Before we get to the playoffs, it’s time to empty my notebook one last time. Caught Looking is a place for all those smaller conversations that don’t quite add up to a full column but still give you insight into the day-to-day work of being a major leaguer.
Julio Rodríguez’s hot streak
You may have noticed that Rodríguez was hotter than the surface of the sun in August. He hit .428/.474/.724 that month and almost single-handedly powered his lineup into a divisional race. Rodríguez and I had chatted earlier in the season about when it’s time to make a big adjustment because he was in the midst of a good but not great first half (.249/.306/.411). His answer was non-committal, as he felt adjusting was a daily item. But he did put in some more substantial work before that hot August.
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“Just trying to be more efficient and getting rid of wasted movement so I can do what I want to do,” said Rodríguez this month, pointing especially to moments early in his swing.
Early in the season, Rodríguez had his hands away from his body as he anticipated the pitch, and then he had to bring them up to begin his load and start the swing.
In August, he brought those hands back up as he anticipated the pitch so that there was less movement backward for his hands.
This change upped his pull percentage from under 40 percent in the first three months of the season to nearly 50 percent in the second half. He was able to pull fastballs on the outer half of the plate that he wasn’t pulling before. And so pitchers adjusted back, moving their sinker location to the outer half of the plate (first two months, on the left) to the inner half of the plate (September, on the right).
The Mariners outfielder smiled when I referenced this change in approach against him.
“Catch them and they catch you back,” he said with a shrug.
So he was right that adjusting is daily work, but there’s still some tension here between adjusting big and adjusting small. How long will pitchers throw him sinkers on the inner half, and how much will Rodríguez have to struggle against this new strategy before he considers larger changes to his mechanics? A .274/.324/.579 September suggests another bigger adjustment will probably wait for a harder slump.
George Springer’s just fine, thank you very much
Sometimes the adjustment is to not make an adjustment. On July 31, George Springer was hitting a forgettable (and below-average) .249/.317/.384, and he was scratching his head trying to find answers.
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“I’ve done some digging with our analytics guys to see if something was different, and we chalked it up to ‘not really,'” he said in early September. “Hit some balls hard and they ended up in gloves.”
His process numbers were not all that different from last year. Almost identical, really, once you consider things like Hard-Hit rate (percentage of balls in play over 95 mph), Barrels, and maximum exit velocity.
| Time Frame | Hard Hit% | Barrel% | MaxEV | K% | OPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2022 | 41.9% | 8.3% | 113.6 | 17.2% | 0.814 |
April - July '23 | 39.8% | 8.5% | 115.9 | 17.4% | 0.701 |
He was hitting the ball as hard as he did last year, making as much contact, and suffering from a big drop in results. Springer decided to look away from those results and continue his work as usual.
“I don’t think the scoreboard really tells you how you’ve hit the ball throughout the year,” he said. “In my opinion, it shows you how lucky you’ve been, and for me, it’s been 26 percent of the time, and it is what it is.”
It was probably the right move. Since Aug. 1, he’s showing a .280/.352/.457 line with eight homers and an OPS that’s right in line with what he did last year and what you might expect given those batted-ball velocities. His four homers in the last couple of weeks have come just when the Blue Jays have needed offense the most as they fight for a playoff spot.
“It’s been a weird year and I feel like I’ve hit the ball way harder than the results would show,” Springer said right before he went into that two-week hot stretch.
Sometimes, you have to trust the process.
Matt Olson on that Braves’ lineup
Braves first baseman Olson leads the league in homers by a lot. Eight more homers from him (as of Tuesday morning) and the rest of that lineup, and the Braves will have the all-time seasonal record for a team. Jayson Stark wrote a great piece about just how good this offense is, and how many records they might set. It turns out the difference in their stories and their approaches might be their strength.
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For Olson, a revelation about vertical break on four-seamers is a huge part of his success. For the first four years of his career, he was basically average against four-seamers, and that wasn’t good enough for the slugger. In 2021, he took a page from Marcus Semien’s book and found a different way to tackle the riding four-seamer.
“In prior years, high spin rate fastballs were a thing, and I kept missing under heaters. I was missing below the ball. In 2021, I was starting to learn a little more about vert break and figuring out how to approach it — knowing the difference between 15 and 20 inches is a big deal, now I can try to swing and miss above the ball in order to hit the four-seam,” Olson said in late August.
Since he made that adjustment, he’s become one of the best hitters in baseball against the four-seam. Look at the top five hitters in “pitch type value” against the fastball — this stat sums up all the balls, strikes, and balls in play to tell you which players have had the most success against a certain pitch type.
But this is just one story in a lineup’s worth. How has Atlanta put together this fearsome group that’s most likely going to break the home run record?
“We’re really good but we’re also a hard team to game plan for with how different we all are,” Olson pointed out. “Eddie Rosario and I are both lefties but I’m probably a little bit easier to game plan for; if you face him, he can hit any pitch. Him, Ozzie (Albies), Michael Harris; they can hit anything. And then you have other guys that will take walks and have a different approach.”
How do you demonstrate this? Here’s one way: The Braves lead the league in work against four-seamers this year, but they do so without exposing a flaw on any other pitch type. The Mariners are No. 2 against the four-seam… and third-to-last and last against sliders and cutters, respectively. The Rays are third-best against the four-seam fastball… and second-to-last against splitters and a negative against sinkers. The Twins are fourth against four-seamers… and last against curveballs. Even the well-rounded Dodgers lineup, which is fifth against the four-seamer, is worse than the Braves against cutters and sinkers.
Here’s another way for the more visually inclined. This heat map shows contact rates for the top nine hitters on the Braves this year. You may notice how different the blobs are from player to player, which highlights the fact that this team has lefties, righties, switch-hitters, high-ball hitters, low-ball hitters, every-ball hitters, and more disciplined hitters. It’s a great mix.
“It’s kind of hard to switch back and forth as a pitcher,” Olson said.
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Pitchers have their strengths, as do hitters, but there’s only one pitcher on the bump at any given moment in a game. The Braves’ lineup gives you nine different looks, increasing the chance that one or two of them will break through. That’s how you hit 300 homers in a season.
Count Reds rookie Spencer Steer as one of the few batters that benefitted from lost time on the field in 2020 — eventually. Away from regular baseball that season, Steer added a leg kick and found more power… but also found a drawback to his new approach.
“I struck out a ton. At first,” Steer said when we talked late this August. “So I tried to find some middle ground, between doing damage, but also walking and being a good ballplayer. That was a big adjustment period. I honed in on my two-strike approach and got better at picking my spots.”
Right now, Steer has the best power numbers of any rookie who strikes out less often than league average. That combination should serve him well even among the larger population. Among players that struck out like he did this year (17 percent to 23 percent) and had above average but not elite power (.170 ISO to .225), his batting line was basically average — but that list of 25 players included Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Francisco Lindor, Trea Turner, Fernando Tatis Jr., Bryan Reynolds, Christian Yelich, and Bobby Witt Jr. That’s heady company.
A great piece from Jay Jaffe over at FanGraphs about how Mookie Betts’ defensive versatility has put him into a dead heat with Ronald Acuña Jr. for the NL MVP race jogged some thoughts loose about my process for voting for that award. I don’t have a vote this year, but when I’ve voted for the award in the past, I’ve tended to value offense over defense just because I think we’re better at measuring offense. I also value raw offensive numbers over park-adjusted sometimes because park factors can be so different from site to site. Consider:
This sort of variance in defensive and park-adjusted production has led to various formulations of Wins Above Replacement that have the two players sorted differently. On the other hand, every site has Betts with a 1.000 OPS and Acuña with a 1.010 OPS. If the WAR I’m starting with has the race as a pick’em, if those WARs are within decimal points of each other, I’m going to hew closer to the stats that have a smaller spread from site to site. It’s not that I think a lack of consensus invalidates a statistic — on the contrary, that lack of consensus is an opportunity for further research and thought, generally — it’s just that when rewarding a player, it probably makes sense to consider what we are most sure of in the moment.
Oakland rookie Zack Gelof hits the ball hard, sort of. Among rookies, he’s got the 15th-best Barrel rate in baseball, right between Gunnar Henderson and James Outman. So he’s good at hitting the ball hard in angles that produce power. By Hard-Hit rate, he’s 32nd, between Corbin Carroll and Masataka Yoshida, so he’s decent at hitting the ball over 95 mph often. By Max EV, he’s 56th out of 68 qualified rookies, and that number is the same in Triple A, where he had another 308 plate appearances of sample. He’s not great at hitting the ball super hard.
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“Maybe down the road, next year, I might unlock something in my swing a little bit and plug into a 110,” the 23-year-old thought. “But with me, I’m just okay with who I am, and I consistently get to my barrel enough. Last night, I got to a ball, 106 off the bat to right center; that’s a home run anywhere. I’m just trying to get to that consistency. If I live at 100, 102, 106 at a good launch angle, that plays to all fields. If I go for 109, it feels like I’m going out of control. It just feels like when I do hit the ball hard, it’s in the right launch angles. I’m not built like Bobby Witt, hitting homers and lower angles at 118.”
This right here might be why there are differing opinions on the value of Max EV (or even 85th or 90th percentile EV) in analytical circles. It mirrors the stuff/command debate to an extent — there are plenty of players that can hit the ball super hard, but do so on the ground or strike out too much to turn those excellent exit velocities into production. But when you’re talking about the upside of the player and what their peak might look like, it’s still true that, generally, hitting the ball harder is good for the hitter. Gelof himself had a .167 ISO in Double A and then a .224 in Triple A, and has projections that range from .114 (by ATC Projections) to .185 (from THE BAT).
Gelof, and his peak power production as his career unfolds, will be a fascinating thing to monitor.
Close your eyes and try to come up with the best five defensive infields in baseball. Maybe you’ll put the Cubs on there. The Padres? Maybe those young Royals with Bobby Witt Jr. are getting better. The Rangers? The Brewers are probably the best defensive team in baseball.
How many teams would you have to come up with before you say the Giants? By one defensive metric (Outs Above Average), the Giants infield is number one defensively in the big leagues. That’s a defense with a former DH at third, the oldest shortstop in baseball and a prospect who played mostly third base at shortstop, and a host of players rotating in and out of first and second base.
Sure, defensive stats don’t all agree, and other metrics don’t tell the same story, but this is a remarkable number for the Giants’ coaching staff even if it’s off some. Kudos to their defensive coaches.
(Photo of Rodríguez: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
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