Certain players in the minor leagues tend to buck traditional statistics, and you can see that in the way Drew Waters plays. The subject of our last article, William Contreras, had a more straightforward relationship between his numbers and scouting and showed a clear linear development. Drew does not have that. Rather than being a well-rounded player he does a lot of things very well and many things poorly making him an interesting case and one I don’t think we can really project with much certainty. His profile, as I’ll explain more below, doesn’t really have many players that are close comparisons. The questions to ask are whether his approach and profile can work at the major league level, and if not where will he have to change his game to take his career in another direction.
Waters’ career has come with little if any difficulty, and picking him up in the second round of the 2017 draft already looks like a steal for Atlanta’s farm system. It took only one full season for Drew to jump into the top 100 and after his age 20 season he was vaulted into the Top 40 where he currently sits. Progression for Drew was swift and aggressive and the Braves only had him play 14 games in the Gulf Coast League before figuring out he was far beyond capable there. In that time he hit .347/.448/.571 good enough for a 189 wRC+ and a trip up to Danville. Waters finished his time in Danville with decent numbers - a 96 wRC+ - but his biggest weakness was showing with a 35.5% strikeout rate. A trip to Rome was the breakout for Waters, with him earning an all star bid with a .303/.353/.513 line and a 145 wRC+. His strikeouts had dipped back down, but it wasn’t for a lack of swing and miss but rather his new trend of hyper aggression that led his walk rate to dip below 6%. He earned significant time in the Florida State League, a good sign as the Braves rarely promote high school players out of Rome in their first full season. In 133 plate appearances Waters held his own quite well, with a wRC+ of 98 and insignificant change in most peripherals. The two biggest there was him hitting no more home runs down the stretch and seeing an expected uptick in strikeout rate.
The Braves had seen enough of Waters at High-A and decided it was time to team him up with fellow prospect Cristian Pache and send them both to Mississippi. This is when Drew’s hype really began to take off as he led the minor leagues in hits for most of the season (narrowly missing out to Luis Robert by season end) and hit .319/.366/.481 with a 144 wRC+ in Mississippi. He again maintained his profile, though his hit totals can be explained by an absurd .436 BABIP. He got a late season promotion to Gwinnett, and while he got off to a roaring start, he faded a bit down the stretch and strikeouts really began to pile up. He finished with a strikeout rate of 36.1% in Gwinnett and a wRC+ of 84, though keep in mind this is for a 20-year old in Triple-A. Ozzie Albies had a wRC+ of 89 his first time through Gwinnett, so these are normal struggles.
Waters is a guy that you don’t need statistics or exit velocity to tell you that he can mash a baseball. He’s one of the few players I’ve ever seen go opposite field to the left center field gap in Trustmark Park (Mississippi’s home park) and get one out. When he hits it, the ball jumps, but hitting it has become one of his biggest problems. Waters has advanced quickly, so seeing his strikeout numbers deteriorate is not something that should come as a surprise. His 19.7% strikeout rate in Rome was really good, in the 70th percentile in the league, but he wasn’t doing that because he had particularly good contact rates. He just swung early and often and so he hit the ball often enough to keep strikeouts at bay. That strategy didn’t work once he got to High-A, and his k rate of 24.8% had him only in the 29th percentile. That dropped to the 23rd percentile in Double-A (26.7% K rate) and bottomed in Triple-A where the pitchers were good enough to take advantage of his aggression. Drew only ranked in the 3rd percentile (worse than 97% of hitters) in the league in strikeout rate, over an admittedly small sample, with a 36.1% strikeout rate.
This fall seems somewhat unpredictable for a guy who was so good at limiting strikeouts early in his career, and it’s where swinging strike rate comes into play. This is the rate of all of the pitches a player sees that end in him swinging and missing. MLB Average is around 9.5%. Waters had an 18% swinging strike rate in Triple-A. This was not a new trend for him either. In the Gulf Coast League. which he absolutely destroyed, he had a 26.9% swinging strike rate. The lowest in his career was his great season in Rome in which he had a rate of 11.5% which put him just above the league median and in the 54th percentile. His other seasons don’t even come close. He ranked in the third percentile in the Appalachian League, the 15th in the Florida State League, the 9th in the Southern League, and the 5th percentile in the International League. Simply put, Drew Waters swings and misses at a lot of pitches and that is the biggest limit to his offensive profile.
All of this being true, why is Waters so consistently at the top of his league in batting average and why is he graded as a future 60 hitter according to Fangraph? It’s one of those interesting parts of scouting where quality of contact comes into play, and while we don’t have all of the numbers we can infer quite a lot about Waters from what we do have. Drew Waters has always had a high BABIP at every single level. He is ranked in the 95th percentile or higher at four of six levels and in the 90th and 85th at his other two levels. This could be a sign that Waters is destined for a great collapse and will be a major bust, but there’s one thing that throws a wrench in that idea. He has a fantastic quality of contact leading to expectedly high BABIPs. Look, the guy isn’t going to have a .400 BABIP in the major leagues, that’s absolutely absurd, but there’s no real reason he can’t maintain a .350 BABIP which would outweigh some of the weaknesses caused by his strikeouts.
The number we looked at to start with is Drew’s batted ball profile, and the number one thing that stands out is his line drive rate. The lowest line drive rate of his career was 21.4%, a number that still put him in the 64th percentile in the South Atlantic League. His line drive rate was at 24.7% in Double-A last season putting him in the 94th percentile, and jumped to 33.3% in his short stint in Triple-A which was well inside the 99th percentile. This is a consistent trend for Drew as he ranks in the 85th, 98th, and 80th percentile at his other levels in line drive rate. Line drives have the highest batting average on balls in play and Drew hits quite a lot of them with a high average exit velocity as well creating a lot of high percentage contact. Another metric to look at is infield fly ball rate, which is the percentage of your fly balls that are infield pop ups. These create next to no offensive value save for defensive blunders, and the MLB average is about 10%. Minor League hitters tend to hit more pop ups, however, and the median rate for the upper minor leagues (AA/AAA) was 19.6% in 2019. Keeping that number in mind, Waters has never had an IFFB rate of above 14.8%, and that came in the short season he spent with Florida. His other seasons have never been above 11.6%, and he finished his time in Triple-A last season with an IFFB rate of 7.1%. This is to show that Drew doesn’t produce as many guaranteed outs as many minor leaguers, which will further contribute to him having a high batting average on balls in play. If he solves the swing and miss problems, which we have no real indication he will, he would be an elite hitter in the league with his hard hit rates and line drive rates. Still, once his strikeout rates and swing and miss rates normalize as he catches up to the better pitching he’s facing he should see an improvement in the viability of his profile.
The contentious point for Waters is going to be his long term power production. There’s no doubt that the potential is there for him to be a 25-30 home run guy in the major leagues especially with as consistently as he hits the ball hard, but his batted ball profile creates a problem when it comes to hitting home runs. The first is that his launch angle is just too low. The line drives are great, but it comes for Waters with a ground ball rate that is far too high for a guy with his power potential. His ground ball rate has been over 45% in every season of his career, although he has seen a slow and steady decline that indicates he is making an effort to get under the ball more and lift. The same approach that leads to Waters not hitting a lot of infield pop ups also has the effect of lowering his average fly ball launch angle and leading to less balls with the potential to leave the yard. His strength can be a bit of a weakness for him, as he has only once has a fly ball rate above 30% and that was in the 133 High-A plate appearances. Both his ground balls and fly balls are turning more into line drives, which is a great thing for him, but he needs to switch some of those ground balls into fly balls to increase his overall offensive potential. Without a major shift he’s probably locked in around 15 home runs, and with his other weaknesses that may not be enough to push him over the edge.
Still, despite the lack of fly balls and low launch angle he has enough raw power to still carry average to above average rates on HR/FB. His best came in Rome, the only time he was reasonably around league average age, and he finished with a 12.7% HR/FB that put him in the league’s 78th percentile. His home runs dipped dramatically in Double-A, that’s how it goes for all Braves prospects, but even so he finished in the 47th percentile in the league with a 5.8% HR/FB. This brings me to a point I made in the last article, that fly ball guys like Contreras will see their numbers suppressed more in that Southern League, while a guy like Waters, Ozzie Albies, or Jose Peraza will thrive because the drop in power production doesn’t affect their profile as much. Waters had success in his short stint in Triple-A and the power numbers rebounded as he had a 14.3% HR/FB rate and finished in the 58th percentile. A tweak to launch angle would do well for Waters, more so than anyone in the system, and he could easily turn many of those 49 doubles and triples he hit in 2019 into extra home runs. That’s the thing about Drew, and about power production in general, is that it isn’t necessarily just home runs. Waters hits the ball so hard that he frequently lines balls over the heads of outfielders and he has plus speed on the bases to let him take extra bases and produce value. His .162 isolated power in Double-A was in the 78th percentile in the league and his .211 ISO in Rome was in the 95th percentile for that league. The power is there, it just may not ever come in the form of home runs if he doesn’t move his average launch angle up a bit.
The biggest chink in the armor for Waters comes with his plate discipline. Waters is aggressive at the plate, it’s part of what makes him able to consistenly drive pitches with force, but it’s also a weakness that will be both exploited for strikeouts and for low walk rates. Waters tends to chase out of the zone, especially offspeed pitches, and he simply needs to improve his pitch recognition and plate discipline. He’ll likely never be an elite walk rate guy, he’ll probably never even be average, and the truth is I don’t think he needs to. If he takes enough to keep pitchers honest where they have to give him pitches to hit and drive then he will survive at the next level. He hasn’t had to develop that part of his game to this point as it’s never been a major liability, but it is now at Triple-A and will be going forward and he has to make those adjustments. The belief is that he will, and I don’t think a walk rate around the 30th percentile is going to hurt him. It definitely does hurt his on base potential though, and if the early count aggression doesn’t offset the strikeout rate then it will be a weakness for him.
This brings us to the final portion of Waters’s profile which is his ability to switch hit. This should be a major strength for him, but so far the bat has not caught up from the right side of the plate. His power production, quality of contact, and plate discipline all take a dip against left handed pitching and that’s the area he has to focus on going forward. In fact, his profile purely as a left handed batter against right handed pitching is a completely different player. Here are the numbers from 2019.
vs RHP: .325/.380/.486, 27.7% K, 7.5% BB, .163 ISO, 11.2% XBH (XBH/AB)
vs LHP: .258/.293/.371, 31.6% K, 4.5% BB, .113 ISO, 8.9% XBH
If Waters can just bridge the gap a bit and make some improvements his overall potential could take a massive leap forward. Fortunately, his best game is against the handedness of pitching he will face most often.
To answer the first question I posed, we need to take a look at similar players to see if this style of play has succeeded in the MLB in the last 10 years. One player that stood out as the only with a reasonable comparison is Starling Marte. Marte had somewhat better contact numbers in the minor leagues, but was much older and didn’t debut until he was 24. When he did he had somewhat high strikeout numbers, very low walk totals, lots of line drives and ground balls, and a high rate of HR/FB. The numbers are actually incredibly similar, and Drew is a better defender. This is a lofty comparison, and Drew really has a long way to go before he’d even hit as good as early career Marte, much less what Marte has developed into now. The answer to that question-yes that profile can work, but that’s the only player with more than 2000 plate appearances since the beginning of 2010 that really fits the bill, so it may not be the best recipe for success. A less successful example is a guy like Brian Bogusevic. Waters is probably closer to Marte than Bogusevic, but there is still a lot that could go wrong with that profile especially if that pitch recognition never develops. I’ve discussed this earlier in the article, but there is really only one major change would I make. First and foremost I would have Drew lift the ball. A step upwards in the fly ball rates could legitimately add 5-10 home runs a year for Waters, and then you’re getting in the range of having a similar ceiling to peak Carlos Gomez.
I would like to see him walk more and strikeout less, that’s to go with ever batter the Braves have, but I don’t know how easy that would be for him to do. The walks in his career have tended to coincide with more swings and misses as he’ll take early and then be aggressive as pitchers get into his offspeed arsenal. His raw bat-to-ball skills could take a step forward, he’s certainly got the bat speed and zone coverage to make improvements, but it’s not the most likely course. If we look at Drew in Rome we can get a feel for what he can be. below 20% strikeouts, a swing and miss rate just a tick above average, and elite power production to make up for a lack of walks. I want to believe in that Drew, but we’ve only seen it once. His aggressive promotions may be the cause of the distinct drop off in contact rate. If that’s the case and his true talent level is around the guy we saw in Rome then the potential he possesses takes and immediate and extreme jump upwards. If he is the guy in Gwinnett that couldn’t lay off of bad pitches then his potential regresses. He has a wide variance that makes him tough to really peg on the board, but a potential to be better versions of the guys listed before. I don’t really know where to conclude this article. I’ve never really known what to think when evaluating Drew. The talent is so obvious that everyone who has spent any amount of time can pick up on it. There’s also so many unique and extreme facets to his game that pinpointing what will work and what won’t is a pure guessing game. I think Drew Waters is a major league baseball player. Beyond that, exactly what he will be remains to be seen, but he’ll be one of the most interesting cases to follow in the 2021 season. Another season of clarity, and the only one he isn’t starting at a new level, will bring a lot of answers to the questions I posited. Drew is easily the most interesting piece in the system, and his ability to make ridiculously good contact while also not making a whole lot of overall contact really challenges some of the traditional approaches to evaluation.
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