How for real is Tyler Fitzgerald?

I like dingers, so I hope the answer is Extremely

I don’t want to start us out on a down note by observing that it’s not particularly likely for Tyler Fitzgerald to be the greatest shortstop in major league history. But that does seem like an important fact to acknowledge before we get started. There’s no way, right? Fitzgerald is currently hitting .314/.373/.650, and he’s been hitting a homer every 6 at bats for the last month, and you see one list he’s on with Willie Mays and Barry Bonds, and another list with A-Rod and Trea Turner, and whatever his true talent level is, it can’t be that, can it?

On the other hand, it’s impossible to ignore that Fitzgerald has done all of the things that put him on those lists. He has hit enough homers in a short time to be in the conversation with Bonds and Mays (in that one way only, obviously) and he’s hit enough homers in a short time as a shortstop to be right there with A-Rod and Turner. That doesn’t happen entirely by accident. He’s been doing something right.

All of that puts Tyler Fitzgerald somewhere on the spectrum between Definitely Not Barry Bonds and Kinda Barry Bonds. Where exactly? Let’s figure it out!

Before his homer binge started, Tyler Fitzgerald was hitting a perfectly respectable .276/.329/.395. For a super-utility player who was about to start getting more starts at shortstop — Nick Ahmed, by the way, hit .232/.278/.302 as a Giant — that was a perfectly respectable line on its own, and a solid foundation for a Let’s See What This Young Player Can Do tryout. So the Giants gave him the job, figuring that either it would work, or they could move Brett Wisely over there, keep Fitzgerald a utility guy, and probably put Marco Luciano at second until Thairo Estrada came back healthy/remembered how to hit.

Fitzgerald, not being a fan of overly wordy sentences, went with the “it would work” option, allowing the Giants to skip the second half of that sentence. Thanks, Tyler!

Fitzgerald, since the start of July, has hit a mere .343/.403/.886 with a paltry 11 home runs and 20 RBIs in 77 plate appearances. Over a full season of 600 plate appearances, that’s just an 85 home run pace. Power-wise, Fitzgerald’s best year in the minors was 2023, when he hit 22 homers in 544 plate appearances, mostly in AAA. We should also note that this year, when he got sent down to Sacramento after getting picked off of first base in a late inning Your Most Important Job Is To Not Get Picked Off Here situation, he hit 8 homers in 87 plate appearances.

So Fitzgerald has found something in his swing that’s allowed him to sock all these dingers. It really does seem like he’s made an adjustment that’s allowed him to hit the ball over the fence more. Congratulations to him, and the coaching staff, and the player development people, all of whom have had a hand in this incredible run of success that Tyler Fitzgerald has enjoyed over the last month.

But he’s still not this good.

Since the start of July, Tyler Fitzgerald has homered on 55% of the fly balls he’s hit. No one does that. That’s not sustainable in the long term, full stop, no arguments. Fangraphs doesn’t have data from 2001, but it does have data for Barry Bonds from 2002 through 2004, and in each of those years, Barry Bonds, the greatest home run hitter of all time during his best home run hitting years, homered on under 30% of his fly balls. If you adjust Fitzgerald’s numbers down to approximate Home Run God Barry Bonds, then you would expect him to have hit 6 homers during this stretch. If you adjust them down further, because come on, then as a long-term projection you’re probably looking at more like 4 homers a month, unless he gets to Bonds-Judge (31% HR/FB)-Ohtani (28.3% HR/FB) territory.

Then there’s exit velocity. Since July 1, Fitzgerald’s average exit velocity has been 90.4 MPH. That’s pretty average, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but it doesn’t really suggest that he’s one of the league’s big boppers. Aaron Judge, for example, has averaged 96.2 MPH exit velocity, and Shohei Ohtani has been at 95.9 MPH. During his hot streak, Fitzgerald has hit the ball hard 36% of the time, while for the season, Judge and Ohtani are in the 40s.

These results, then, are pretty far out of line with Tyler Fitzgerald’s process. It’s important to note that Fitzgerald’s process should be leading to very good results — his rolling xwOBA hasn’t dropped below .350 in his last 50 PAs, so one would expect him to have a lot of success, which he has. He’s hitting a good number of line drives and his BABIP is .361, which is high but not that high — if it was sitting at .330, with his speed, I don’t know if anyone would blink — so that part of it is pretty close to sustainable.

Tyler Fitzgerald does not need to be a home run hitter to be productive at the plate, but there is one aspect of his batted ball profile that is very promising. His barrel rate over the last month has been legitimately extraordinary. Judge has barrelled 27.6% of balls he’s hit this year, and Ohtani has been at 21.2%, and they are first and second in the majors, respectively. Since July 1, Fitzgerald is sitting at 23.4%. Almost a quarter of the balls he’s hitting are both hit very hard and at the right launch angle that they could leave the park.

And I don’t really know what to make of that. It’s hard to see how he can keep this up long term, considering that he doesn’t hit that many balls that hard. But the ones he does hit happen to be at the perfect angle to leave the park. It seems like it’ll average out and at some point he’ll pound some balls into the ground and hit fly balls to shallow center field, but he’s spent a month avoiding exactly those outcomes. I don’t think anyone has ever done that for an entire career, and we probably shouldn’t expect Tyler Fitzgerald to be the first.

But he should still hit like 10 more homers in August. For fun!