Brewers Sign Luke Voit: How He Can Have an Impact

Though he’s 32 years old and had a rough finish to 2022 with the non-competitive Washington Nationals, Luke Voit is a player very much in the Brewers’ favored mold for right-handed power bats. He produces high-value contact as often as almost any hitter in baseball, though when he fails to do so, it’s often because he’s struck out, and the swing-and-miss element of his game is always a threat to his overall production.

The easiest way to think about Voit, if a somewhat counterintuitive one, is as Keston Hiura, without the glaring hole in his swing on pitches up in the zone. He’s a Goliath to Hiura’s David, physically, but their batted-ball profiles are very similar: lots of fly balls, impressive top-end exit velocities and home-run power, and a modicum of plate discipline, but low, low contact rates.

Voit suffers from the modern paradigm, which measures players against replacement level. That mode of evaluation breaks down when we’re talking about low-cost guys who occupy the bottom end of the defensive spectrum but have offensive value. He was an above-average hitter in 2022, according to OPS+, despite his ugly strikeout rate. He’s a good complement to Rowdy Tellez, and certainly makes the path to a roster spot or a regular role more narrow for both Hiura and Mike Brosseau, about whom I wrote this morning.

Let’s pause a moment to reaffirm that penultimate assertion, though. Because Voit is not a guy with big traditional platoon splits, it might be tempting to dismiss the idea that he actually works well as a partner to Tellez. Certainly, that became a storyline last season, when Hiura (who doesn’t sport normal splits either) and the rest of the team’s would-be lefty mashers failed to deliver the boom. I think, though, that simple left-right thinking on this is too simplistic, and is considered outmoded within the game itself.

Here’s Tellez’s xwOBA (expected weighted on-base average; .330 is the rough average, and higher is better) by pitch location since the start of 2021.

Here’s the same chart for Voit.

As you can see, Voit is quite strong in a couple of zones (up and away from him, which is up and in on the left-handed Tellez; middle-in on him, which is middle-away on Tellez) where Tellez is vulnerable. The reverse is true for other zones, where Tellez makes his hay but Voit is weak. 

Like reading off platoon splits, this, too, is an oversimplification. It illustrates something real, though, which is that teams increasingly set their lineups according to pitch shapes, bat paths, and plate coverage. In that way, Voit and Tellez make life more difficult for opponents than their raw numbers might suggest.

There’s no way not to read this as bad news for Hiura. It’ll also make more interesting (but more messy) the sorting out of playing time at DH, where Voit could find some at-bats but make a harder road to partial rest for William Contreras. All of that, of course, is contingent on him actually winning a job in camp. For now, this is just a nice way to increase the organizational depth and give the team more potential paths to production from their most offense-first positions.