On June 27th Keibert Ruiz went on the 7-day IL with a concussion suffered from an unfortunate accident in the dugout, since then Riley Adams has started 34 of 50 games and put up a 114 wRC+. Naturally, this has a lot of people wondering whether Adams has been unleashed by the power of regular playing time.
Breaking things down by month you can see some clear improvement in his August numbers compared to the previous months. His walk rate is up to 9.8 percent and his strikeout rate is down to 29.5 percent. That’s powered by some better decision making at the plate. Adams is swinging at pitches outside of the zone less and making more contact inside the zone. Overall, his improved swing decisions are reflected in his 17.9 SEAGER for August, the third best month of his career.
Improving swing decisions should help every hitter but they should be a boon to Adams in particular. Anybody that has seen him hit a baseball before would not be surprised that he has great power with a 90th percentile exit velocity of 106.6 MPH (79th percentile). His problem has always been in actually making contact to take advantage of the power. Of course, knowing when to swing does not mean you make contact. Adams has always had a below average in-zone contact rate (82.4 percent career) but Ben Zeidman has shown that players see a diminishing return in improving their in-zone contact rate beyond 80 percent. Knowing when to swing has always been the bigger problem.
Despite the improvements Baseball Prospectus’ deserved rates show that his success has been a bit inflated, with a 98 DRC+ in August, 39 points below his 137 August wRC+. The reason is the significant difference between his deserved singles rate of 13.3 percent and his actual singles rate of 21.5 percent. That’s certainly not a sustainable difference and I would expect the number of singles to fall back in line soon. Even with a regression, catcher offense is so bad that Adams could provide value there with a slightly below average bat as a 98 DRC+ would be 18th among catchers in MLB if Adams carried it through a full season.
Overall, I would not change my assessment of Adams from a month ago, he’s not a starter, but is probably worth keeping around as a backup as the Nats have higher roster priorities. This might be a different story if Adams’ hot month at the plate was also a hot month behind the plate, but instead he’s one of the worst catchers in baseball at -5.1 runs of catcher defensive runs added.
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