Boston Red Sox: Did Xander Bogaerts change his swing?

Boston Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts is off to an incredibly hot start. Is it just a hot streak or did he make sustainable changes to his approach at the plate? Early indications are that it might be real.

One series is an impossibly small sample size to draw any firm conclusions from, but the hype around Boston Red Sox post-prospect Xander Bogaerts is intense right now nonetheless. It’s no secret that Bogaerts wasn’t getting the ball in the air enough last season, and talk of changes in approach are rampant. And, it’s easy to infer that all the power he has displayed so far is due to getting on board with the launch angle revolution. But causation does not equal correlation, so we still need to ask the question: Did Xander Bogaerts change his swing?

Enter Tim Hyers:

The addition of Tim Hyers to the coaching staff brought with it an expectation that the Boston Red Sox would, collectively, get the ball into the air a little more. After all, the club had some of the lowest ranking players for balls hit between 19 and 39 degrees last year. That list included Bogaerts who was 172nd out of 180 players with 450 PA or more in 2017.

So what can we discern from the opening series in Tampa this past weekend? Bogaerts has a 310 wRC+ after four games, good for 8th in the majors. He hasn’t drawn a walk yet, but that’s mostly because he’s been murdering the ball. Six of his eight hits have gone for extra bases.

His soft contact percentage for the Tampa series was just 13.3%. That’s astonishingly low for a season-long rate, but in such a small sample has no predictive value. Besides, soft contact wasn’t his problem last year. He posted a 19.7% soft contract rate in 2017 for the Boston Red Sox, which put him just ahead of names like Anthony Rizzo and Justin Upton. In fact, his hard his percentage isn’t even all that out of whack with 2017. It was 31.4% last year as compared to 33.3% over the weekend.

Next: Optimal Launch Angle