Southpaws And Strategies

Southpaws

One troubling theme that has emerged through the fist third of the season is the Padres repeated struggles against left handed pitchers. Friday’s game against the Yankees featured lefty Carlos Rodón against the Padres at Petco, and saw the trend continue in an 8-0 drubbing. Is there some reason why?

Let’s start with the Padres OPS splits between right handed and left handed pitchers the past three years:

The Padres have been a bit better against lefties the past two seasons but in 2024 there’s a sudden drop in production. It’s not just one player who’s struggled against left handers in 2024, most of the hitters who’ve been in the starting lineup are struggling:

Not a single hitter on that list has an OPS higher than .633 against left handers this year, but other than rookie Merrill who has no prior seasons for comparison, every hitter above has historically performed much better against left handers than they are this season:

Those are pretty drastic deviations from career performance.

So what could it be? After facing Rodón Friday the Padres have faced a left handed starting pitcher 16 times this season. When you break down those 16 starts a pattern starts to emerge. First, only four of the sixteen starts were against pitchers with a worse than average ERA. These four starters pitched to an ERA of 6.53 so far this year, much higher than the league average of 3.98. And the Padres won all four games against these below average starters. This chart has the pitchers’ name, team, date they faced the Padres, and numbers against the league as a whole:

The Padres took care of business against the lefties that were struggling against the league in general. In the other twelve games they faced lefties that were generally laying waste to the rest of the league:

There’s a few things to note here. First, these pitchers’ cumulative ERA is an incredible 2.55 in 546 innings pitched. Second, Austin Gomber is a name we usually have coded to below average starter, but he appears to be living up to some of the potential that made him the centerpiece of the package the Rockies received for Nolan Arenado. Third, on this list are also the early Cy Young favorites Shota Imanaga, Ranger Suarez, and a rejuvenated Chris Sale, as well as prior Cy Young candidates Max Fried and Rodón. Perhaps not surprisingly the Padres are 3-11 in these games. The lion’s share of left handed starting pitching the Padres have faced has been well above average. And we would expect from that that the Padres hitters might perform below their career averages which were accumulated by facing a more representative sample of the average left handed pitching in the league. Overall the quality of left handed starting pitching the Padres have faced has been superb, putting up a 3.01 ERA against the league as a whole.

It’s not unreasonable to guess that the Padres struggles against left handed pitching have a lot to do with facing many excellent left handed pitchers to date, and therefore we should expect a regression to the mean as the next 100+ games play out and the sample of left handed pitching the Padres face normalizes.

The one indicator suggesting we should temper expectations is the degree to which Padres hitters just seem to be having down years in general:

Only Cronenworth is above his career OPS. Bogaerts is likely out until near the end of the season and won’t have a chance to improve on what was shaping up to be his worst year as a pro before his injury. Tatis and Machado have not been right. Both also had down seasons last year compared with their career averages, but not to the degree we’re seeing this year.

In Fernando Tatis Jr’s case the evidence something is wrong is mixed. He set his career high in max exit velocity at 116.7 MPH earlier this season and is hitting the ball hard at about the same rate as he did a season ago, and bat tracking shows excellent bat speed. It doesn’t look like a pure athleticism issue. But his weak contact rate is above 5% and that’s by far a career high. The issue appears to be with squaring the ball up consistently. And this often has roots in timing or mechanics. Despite this Tatis’ expected wOBA is a very good .378, while his actual wOBA an ok .329. Some bad luck probably has struck him, but it’s really hard to know what to expect here.

It’s a bit different with Machado. Similar to Tatis, strength and bat speed do not seem to be the issue, he continues to have 89th percentile exit velocities and 86th percentile bat speed, and his hard hit rate is actually slightly higher than his career average. But Machado’s on record saying he’s still playing through pain after offseason surgery and it’s limiting his mechanics. Something seems very off with his mechanics. He is putting the ball on the ground at rates that blow away any season he’s had previously:

A 49% ground ball rate is eye-popping. And it doesn’t seem to be an issue with pitch selection, he’s not simply swinging at more balls down and out of the zone:

He’s actually swinging at fewer pitches down and out of the zone than in the past.

What he’s doing is topping the ball at career high rates. And as a result when you watch him hit you see he’s doing this on balls that really shouldn’t lead to grounders:

Unfortunately this tendency caught up to him in the highest leverage at bat of the season so far in the first game of the home series against the Rockies. With bases loaded only one out, down by a run 5-4:

That pitch is high in the strike zone. He times it perfectly. He hits it off the barrel of the bat. That pitch is quite elevated. This shouldn’t be a ground ball:

His ground ball rate being through the roof this year just doesn’t seem to have its roots in pitch selection or being off balance/fooled more often, it seems to have a mechanical explanation. You have to wonder if playing through pain has had any effect on his swing path. He’s put 145 balls in play this season and 71 have been grounders. That’s why despite consistently hitting the ball hard he has the lowest slugging percentage of his career at .363 and it’s not particularly close.

What’s notable about the at bat above is that with less than two outs and a runner at third base a fly ball is much more valuable than it normally is, any modestly deep fly out is likely to score the tying run in that situation. It raises the question of whether the typical approach in that situation, looking to drive the ball as hard as possible, is the correct one strategically when the hitter is producing grounders ~50% of the time.

An interesting juxtaposition is to watch a similar at bat from the hitter Machado is most often compared to.

Swing Strategies

In the Phillies/Nationals game last Saturday Bryce Harper was at the plate with the game tied at 3-3 in the bottom of the tenth with runners on first and third and one out. With Harper at the dish and a base open the Nationals’ strategy is a foregone conclusion: they’re not going to give him anything to hit. Teams pitch around Harper all the time and he’s happy to take the walk. With the game on the line he’s not going to chase pitches he can’t drive. Or so you’d think. Watch what he actually does:

Harper chases three straight pitches he knows are going to be down and out of the strike zone. He’s not fooled on these pitches. Watch Harper’s swing from the side in slow motion at the 33 second mark. This is not an A-swing. This is a contact swing, aimed at lifting a ball off his shoe tops:

That pitch was in a zone where Harper’s average launch angle is zero:

The ball he hit had a launch angle of 18 degrees, a guaranteed fly ball. It looked deliberate.

As Bryce Harper was at the plate the broadcast flashed this graphic:

Keeping track of RBI or RBI efficiency feels quaint now: it is just crediting a player for things he didn’t really produce. Unless he’s driving himself in with a home run, RBI are more reflective of his teammates getting on base, and there’s no skill in driving in runs beyond just hitting the ball hard as often as possible. The sabermetric cannon is that situational hitting is a mirage, there is a correct approach to take at the plate every time: try to drive the ball out of the park. That is almost certainly the best run maximizing strategy over the long term. But watching certain hitters makes you wonder if players don’t have just a bit more agency over the short term than the cannon gives them credit for. Bryce Harper is a baseball genius. He put in one of the best at bats anyone has ever seen in the deciding moment of the 2022 NLCS against the Padres. And he is a dominant power hitter with an elite eye at the plate. Which is precisely why this at bat is so fascinating. It looks like he has the bat control and situational awareness to recognize when a swing decision away from doing maximum damage is the win maximizing strategy, if not the run maximizing strategy. And if so, maybe his knack for driving in runs isn’t just the slug he provides... maybe he has another gear, not the higher gear we’ve fruitlessly searched for to find that definition of the ‘clutch’ player that rises to the moment. What if being clutch means knowing when to shift into a lower gear? This play worsened Harper’s OPS and wOBA and pretty much any other advanced metric to capture his value as a hitter. And it won the game.