Eli White has brought his contact and power numbers way up and his strikeouts way down
Looking at Eli White’s skill set of defense and speed, I could really dream of the value he could create if he added a just a little pop to his bat. After all, he put up a .200/.274/.305 line over 117 PA and contributed 0.6 WAR in 2022. So it’s a decent defensive skill set. We got to see a little bit of that in the early season.
Let’s look at a little bit of that defense. Here’s Eli robbing Mickey Moniak in Denver.
Here’s Eli running one down against the Reds.
Eli White’s Outs Above Average number in right field was at +2 for most of the season. He did that trouble with a tough ball over his head Thursday night in Washington. That overall number, added with the work in left field, flattened to zero overall with the tough play Thursday. His FanGraphs defensive value wandered into the negative Friday to Saturday somehow after only pinch-running (maybe FG runs their defensive calculations once a week IDK). Defensive numbers in small samples can be flightly, so I wouldn’t let that worry you. His defense is real and should provide good value going forward. It’s not like he’s getting slower. His sprint speed is still 99th percentile.
So with the solid defense in corner outfield and the five stolen bases, just being adequate and providing a little power should make him a decent starter in the absence of Jurickson Profar. And it has, as he has replicated the 0.6 WAR mark from 2022, this time with 126 plate appearances. For reference, 0.6 WAR over 126 PAs is 2.9 WAR, and 2 WAR is average for an everyday starter.
For the majority of his career, Eli did have light offensive numbers, and he’s very fast. But no one should mistake him as a guy with a slappy hit approach who uses his speed to reach. He’s very much an Atlanta Braves-powerpoint-friendly, swing-for-extra-bases kind of a hitter. The problem is he had not hit the ball all that often. He had struck out at a 31.7% rate coming into 2025. If you somehow could bring those strikeouts in line with the 22% rate from this season, you find some decent value and maybe some more playing time. (it’s 23.0% now but it was 22ish when I ran these numbers). To the left is with strikeouts removed, to the right with everything.
If you can just bring those strikeouts down to a more manageable 22-23% range, you can add around 80-120 points to the OPS and grab some more playing time. Otherwise, the offensive output stays repressed and you stay in Gwinnett. Not that strikeouts are necessarily always bad, but it’s perhaps a symptom of Eli’s bigger problem, putting that dang bat on the baseball. And he’s definitely finding success with that this season.
Above are his plate discipline numbers for his career and this season. And this season is about a fifth of his PAs. The swing percentages don’t really reflect a change, so it appears that he is not a part of the rumored “swing percentage” contest. Check out the contact numbers though. Overall contact is up. And z-contact, aka percentage of the time that he hits the ball when he swings at a pitch in the zone, is up dramatically. I have Eli with a z-contact of 77.6% before this year, 88.3 afterward. For reference, the rest of baseball has a z-contact of 85.3%, so he’s gone from well below to above average.
The result is a much improved xwOBA from .263 to .319 from a year ago. And when he’s getting contact, he’s getting more quality contact. Not only is he attacking strikes, he’s attacking good strikes.
The power cross is the part of the strike zone running middle of the plate and in the middle horizontally. It’s largely where hitters need to hunt for extra bases. And Eli is much improved here. He has a .348 BA, .591 SLG, .402 wOBA and .384 xwOBA in his power cross. This is way up from the .248 BA, .398 SLG, .272 wOBA and .263 xwOBA from years before. The .398 SLG in pitches swung at in the power cross was abysmal, and that number is nearly .200 higher now.
Eli White has discovered the source of his problems and has confronted it head on. The contact numbers are up and the strikeouts are well down. He really should get the majority of time in left field until Profar rejoins the team. This is contrast to Alex Verdugo, who’s done a competent job but hasn’t corrected the fastball issue of previous years. The better players eventually find the correct playing time.