MLB: Six Surging Sluggers Over the Last Month
Several MLB power hitters have overcome slow starts during the past month. Here are six sluggers who are heating up.
Every year, there are MLB players who get off to slow starts. They stumble out of the gate, can’t hit a lick in April, continue to struggle in May, and fans write them off. If they play on your favorite team, you may be hoping the team will look for a replacement. Perhaps they’ll bring up the hot-hitting prospect from AAA or trade for an upgrade. This is particularly true if you expect your favorite team to be a contender.
If you play fantasy baseball, you have to decide just how long you can put up with the lack of production. If you’re a particularly snake-bit fantasy owner, you have likely had the experience of dropping a player you had high hopes for only to see him rebound after he leaves your roster. Sometimes, the improvement is immediate. You drop a guy and he hits two bombs the next day. You try to get him back but another team has a higher waiver priority and you’ve lost him.
This year is no exception. There are a number of players who were expected to produce but didn’t hit much at all for the first couple months. They have now started to hit, although their season lines may not yet show it. Let’s look at some players who were expected to produce, got off to bad starts, and have since rebounded.
Next: Joey Votto
1B Joey Votto, Cincinnati Reds
When Joey Votto has a down season, he’s still much better than league average as a hitter. His last “down” season was in 2014, when he hit .255/.390/.409, but was limited to 62 games because of injury. His wRC+ that year was 127, meaning he was still 27% better than a league average hitter. Even a bad Joey Votto is still good.
This year, a truly bad Joey Votto showed up at the beginning of the year and stuck around for almost two months. Votto hit .207/.330/.367 through May 29. His wRC+ was a below-average 84. A .255 BABIP was a big part of the problem. Votto has a career BABIP of .355 and the only time he’s ever had a BABIP below .300 was during that “bad” 2014 season. Votto is generally in the .350 to .375 range. He was also striking out more than he ever has, with a 26.6 percent strikeout rate. He was hitting the ball hard (43.7 percent hard hit rate), but too often on the ground. This was not the Joey Votto we were looking for.
The Joey Votto we were looking for showed up about a month ago. Since May 30, Votto has hit .318/.453/.529. His strikeout rate is still a little higher than his career average, but he’s walking close to 19 percent of the time over the last month and the balls are dropping in for a .404 BABIP. He’s no longer hitting the ball on the ground 50% of the time and he’s spraying the ball around the field quite well. His season line isn’t close to what we expected, but he’s on his way.
Next: Brian Dozier
2B Brian Dozier, Minnesota Twins
Coming into the 2016 season, Brian Dozier had become a reliable source of power at the second base position. He used a pull-centric approach to launch home runs to left field at a steady rate. His pull percentage from 2013 to 2015 was 52.3 percent and he hit the ball hard or medium 82.6 percent of the time. During this stretch, no second baseman in baseball hit more home runs than Brian Dozier. Last season, Dozier’s 28 home runs led all second baseman by a good margin. Robinson Cano was second, with 21 dingers.
Dozier got off to a rough start in 2016. He bottomed out on May 22 when he was hitting .199/.284/.318, with four home runs in 170 plate appearances. He was still pulling the ball the majority of the time, 51% percent, but was hitting the ball softly more often than usual. He also had a low .218 Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP). He’s never had a great BABIP, just .269 for his career, but the .218 mark he had through the first seven weeks of the season was part of the problem.
Since May 24, Dozier has been much better. He’s hit .322/.402/.591, with a .348 BABIP. He’s pulled the ball 61 percent of the time and is hitting the ball softly less often than before. He’s back doing what he does best—pull the ball into the left field stands with authority. His season line is back where it should be and he’s on pace for another 20-homer season.
Next: Kendrys Morales
DH Kendrys Morales, Kansas City Royals
Kendrys Morales had his first full-time season in 2009 when he busted out with 34 homers and 108 RBI. He was off to a good start the next season when he had the unfortunate broken leg during a home plate celebration of a grand slam he hit to win a game against the Seattle Mariners in late May. He missed all of the 2011 season, but came back to post two good seasons in 2012 and 2013.
The 2014 season was ugly. Morales turned down a contract offer from the Mariners, which attached a compensatory first-round pick if he signed with another team before the MLB draft on June 5. Morales sat out the first two-plus months of the season and signed with the Twins on June 7. He played with the Twins and Mariners in 2014 and was awful, hitting just .218/.274/.338. Morales signed with the Royals last year and bounced back with a .269/.362/.485 season.
This year started very poorly. Morales struggled through April, May, and the first part of June. At the end of the day on June 5, Morales was hitting .191/.257/.320. Despite that ugly batting line, Morales’ batted ball profile looked fine. He was hitting the ball hard at a good rate (34.6 percent) and spraying the ball around the field much like he usually does. His strikeout rate was up from around 16-17 percent to 20 percent. The most glaring problem seemed to be a .211 BABIP. Morales has a .298 career BABIP. The last time his BABIP was under .290 was that dreadful 2014 partial season, when it was .244.
Since June 5, the balls have begun to fall in. Morales has hit .377/.450/.660, with a .421 BABIP. He’s hit the ball hard an incredible 47.6 percent of the time and 33 percent of his fly balls have left the park. He won’t continue to be this hot, and his season line still isn’t up to expectations, but it will be soon. The one caveat with Morales is that he’ll likely miss a few upcoming games when the Royals play five games in National League parks in the latter part of this week.
Next: Adam Jones
OF Adam Jones, Baltimore Orioles
A graph of Adam Jones’ career would follow what many would guess is the typical aging pattern of a Major League player. Since becoming a regular in 2008 at the age of 22, Jones has seen his wRC+ rise steadily, then slowly decline. Weighted runs created-plus (wRC+) is a statistic that credits a hitter for the value of each outcome and is adjusted for offensive environment and ballpark effects. Jones’ wRC+ was 84 when he was 22 years old in 2008. It could be said that he was 16 percent below league average as a hitter.
He started to improve over the next three years, with seasons of 103, 105, and 109 wRC+. He peaked at the age of 26 with a 127 wRC+ in 2012, then stayed near his peak over the next two years, with seasons of 119 and 116. Last year, at the age of 29, he dropped to a 109 wRC+, which is still above average and mirrored his age 25 season.
Jones is playing his age 30 season this year, so you would expect a slight decline from last year. Instead of a slight decline, though, Jones appeared to have suddenly fallen off a table through the first two months of the season. After his game on May 30th, his wRC+ was 70 and he was hitting .228/.287/.357.
Much like Morales, Jones’ batted ball profile didn’t show any glaring warning signs. His career hard hit percentage is 32.1 percent. Through May 30 of this year, his hard hit percentage was 34.3 percent. His pull rate was almost identical to his career pull rate and his fly ball rate was similar to his career rate. One noticeable difference was that Jones was hitting more ground balls than he normally does and fewer line drives.
Since May 31, Jones has hit .321/.353/.634, with 10 homers in 120 plate appearances. He’s hit the ball harder (41.9 percent hard hit percentage) and put the ball in the air more often (45 percent fly ball rate) and the results have been impressive. Jones now has 15 home runs and 48 RBI, with a 105 wRC+. He’s right back in line with his career trend.
Next: Jayson Werth
OF Jayson Werth, Washington Nationals
After two very good seasons with the Nationals in 2013 and 2014, Jayson Werth really struggled as a 36-year-old last year when he hit .221/.302/.384. Along with his struggles with the stick, he was limited to 88 games because of injuries. The Natinals still owe Werth $21 million for each of the next two seasons, so they were really hoping he would bounce back.
Through May 28, Werth had not bounced back. In fact, he was even worse than he’d been in 2015. His strikeout rate was up to 23.3 percent, which would be his highest rate since 2011, and his walk rate was down below 10 percent for the first time since 2004. He had a .254 BABIP, which was almost identical to his career-low .253 BABIP of 2015. When he hit well in 2013 and 2014, Werth had a hard hit percentage of 39.9 percent and 39.2 percent. Through May 28 of this year, Werth’s hard hit percentage was 35.5%, which was closer to last year’s 34.4 percent than the higher mark he’d had in the two previous seasons.
Since May 28, Werth has looked much more like his old self. He’s still striking out more than he had in 2013 and 2014, but he’s also walked 14.3 percent of the time and his BABIP has been .397. That will likely come down, but Werth’s career suggests his BABIP should be closer to .325 than the .250-ish mark he had in 2015 and the first couple months of this season. He’s hit .325/.418/.542 since May 28 and he’s had a hard hit percentage that is in the top five in baseball over the last 30 days.
Next: Jose Abreu
1B Jose Abreu, Chicago White Sox
Jose Abreu burst upon the scene as a 27-year-old rookie from Cuba in 2014 when he hit .317/.383/.581. He was 67 percent better than league average as a hitter. He followed that up with a not-as-good .290/.347/.502 season (129 wRC+). It was still a good year, but not nearly what he’d done in his first year in the U.S.
This season, Abreu got off to a brutal start. On June 1, he was hitting .237/.301/.374. His bad start could be attributed to a number of issues. His BABIP was .278, down from .356 in 2014 and .333 in 2015. His hard hit percentage was down, from 36.4 percent in 2014 and 34.2 percent in 2015 to 31.7 percent through the first couple months of this season. He was also pulling the ball less often than he had in his first two years.
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Since June 3, Abreu’s hard hit percentage is up slightly, but he still isn’t pulling the ball as much as he did during his first two years in the big leagues. His BABIP is up during this stretch (.333) and his strikeout rate is down. Overall, he still has a below-average wRC+ of 96 for the season, but it’s been 148 since June 3. For most of this month, Abreu has hit somewhere in between his first two seasons.