I had started working on this post to hopefully find some small positives around Dylan Crews’ 0-18 with 10 strikeouts start to the season and instead what I found was a fractal of bad news.
The obvious first place to examine further is the strikeouts, since 52.6 percent is a strikeout rate even Elijah Green would be embarrassed about. I was hopeful this could be a case of some bad luck and tiny sample size flukes that made things look a lot worse. However, not only are the results terrible but the process is just as bad. So far Crews is swinging at pitches outside the strike zone (38.7%, MLB average 28.9%) nearly as much as he is inside the strike zone (47.2%, 65%). And when he does manage to swing he’s not making contact either outside the zone (25%, 56%) or in the zone (76.5%, 83.7%). That leads to an astonishing 42% called strike plus whiffs rate, well above the league average of 27.5% and 4th worst in MLB.
When you drill down into the individual games things somehow get even uglier. Warning, the following image is not suitable for children under 18 and should be viewed with extreme caution.
This might be the singularly worst hitting performance in team history. The orange circles for called strikes were all the first pitch of the at bat. That means that three times Crews got up to the plate, took the first pitch for a strike, then swung at every subsequent pitch except for the one ball in the dirt (he has some dignity), and missed on 5/6 swings with the sixth swing being a foul tip to strikeout. Oh, and of the pitches he swung at, 5 were outside of the strike zone with four being well outside. Already a horrifying day, but somehow it’s even worse when put in the context of what happened the day before.
It might be a little tough to see but yes that is seven (7!) called strikes in 4 at bats. That is a nascent career high for Crews. No wonder Crews was so swing happy the next day. Now to be fair, last year, in all of MLB a batter took seven or more called strikes 436 times out of 42,327 games with at least 3 plate appearances, so it’s not like this never happens, but it’s pretty rare. By the way, the lone leader with the most called strikes in a single game last year? James Wood with 11 on August 31, but we’re not talking about him right now.
With a bit of desperation I hoped maybe this was a new problem for Crews. Last season he had a respectable 26 percent out of zone swing rate, a 10 percent swinging strike rate and an 18 percent called strike rate, in line with league averages, but that was just in the Majors since we don’t have a lot of minor league data publicly available. What we do have is public scouting services from data focused websites like FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus and from there we get even more bad news.
First, from FanGraphs, on Crews before he got to LSU “He was the top unsigned high schooler from the 2020 class, a toolshed who swung and missed on the summer showcase circuit more than teams felt comfortable with.” While Crews then enjoyed massive success in college and walking more than he struck out, he never completely erased his plate discipline concerns. With Baseball Prospectus noting in their preseason rundown “to wit, Crews managed to be overly passive inside the strike zone and a bit too aggressive outside of it through the entire 2024 campaign.”
If you want to find a silver lining it is still very early in the season and that leaves plenty of space for some small sample size funkiness to take the blame. For example, three of his five games played were during day games in DC with early spring sun angles leading to a lot of shadows and abnormal lighting. It’s possible that could have a big effect that will get washed out as we get further into the season. However, if you’re reduced to blaming the sun angle that’s a pretty good sign you should be concerned.
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