Just yesterday Baseball Prospectus announced new additions of their plate discipline metric SEAGER and their batted ball metrics including 90th percentile exit velocity were added to their leaderboards and player cards. To celebrate let’s take a look at two young players that are supposed to be establishing the Nats’ new core and instead find themselves mired in mediocrity: Dylan Crews and Luis García Jr. Man, it is still weird that list doesn’t include Keibert Ruiz.
I’ve already covered Crews’ plate discipline struggles here after a rough first week of the season, but it should be no surprise that one week is not representative of the entire player. While Crews is still stuck with a 46 wRC+ because of that first week from hell, he’s really come on lately with a 185 wRC+ over the past week as he hits the cover off the ball and takes as few walks and strikeouts as possible.
At the more granular level the plate discipline numbers are much better and in line with what we saw during his cup of coffee last season. He’s swinging at 25 percent of pitches outside the strike zone, now below the MLB average of 28 percent, and there’s a much bigger gap to his in-zone swing rate of 64 percent (MLB average of 65 percent). And as you can probably guess based on his last week, he’s making contact too, at 88 percent contact in the strike zone above the MLB average of 85 percent.
Baseball Prospectus’ SEAGER is their updated metric for evaluating plate discipline by rating players on how well they can take bad pitches without taking the pitches they do the most damage. SEAGER is meant to show how there are multiple paths to maximizing damage, for some players swinging more can be beneficial, while for other players they can wait and wait without missing their pitch. I like SEAGER because it can highlight players with nontraditional approaches and expose players who are hiding deficiencies.
Crews rates out well by SEAGER at 16 this year and 15.9 last season, well above the league average of 11.6 and 65th in baseball among qualified hitters. Only James Wood and Josh Bell have a higher SEAGER on the Nats this year. Week from hell aside, so far, Crews has actually showed good plate discipline in the Majors.
If you’ve been on statcast page before you’re likely familiar with average and max exit velocity (EV). However, a lot of research has shown that for hitters 90th percentile exit velocity is more stable year-to-year and better predicts the next season’s wOBA. That’s great news for Crews, because his average EV of 90.1 MPH is right at league average, but his 90th percentile EV is 107.6 MPH is 46th in MLB between Manny Machado and Teoscar Hernández. That’s not a bad place to be.
It's still only April so the jury is still out on what Crews will ultimately develop into at the plate, but the good news is that only a couple weeks later there is a lot of reason for optimism. It will take a while for his box score numbers to reflect it because his first week was so bad, but I think by June we should see Crews comfortably standing with Wood and CJ Abrams at the top of the Nats leaderboards.
For García, current owner of a 60 wRC+, it’s a different story. Interestingly, García has not been consistent by SEAGER and has also not had a strong correlation between good SEAGER and good seasons. With his best year by SEAGER being far and away 2023, where he had a 17.8, also being the worst of the past three by wRC+ (85). Compared to last season his SEAGER is lower (10.3 vs. 8.1) and that’s likely because he’s increased his swings at pitches outside of the zone but also increased his contact.
And that has shown up in some weaker contact for him, with his 90th percentile EV being 102.5 MPH, a whole 1.6 MPH below last season. That might not sound like a lot but if he had the same 90th percentile EV as last year García would be 150th in baseball tied with Ty France, instead he’s 180th.
We know García has a unique approach at the plate, that’s been well-established in his six seasons in the Majors. He will never be a James Wood or Dylan Crews style wait-and-mash guy, but he showed last season he knows how to make it work. Usually, I would say it’s a bad thing when a hitter who is struggling has poor underlying numbers behind it, but in this case I think it can be a good sign. My concern with García was that his box score results last year were a random fluke disconnected from any change in approach or contact. But the decrease in SEAGER and 90th percentile EV this year looks like a sign that last year was a legitimately different and better version of him. The hope now is that it’s April and given time García can get back to that higher level.
I just want to take this time to thank Baseball Prospectus for adding these stats to their leaderboards and player cards. One of the reasons I stopped writing is that around 2019/2020 it became clear there were better metrics on the private side that were no longer making it to the public and that what was coming out was inferior. It’s nice that we’re finally seeing some of these new, better metrics become public and easily accessible and I look forward to incorporating them more as the season goes on.
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