Revisiting Gallo%, a Three True Outcomes Metric

Awhile back, I coined a term for a three true outcome metric called a “Gallo”. That term describes a game wherein a player gets three or more plate appearances, all of which result in one of the so-called three true outcomes. The name, of course, comes from three true outcome icon Joey Gallo, who had recorded the most Gallos over the year-plus of data I examined originally.

Yesterday, the Dodgers and Yankees were finishing up their three game weekend series in New York; unlikely hero Trent Grisham helped the Yankees salvage the series with a three run home run in the 6th inning off Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow. Along with the home run, Grisham walked twice and struck out once, culminating in a day that qualifies as a Gallo.

Upon noting that performance, I figured now might be a good time to revisit “Gallo%” to see who has been leading to this point in the 2024 season.

First though, a bit of context. According to data from FanGraphs splits leaderboards, there have been 17,097 3+ plate appearance game performances by hitters to this point in the season (all data is through June 9th). Of those thousands of individual games, there have been just 296 qualifying Gallos. That means a Gallo has occurred in just ~1.7% of qualifying games, suggesting this is a rare type of game for any given player, but not exceptionally so.

With that in mind, below are the top ten players in Gallo%, to this point in 2024.

Joey Gallo has company; to this point in 2024 he barely cracks the top 10 of his namesake metric. Note though that only players with 30+ qualifying games were eligible to occupy this leaderboard. For now, Will Benson, Michael Busch, and Cal Raleigh lead MLB in Gallos this season, with five apiece. From a Gallo% perspective, Benson leads the pack given his only playing in 46 qualifying contests.

Given that a Gallo occurs in just ~1.7% of qualifying player’s games, this leaderboard highlights the proclivity of these players to have such a game relative to the rest of the league. The top 5 on the above list have recorded a Gallo >5x more often than league average to this point. In fact, of the 283 players with 30+ qualifying games — by plate appearances — over half (151) have not yet recorded a Gallo this season.

Another interesting question is the relative frequency of Gallo variations. Below are the top 15 iterations of a Gallo.

Unfortunately, though perhaps unsurprisingly, the most frequent Gallos are pretty rough for the hitters who record them. Nearly one quarter of Gallos this season have simply been 0-3 with 3 strikeout games. Golden Sombreros are the third most common variety of Gallo this season. However, better lines, like Trent Grisham’s yesterday — 1 home run, 2 walks, 1 strikeout — are not unheard of this season; in fact, that line had occurred 8 times prior Grisham’s performance on June 8th.

These relative frequencies beg the question, are Gallos, generally speaking, actually good? Looking at the table above, it would be easy to assume that they are not. To take a lazy hack at that question, I took the cumulative performances of all Gallos in 2024 and summarized them below as one slash line.

Quite the Gallo-ian result. Surprisingly, this OPS figure, .723, is greater than the league average OPS (.699) as a whole this season. Of course, this summary is context neutral and additionally fails to highlight the fact that a 70% strikeout rate surely would undermine the value of any resulting surface level slash line. Still, recording a Gallo need not be an indicator of futility, as Trent Grisham illustrated yesterday.

In summation, the considerable variation in possible permutations of a Gallo make it even more interesting to me as a metric, given that seemingly few other metrics in baseball seem to be so productively ambiguous (Hitting the cycle? Good. Golden Sombrero? Bad). It might mean a 2-walk, 2-home run game, as one player has already had this season, or a golden sombrero, as several more have endured.