MLB

What the hell is a Brandon Nimmo?

At 25-years old, New York Met’s outfielder Brandon Nimmo is having his breakout season. He’s already been worth 2.7 wins over the first two and a half months, so let’s take a closer look at a budding new super star.

In 226 plate appearances, Nimmo has hit .282/.403/.574 with a wRC+ of 168. The young outfielder is walking at a decent clip (12.4%) while striking out at a high, but manageable, rate of 26.5%. Nothing about his performance screams unsustainable — not even his BABIP of .365 looks unsustainable — because it’s all in line with what he’s done in his 544 plate appearances at the big league level.

Now, the wise analyst will not that 544 plate appearances is not the biggest sample size to determine what his career norms will look like.

But me, the woke analyst, would like to point out that most big leaguers will see between 500 to 600 the plate appearances in a season. Which means that we have a season’s worth of data and that means we can start to figure out who Nimmo is as a batter.

The first thing we can tell about Nimmo is that he is willing to wait for his pitch — he has a 21.5% o-swing rate for his career, 22% this season. His patience at the plate has led to him seeing a bunch of meaty pitches to crush.

Nimmo’s high isolated slugging of .293 this season — sixth highest in baseball this season. He’s been crushing the pitches that he’s gotten to hit.

At some point, pitchers are going to stop feeding him such easy to hit pitches. There is going to be an adjustment period as teams review the tape and find new weaknesses to exploit.

Nimmo’s biggest weakness seems to be that he leaves his bat on his shoulder too often — he is only swinging at 62.6% of pitches inside the zone. This means we might start seeing pitchers try to fool him with more breaking stuff higher in the zone, which he’s struggled with this season, and that could lead to some struggles during the second half of the season.

For the Met’s rebuild to work, Nimmo is going to need to be a superstar. From what we’ve seen so far, it looks like he has the talent.