Joey Gallo’s power

During the 2021 baseball trade deadline, Joey Gallo was traded over to the Yankees. That’s quite the grab for the Yankees as he adds tons of power and plus defense. That led me down a route to wonder just how good of a player they received is.

Taking a quick look at his baseball savant page, it looks like if he would have played his home games in Yankee stadium he would have gained 6 home runs since 2019. Which, for a guy who has crazy power, is fascinating.

And then that led me down the route of wondering just how good he has been as far as his power is concerned. So modifying my script from yesterday to point to him and making a few other changes that I’ll get into, I came up with this graph:

I kept the Y axis the same, percent of hits that are HRs, but I made a few changes to the X axis. I wanted to know what percent of balls in play (whichI have as AB-HR-K+SF+SH) went for extra base hits. So my equation looks like this:

(2B + 3B)/(AB - HR - K + SF + SH)

And the above graph is what we end up with. Point out Gallo shows that nearly 38% of his hits are for HRs and a hair over 9% of his balls in play land and get extra bases.

Now this seems, to me, to be very significant and I believe that the graph says as much as well. Here’s a printed version of how good he’s been at each one of these:

Better than 99.98373454782043% at HR/hits
Better than 97.49512036434614% at XBH/BIP

Those numbers *are* significant. Only ~0.02% of players who have ever amassed 400 PA hit a higher home run/hit rate and only ~2.5% of those same players have a higher extra base hit/ball in play rate. I think this makes him a top power hitter of all time.

Even if we change the criteria to 2,000 PA, here’s the graph and results:

Better than 100.0% at HR/hits
Better than 97.21100917431193% at XBH/BIP

Out of 2,725 players that fit that criteria, none hit more HR/hits than Joey and only 73 have more XBH/BIP. Ever. In the history of baseball.

And at 27, he’s got plenty left to give us.