor league career despite running consistently high strikeout rates at every level. While the strikeout rates have been getting slightly better over time, should there be concern that the high swing-and-miss might prevent Williams from living up to his 60-grade Future Value projection (Fangraphs)?

Plenty of big leaguers make it work with similarly high K%, but what else needs to be present in the offensive profile in order to do so? Looking at major league hitters since 2015 (start of Statcast era) with a K% between 28%-31% and a BB% between 10%-13% (Williams - 28.5 and 11.5, respectively, in 2024), and bucketing by tiers of wRC+, there is a clear need to establish elite power output in order to attain all-star level production (wRC+ >= 120).

I won’t provide percentile rankings (no pitch-level data scraped prior to 2023), however when analyzing the Baseball Savant percentile sliders for each hitter on this list, many of them share well-above-average performance across multiple batted ball quality metrics like Barrel%, Hard-Hit%, and Average Exit Velocity, in addition to above-average BB%. For instances where a player is more in the above-average range (~60th percentile) in one or more of these metrics, they seem to compensate with consistent, quality launch angles (Brandon Marsh; LA Sweet-Spot%). But for this tier it is never really one or the other between quality angles and contact, but some elite combination of both.

In a profile with high swing-and-miss, it’s critical to make the most out of the opportunities where you are putting the bat on the ball, and not squandering them with weak contact or ground balls. Only one player in this group posted a GB% higher than 45% - James Wood during this past season. Elite sprint speed likely plays a role in Wood’s ability to have success in spite of a 55% groundball rate, but the jury is still out on whether a profile like this is sustainable for maintaining production that keeps him in a tier like this. The Nationals may work with him on lifting the ball more, but might find difficulty given the scarcity of instances where players have been able to do so while maintaining similar power output.