Chicago White Sox: Is Avisail Garcia Becoming a Superstar, or Experiencing One Sterling Month?
By Jason Burke
The Chicago White Sox acquired Avisail Garcia in a three-team deal that netted them Frankie Montas (now with Oakland, via Los Angeles) and J.B. Wendelken (dealt to Oakland in the Brett Lawrie trade) while sending Jake Peavy to the Boston Red Sox. That was back in 2013. Now, four years later, Garcia is living up to some of his promise.
Nearing his 26th birthday. Avisail Garcia is starting to produce with the Chicago White Sox to the tune of an AL best .368 batting average, a .409 on-base percentage, five homers, 20 driven in, and an fWAR of 1.2. At this rate, he’s on pace to hit 30 bombs, drive in 120 and have an fWAR of 7.2. His career high in each of those? 13 homers (2015), 59 RBI (2015) and a 0.5 fWAR from 2016. The track record is certainly not on his side in terms of keeping up something similar throughout the course of the season.
One of the reasons for skepticism would be his incredibly high .443 BABIP, which is 134 points higher than his mark last season. Last year DJ LeMahieu led all of baseball with a .388 BABIP, followed by a number of speed-oriented players, and before long the 16th best BABIP in all of baseball is Ian Desmond at .350. In other words, anything north of .400 is going to be extremely difficult to sustain, even with tons and tons of luck.
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Another reason that Garcia’s hot start could be a mirage is that his approach hasn’t changed all that much. His walk rate has actually gone down (7.5% to 5.4%) and while his strikeout rate has also dipped, it hasn’t been by a large margin, down from 25.4% to 22.6%. The biggest difference in his swing percentages is that his swing rate inside the strike zone has gone up from 76.4% to 82.9%. The rest of the rates (overall swing rate, swinging strike rate, etc.) have all stayed pretty consistent. He is swinging at pitches outside of the zone slightly less, but nothing that is attention grabbing, a difference of just 1.4%.
On the bright side, Garcia is lifting the ball more with his swing this season, doubling his launch angle over last season, and according to Statcast, there doesn’t appear to be any one pitch that is giving him a hard time.
Before this season the book on him seemed to be to pitch him down and in or down and away, but out of the strike zone. It still seems as though pitchers are aiming to keep the ball low, but when he’s getting a pitch up in the zone he’s crushing it. His exit velocities at the top of the zone from inside to outside pitches so far are 95, 110.7 and 97.6, compared to 74.6, 81.8 and 84.9 last season.
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So can he keep up the pace that he is on? Not without making some adjustments to his approach, which means walking more and continuing to chip away at that strikeout rate. That BABIP is going to fall, and with it, so will his batting average. That said, he’s in great position to set new career highs in home runs, RBI and WAR, and could even put up a WAR somewhere in the three to four range with just modest production the rest of the way.