Miguel Sano’s Increased Patience Leading to Sustainable Results
By Jason Burke
The Minnesota Twins are off to a much better start in 2017, sitting at an even .500 at 7-7, way ahead of their 2016 start when they dropped their first nine contests and didn’t gather their seventh win of the season until April 26, and held that win total until May 2. Slugger Miguel Sano is still only batting .245, which is actually an improvement over his 2016 output, but he is a much bigger force at the plate in the early going.
We’re just a couple of weeks into the season, which is always an interesting time for baseball fans, beat writers and those of us that like to make wild declarations on the internet. Are the results that we’re seeing through the first handful of games sustainable, or will old routines win out and take over once more? That is part of the fun of writing about early season stat lines.
While the Minnesota Twins likely won’t be making a playoff push just yet this season, if their pitching continues to produce at current rates, they could be in good shape. One factor that could lead to a somewhat surprising season for the club would be the sustained output of Miguel Sano, who is still striking out in over 30 percent of his plate appearances, but not at quite os high of a rate.
The other factor for Sano’s early season surge has been his improved walk rate, which has just about doubled from his 2016 mark, from 10.9% to 21.4%. Add in four home runs, 13 RBI and a wRC+ of 176, and Sano’s production at the plate ranks among the league leaders so far.
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In looking at his page on FanGraphs, we see that his walk rate (21.4) is relatively close to his strikeout rate (30.4) and his WAR output so far (0.7) is already more than half of last year’s 1.3. All of this looks nice on its own merits.
The real bread and butter of sustainable output resides a little further down the page where they go into how often he is swinging, and where those pitches are located. Last season he swung at 24.0% of pitches he saw outside of the zone. This season that number is 20.5, which means he’s being more selective. He is also making contact with fewer pitches outside of the zone. This season he is sitting at 25.9, down from 37.6.
In contrast, he is swinging at more pitches inside the zone, up to 67.9 from 61.3, and is making a tremendous amount of contact, currently sitting at 84.7 percent, up from 78.8 last season. The number of overall pitches he’s swinging at hasn’t changed much at all, up 0.6% from 41.0 to 41.6.
While there isn’t a fancy graph to show all of this info, basically what it all boils down to is this: Miguel Sano is swinging at fewer pitches outside of the zone (hence the increased walk rate) and is swinging at more strikes, and making more contact on those pitches. As an added bonus, he’s also swinging and missing less often, sitting at 13 percent, which is an improvement for him.
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The main question from here until the end of the season will be if this approach can be sustainable for the Twins slugger. As an optimist with Miguel Sano on their fantasy team, I’m sure hoping so.