In an era of baseball where pitchers have been elevating fastballs more than ever, Kris Bryant has always had a knack for smashing the up-and-in pitch.

If you compare a graphic of where the league whiffs to where Bryant whiffed in 2019, the right-hander routinely made contact with pitches the rest of the league missed (link). In the tightest up-and-in corner of the strike zone, for example, Bryant only whiffed on 8% of the pitches he saw while the average right-hander whiffed on 18%.

“If you break the hitting zone in nine quadrants, he was getting to that up-and-in pitch,” Marquee Sports Network analyst Ryan Sweeney said on Cubs Live!

Bryant wasn’t just making contact on those pitches and fouling them off, he was doing substantially more damage than the average hitter (link). He slugged .543 on pitches in the up-and-in part of the zone while the league slugged over 120 points less. The most impressive of which was a home run to center field at Petco Park against a 100-mph fastball from former Padres reliever Andrés Muñoz.

In 2020, things for Bryant have been slightly different. On those same up-and-in pitches, he slugged only .250 and his whiff rates above the zone have elevated above league average for the first time since 2015 (link). 

“When you have a finger injury or a wrist injury, it’s tough to get to those up-and-in pitches,” Sweeney said.

But perhaps Bryant’s 2020 is looking up. The Cubs All-Star third baseman landed on the injured list on August 22 with a finger injury and he also received an injection for his left wrist. His return to the lineup came Tuesday in Pittsburgh with promising results despite no extra-base hits.

Bryant put the ball in play all six times at the plate Tuesday. In the first inning he lined out on a pitch hit over 100 mph (greater than 95 mph is considered a hard-hit ball). He squared up his other five balls in play, none of them hard-hit but all of them over 80 mph exit velocity.

“Back in 2019, he turned on a 100-mph fastball like it was nothing,” Sweeney said. “Let’s hope that finger is healed and he can get back to turning on that up-and-in pitch.”

With Ian Happ’s continued success in the leadoff spot, Bryant will slot in the 2-spot in the Cubs order for the time being and adding another masher of left-handed pitching to the lineup will surely help their .208 average versus southpaws this season.

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