Offensive Check In

Last month I talked about my optimism for the Nats and the stats I would be tracking for each player to get an idea of the impact the new coaching staff can make. Now we find ourselves 51 games into the season, the Nats are still managing to hover around .500, and some major promotions and demotions started the week so it’s as good a time as any to do a check-in.

The overall offensive performance has suggested the optimism is real even if I might have missed the mark on which stat to track for each player. The only two players here with a substantial difference are García and House, who just got sent to AAA despite the improvement, more on him in a minute.

First, García’s improvement in exit velocity is pretty much the only thing he’s doing better this year at the plate. Already a well-known free swinger, he is somehow setting a new career high in swing rate at an astonishing 56.2 percent. If that was not bad enough, he’s also making contact with a career high 74.1 percent of pitches he swings at outside of the strike zone, while dropping his in-zone contact rate by 2 percentage points. If he was not hitting the ball significantly harder we would have a real problem on our hands.

Now before we tackle House, let’s run through the other three and see if they’re making an improvement elsewhere. Abrams has not improved his exit velocity as García did, but he has significantly improved his slugging on contact to an absurd .703. Some of that can be early season weirdness, but he has made an adjustment to his pitch selection, chasing less with a career low 35.2% swings at pitches outside of the strike zone, while maintaining his in-zone swing rate. Another big difference is he’s making a lot less contact both out of the zone (down 10 percentage points) and in the zone (down 3 percentage points). All together that reduces the amount of weak contact he makes and increases his rate of hard hit balls even if his max speed is the same.

Wood’s chase rate was not as bad as some of his teammates but he too has made a big improvement there, going from 27.7 percent last year to 23.2 percent to start this year. Unlike Abrams, that change has not made an impact elsewhere in his profile so far. The other big change for him has been in a stat I did not consider in April but should add now, launch angle. His average launch angle has gone from 6.7 degrees to 11.2, with his groundball rate commensurately dropping 9 percentage points. More fly balls with his elite exit velocity will always lead to more hits and especially more extra base hits.

Ruiz, despite the recent hot streak, only has one major difference and it does not seem to be a positive one, reducing his in-zone swing rate from 70.7% to 60.7% while not seeing a similar drop out of the zone. That’s lead to a ghastly SEAGER of -4.4, an early season quirk, but one I still didn’t realize was possible. I do not see much to suggest that the Keibertaissance is real this time either.

With those asides out of the way let’s get back to the one hitter who interests me the most here, Brady House. I’ve been wanting to write something about House’s hitting stats since the end of last season but distractions and a desire to perfect the stats and argument meant I could never get the post out. Luckily, his start to this season has perfectly illustrated the point I was trying to make: despite these stats being presented independently on the leaderboards, they are actually codependent. I mentioned one obvious way with Abrams above, swinging at fewer bad pitches should lead to an improvement in average exit velocity through the removal of weak contact. But there are much more subtle ways they can become intertwined and House is a perfect example of that.

Last season, by his own admission, House chose to focus on timing up fastballs over letting the ball travel and trying to identify it. In other words, on every pitch, House was loading and swinging as if it was going to be as fastball so that he would be able to get his bat in the zone fast enough to make contact. Because the league average fastball rate was 58.5 percent, House’s guess was often correct and he was able to make contact on 80.4 percent of pitches in the strike zone. The problem was he was swinging a lot, 41.5 percent out of the zone, 57.1 percent overall.

This spring the Nationals and House talked about a focus on reducing his chase rate, and as you saw above, he succeeded, getting it down to a still poor, but better 36.3 percent. Unfortunately, he did that at the expense of being able to time up a fastball, dropping his in-zone contact rate to an unplayable 74.8 percent.

The challenge House faces in AAA now is doing the slow, but necessary, work to speed up his subconscious pitch identification so that he feels like he is letting a breaking ball travel while still timing up a fastball correctly. This is going to be a great challenge for the Nationals coaching staff as making a change like that requires a lot of patience and does not come with an immediate improvement that encourages sticking with the process. It’s easy for players to quit and fall back on their old patterns, especially for a hitter like House who has already proven he can find success at AAA with his current approach that does not work in MLB.

Hopefully, I will find the time soon to write more about how to try to identify hitters like House before they make it glaringly obvious. But overall, what I want you to takeaway is that focusing on correcting a weak point, while important, does not guarantee automatic success on improvement. Tracking these stats is for evaluating how the coaches help with the small improvements, not expecting them to turn every hitter into a star.