Mode Switching

A Situational Hitting Sighting

In Monday’s home return against the Pirates the Padres dueled to a 0-0 tie entering the bottom of the seventh. Jurickson Profar led off with a double. Jake Cronenworth followed and struck out after a six pitch battle. This brought up the team’s cleanup hitter Xander Bogaerts who worked the count to 2-0. On the third pitch of the at bat Pirates pitcher Kyle Nicolas missed very badly with a slider in the dirt that bounced away from the catcher. Profar took third base on the wild pitch. And with this the situation for Bogaerts changed significantly. Here is the still frame from the broadcast of the moment the pitch in the dirt bounces away from the catcher:

You can see that the defense was in a typical alignment optimized around preventing balls from getting out of the infield, the shortstop and second baseman near the edge of the outfield grass, and all the infielders shading toward the pull side of the right handed hitter. But once Profar reached third base the defense shifted massively, positioning themselves at the edge of the infield grass:

This is a classic defensive gamble, trading away some chance of keeping a sharp hit on the infield for a higher chance of preventing the runner from third from scoring if a ball is hit softly or right to one of the fielders. And what unfolded next is very interesting.

With the count now 3-0 Nicolas threw a fast ball right down the middle for a strike. That brought the count to 3-1, the quintessential hitter’s count. The 3-1 count lets the hitter take his best swing with no fear of a strikeout, and with a higher chance that the pitcher will try to throw in the strike zone to avoid issuing a walk. This is the count where power hitters earn their paychecks. Year after year hitters swinging 3-1 put up gaudy numbers, and Bogaerts is no exception, he has a career 1.557 OPS in 3-1 counts. He averages a homerun every 9.9 ABs when he puts a 3-1 pitch into play. Extrapolated to a full season (~620 ABs) that’s a 62 home run pace. Classically in this count Xander Bogaerts has been a Ruthian slugger. Here’s a typical 3-1 swing from Bogaerts earlier this season:

That’s a healthy cut. That’s an A-swing. That’s typical for Bogaerts in these counts. And that’s why the swing he took 3-1 on Monday deserves some special attention:

That’s not a power swing. That swing is not capable of producing a home run. That is not what cleanup hitters usually do on 3-1 counts. It was a slider low in the strike zone, maybe the explanation for that swing is Bogaerts was sitting fastball and got fooled by the slider and couldn’t get to his best swing as a result? But watch the slow motion, did Bogaerts get fooled here?

It sure doesn’t look like it. He’s on time with his swing, his head is down and the contact is square. It looks like a deliberately different approach. It looks like he switched to a contact swing.

Perhaps he had reason to. Here’s a camera angle that shows a good look at the defensive alignment in front of Bogaerts:

Here’s the video from this angle:

It’s easy to see why a contact approach might have a better chance at yielding a hit than normal. And with a runner on third any hit is guaranteed to score a run.

Still, that swing was not capable of producing a homerun, and if it was a deliberate contact swing that means that Bogaerts was likely accepting some tradeoff in the probability his swing would lead to an extra-base hit, and a big inning, for a swing with a higher probability of plating the one run. Is that a good tradeoff for a team’s cleanup hitter?

Again this was a 0-0 game in the bottom of the 7th inning. If the Padres could plate the runner on third there’s a very good chance Tanner Scott and Robert Suarez could shut down the Pirates in the 8th and 9th to secure the win. It’s rational to assign a higher win probability to that one run scoring than, say, a run scoring in the first inning when it’s not clear how many runs would be required to win the game. And that knowledge might imply switching from a power swing to a contact swing is a good tradeoff in this situation. We once called this baseball’s Monty Hall problem.

So if Bogaerts did mode switch from power to contact, was that a good tradeoff? We can’t be sure. This has never been studied. The studies that demonstrated the superiority of power hitting as a run maximizing strategy over the long term were done on massive pools of data in which the situational context was stripped away. Those studies structurally can’t say whether it’s a good tradeoff to forgo some run scoring upside for a higher chance at scoring at least one run in these specific situations. And indeed on Monday the Pirates still had two innings to score, and it turned out that two runs were needed to secure the win. Thankfully the Padres added a run in the 8th so when the Pirates scraped across a run in the 9th they still led 2-1. But even with the extra cushion the 9th inning was tenuous. Here’s the play that ended the game:

Safe to say that was a near miss. Another transcendent play from Jackson Merrill saved the game. But the dangers of foregoing upside when you can’t be sure how many runs are needed to win the game was pretty clearly hinted at.

Though we can’t be certain of his intent, there’s reason to believe a more contact oriented approach was front of mind for Bogaerts given the situation. Over the weekend Dennis Lin published an article discussing the 2024 Padres cultivation of MLB’s most contact prone offense. In it he mentions a catch phrase Mike Shildt and hitting coach Victor Rodriguez have distilled: Score one more run than the other team. Rodriguez is clear that situational hitting is a point of emphasis in achieving this goal:

If you put the ball in play, you have a better chance to do something, especially with men in scoring position. I think from day one we have preached, ‘Let’s score one more run than the other team.’ And how we’re gonna do that is by knowing situational hitting, by having a two-strike approach, an approach in which it doesn’t matter if you have two strikes; you still have a chance.

We can’t be certain Bogaerts did switch modes. But there’s a case to be made that if he did, it was a reasonable tradeoff, one that would seem to align with the organizational hitting philosophy.