Xander Bogaerts: Infield Hit King

Maybe you already knew this about Xander Bogaerts, but I didn’t. When I think of Xander Bogaerts, I think of a power hitter with 186 career home runs. The guy with one 30-homer season, three 20-homer seasons, and double-digit homers in every season stretching back to 2014. Bogaerts is more than that, obviously. He’s slowing down now, but he’s always been an excellent baserunner and he turned himself into an great defensive shortstop over the years. He’s always hit for average too, boasting a career batting average of .289, five different .300 seasons and four more above .280. What I didn’t think about was infield hits. It turns out that was an oversight. 

Entering Monday's games, Bogaerts had five infield hits, tied for third-most in baseball. And that's nothing new. Since his debut in 2013, Xander Bogaerts has 227 infield hits. That’s third most in baseball, trailing only Jose Altuve with 251 and Jean Segura with 227. If we start our counter in 2015, when Bogaerts figured things out at the major league level, his 210 infield hits are the most in baseball. He’s finished in the top 10 in infield hits five times in the past 10 seasons, and led all of baseball with 30 in 2023.

In a way, this shouldn’t be surprising. Even though it took him a while to figure things out on defense, and despite his imposing 6-foot-2 frame, Bogaerts has always had speed. While he was never in the elite range, his sprint speed stayed above 28 feet per second until his age-27 season, and even as a 32-year-old, he’s currently at 27.8, well above average, even for a shortstop.

Bogaerts also hits the ball on the ground kind of a lot. Since the beginning of the Statcast era in 2015, Baseball Savant credits him with 2,022 groundballs. That’s third-most in the game, trailing DL LeMaheiu with 2,193 and Altuve with 2,074. Those are the only three players above 2,000. FanGraphs credits Bogaerts with a 45.6% career groundball rate, and while that’s definitely on the higher side, it’s not enormous. He’s really hit so many groundballs because he’s excellent at putting the ball in play. Bogaerts has 20% strikeout rate this season, putting him in the 61st percentile, the lowest percentile ranking of his entire career. Hitting a groundball may not be the most valuable thing a batter can do, but it’s still preferable to striking out. Here are the five infield hits Bogaerts has registered so far this season. As you can see, there of them turned into hits because his launch angle was so extreme that he chopped the ball straight into the ground, giving him enough time to beat out the throw. So it’s not just his high groundball rate, it’s the volume and the fact that the high groundball rate comes because of an extremely low launch angle.

Bogaerts also has an extremely high success rate on groundballs. He has a .295 career batting average on them. Among the 724 players who have hit at least 250 groundballs since 2013, that ranks 42. That puts him in the 94th percentile, and he mostly trails absolute speedsters like Billy Hamilton, Michael A. Taylor, Byron Buxton, Trea Turner, and Bobby Witt Jr.

So why did I find this so surprising? It’s because of the power. The graph below starts in 2015, and it shows every batter’s home runs and infield hits. Bogaerts is the red dot at the very top.

Not only does he have the most infield hits, but he’s also farther away from the trendline than anyone else. In today’s game, there’s just no one who hits both home runs and infield hits the way that Bogaerts does.