Looking at all-time MLB great lefties by home run totals to see what they looked like in their early years. Can Jac Caglianone be the Kansas City Royal who joins them?
Jac Caglianone is probably going to do a lot of specific and varied things while he is a major leaguer. I am not interested in most of those things in this article. We are focusing on the most important thing he is hopefully going to do many times as a Royal, hit the ball over the wall. When you have a prospect that hits 120 mph on an exit velo in the minors and then hits five homers in four games shortly after being called up to AAA, the main concern becomes how many bombs are we about to see. To that end, I wanted to look at great left handed power bats to see when they came up and what they did early on.
It is unfair to expect someone new to the big leagues to become one of the following players, so do not mistake that for my intent. However, this is the ceiling that his power comes with and I wanted to look to that possibility. Left handed power comes in many different forms, so if you look at the leaders in home runs from lefties from 1969 to now, here is what you will find.
Fangraphs’ leaderboard shows you a decent number of of athletic outfielders to go along with large grip it and rip it 1B/DH types. There are even a couple of hot corner bats in Graig Nettles and Darrell Evans. What you won’t see are any second baseman, shortstops, or catchers though Robinson Cano was 26th with 335 long balls. Caglianone is, we assume, going to play the majority of his career at first base. He is a very large man at at 6’5” and 250 pounds, and those guys don’t tend to run around the outfield, Aaron Judge being the exception that proves the rule.
There are four on the list that spent significant time at DH in Ortiz, Thome, Giambi, and Baines. There are ten who were primarily at first base including Palmeiro, McGriff, Delgado, Dunn, Howard, Helton, Votto, Freeman, Martinez, and Stargell. A lot of these guys spent time at more than one position, but these 14 seem like the type of players we want Caglianone to turn into based on being bat first power hitters who are first base then maybe age into DH over time. Baines did play a lot of outfield, so maybe not him. He also never was a huge home run guy, just accumulated them over a long period and never even got to 30 for a season. On to the rest!
All of these players came up between age 20-24 with Thome being the only 20 year old and Howard/Giambi being the old guys at 24. So 21-23 is the majority of the dudes and Jac is in good company as a 22 year old. Their big home run totals typically are not right away, most don’t get into the mid 30s or higher in home runs until their mid to late 20s. At just 24 McGriff hit 34 and Dunn 46, but are the only ones to put up totals like that so early. There are only 6 seasons from 22-year olds or younger above 30 homers in the last half century, none on this list, so don’t assume Jac’s going to hit a ridiculous amount of jacks in 2025 like he has been at AAA.
The biggest knock on Jac is that he is a free swinger, and it would be nice to see chase rates for all of these guys, but we just don’t have that kind of data going back far enough. In lieu of that I am focusing on walks to start with. I do not think that Jac is going to be some of these guys. Jim Thome, Fred McGriff, and Adam Dunn all walked early and often, which does not seem like the path Caglianone will take. That actually made me feel better about where he is at. His walk rates have been meh in the minors, but most of these big sluggers did not come out of the gates walking 12%+ of the time. Even guys like Joey Votto, known for walking, took a year or two to really get into higher walk rate territory and super high OBP range. Almost all of them did eventually get there to one extent or another except for Tino Martinez who never really walked a ton.
That means we have at least 8 or 9 examples that say if he becomes an elite power hitter, the walks and OBP will get to an elite or near elite level as well, though maybe not in the next year or two. The other interesting bit with that is that for several of them the walks came before the power to some extent. It seems like it would always work the other way. Hit a bunch of home runs, pitchers get careful, then you walk more because they are avoiding you. For a Votto or a Giambi it was more the other way around or a Ryan Howard they seemed to happen at the same time.
We have some swing rate data and it does seem that most of these players got down in the low to mid 40% range on their swing rate, which is a lot lower than Cags’ current mid 50s rate with a decent amount of chase. We don’t have data going far enough back on this to see how that progression happened from early career to peak and then through decline phase. The fact that the linked article there has him swinging as much as Bobby is worrisome, but he is also doing damage against AAA pitching. He may adjust and swing less once he is facing major league pitches that are less forgiving. We will have to wait and see, but all Royals fans should hope that the swing rate comes down some or accessing the top end of his production is going to be difficult based on historic precedence. That is also historically the organizations Achilles’ heel, Bobby’s swing rates have not come down since he debuted for instance.
It is too early to know if Jac Caglianone can actually become a great home run hitter, but I figured it was worth looking at the modern greats to see what they looked like coming up. His relatively low strike out rates makes me think he will not become a Joey Gallo type with all the power in the world but too much swing and miss.
That does not mean that Jac cannot fail, we have seen too many prospects fail to ever take that possibility away. It does look like he walks enough that if he can follow many of these great players in getting more patient/making pitchers fear him, then he has a good chance of hitting a large number of home runs as a pro. Any of that is far away at this point though, so for now just enjoy each plate appearance as they come.