Take a look at this clip:
Notice anything? It’s a nice-looking double, of course. And it’s off a good pitcher too; Robbie Ray is the real deal. That’s not enough to make the hit terribly interesting though. By all visible measures, it’s fairly routine. But there’s one not-entirely-visible aspect to it that makes it interesting: this was the second-hardest any Phillie has hit the ball this season.
Johan Rojas hit that ball at an exit velocity of 112.4 MPH. Of all the Phillies, only Kyle Schwarber has hit a ball harder this season (his best was 116.7 MPH). You won’t get a prize for guessing that Schwarber occupies the top spot on the Phillies Maximum Exit Velocity Podium. But you might if you guessed Rojas would be in second. Rojas is not who you would expect to occupy the silver medal spot. He’s also not someone you’d expect to be in the top 10% for maximum exit velocity league-wide, which he currently is.
Maximum exit velocity can be a tad misleading, though. It measures only your very hardest-hit ball, and a single, unusually good swing can put you in the lofty heights on that leaderboard, even if your typical batted ball doesn’t carry anywhere near much heft. That’s why maximum exit velocity is, while useful, a very much flawed measure of batting ability.
And so we have to pump the breaks on our enthusiasm regarding Rojas’ max EV. If we look at his average exit velocity this season, a very different story emerges: his average EV of 88.2 MPH is good for 9th on the team (minimum 25 batted ball events). He is second on the team in EV50 (average exit velocity taking only the higher half of a player’s batted balls into account). But that’s likely noise rather than signal: with only a very limited number of batted balls this year due to his platoon role, and with the nature of EV50 cutting that number in half, his very best swings are tilting the number to a disproportionate degree.
But. Maximum exit velocity, while flawed, still tells us something. It tells us how well the player can hit the ball at the peak of their swing’s potential. That matters, even if it perhaps doesn’t matter quite as much as how frequently they can tap into that potential. in 2024, Rojas’ maximum EV of 110 MPH put him middle of the pack among qualified Phillie batters. His average EV of 85.7 MPH was dead last in the same pack. Rojas typically doesn’t hit the ball with much power. But when the pieces come together, he is able to hit it reasonably hard. Correspondingly, the gap between his maximum EV and his average EV, 24.3 MPH, was the largest on the team in 2024.
No player is going to be regularly hitting the ball at an exit velocity close to their maximum, of course. But if there’s an extremely large gap between the average and the maximum, that might suggest that there’s a higher level of power that the player might be able to tap into with greater frequency. Easier said than done. But it’s proof of concept for a different, heavier-hitting version of Rojas. And the results of his 2025 might suggest that he’s starting to finding that version of himself; each component of his .289/.340/.333 line is up from last year, and his wRC+ of 91 suggests a bat that, while below average, is still much better than the one he wielded last season (when he posted a wRC+ of 68). Of course, that may be in part the result of small sample size and an unsustainable .448 batting average on balls in play. But even still: there’s reason to hope for for a version of Rojas that wields a better bat.
