What Happened to Jose Miranda's Swing During the 2022 Season? (Full Version for Caretakers)

Nevertheless, Miranda’s performance began to cool in August and leveled out for the remainder of the year. He hit .262 over his final 136 plate appearances with far less power production.

How did teams adjust to him and what does it say about his potential going forward? 

Before we start disparaging Miranda’s late season performance, let’s consider some of his strengths. 

His 117 weighted runs created plus – a rate stat that takes into consideration park factors and current run environment of the league – was the seventh best by a Minnesota Twins rookie and tied with notable legend Rod Carew.

From June through August, he led the team with 49 runs driven in and collected 74 hits (behind the eventual AL hit king, Luis Arraez). He was anointed the AL’s Rookie of the Month in July. He carried the Twins offense as best he could through a stretch in which the team was preparing for a late season nosedive.

In that time Miranda showed a keen ability to hit non-fastballs well. His .325 average against non-fastballs during that stretch was the 5th best in major league baseball. This is noteworthy considering how often rookie hitters struggle with spin: Over the last ten years, rookies have posted a .230/.270/.378 line against non-fastballs. 

Unsurprisingly, pitchers adjusted their game plan to Miranda after he showed the propensity to wallop non-fastballs left in the strike zone. In August, teams started to shift to throwing him more sliders and locating them off the plate. Miranda began to swing more often and chased more frequently and so teams continued that trend throughout the rest of the season. 

Miranda did an exceptional job of ambushing pitchers early in the count and this coincided with his ability to hit in-zone breaking balls hard. As pitchers tried to use get-me-over breaking balls to work ahead early, Miranda would attack. Spotting this trend, teams adjusted their approach and began to throw him breaking stuff away rather than risk catching too much of the zone.

Let’s acknowledge here that the division of the data is not as clean as simply turning the calendar. Teams did not wake up on September 1st and decided to throw Miranda more sweeping sliders off the plate – they started to phase those in more in August. But that strategy proved fruitful and likely enticed other teams to follow suit.

Miranda’s success may have prompted another strategy for the opposition. Earlier in the year, he held an average platoon advantage rate against relief pitchers. Meaning that teams were not necessarily ensuring they would gain an edge with a right-handed pitcher on the mound. This year, right-handed hitters in baseball had the platoon advantage against relief pitching in 23.6% of the plate appearances. From June through August, Miranda was at 21.6% (but he held a 27% advantage in June and July alone).

There are two reasons why teams began to make sure they had a right-handed pitcher on the mound when Miranda came to the plate. 

The first is simple lineup construction. In June and July, Miranda often hit behind left-handed sluggers like Trevor Larnach and Alex Kirilloff. Opponents were more likely to use a lefty reliever against Larnach and Kirilloff while rolling the dice for an at bat with Miranda. Meanwhile, in August and after, Miranda was hitting behind Correa and Buxton. 

Once Larnach and Kirilloff were out of the lineup, teams were able to use a nasty righty reliever against Miranda – especially considering he was positioned with Correa ahead of him and Nick Gordon (who hit .190 against all relievers from June onward) following him. Miranda’s percentage of plate appearances with the platoon advantage fell from 21.6% to 10.4%.

Similarly, like the blobby heat map above suggests, teams realized that they could stymie him with sliders and they would dispatch relievers to do just that. In his hot stretch, he saw sliders 27% of the time. During the last month and change, he got sliders 47% of the time out of the pen. 

So those factors explain some of the decline in the latter portion of the season. The other element was how Miranda slowly incorporated bigger movements into his swing.

Take a look at the video below:

What started to happen in August is that Miranda’s barrel tip – a rhythm mechanism during the load process that some hitters use to time up a pitcher – got more pronounced. His hands got lower and further away from his body as he would tip the barrel further toward the left-handed batters’ box. 

Why this happened is unclear. It’s possible that the movement slowly got bigger as Miranda felt the need to add more power to his swing. After all, his home run totals sagged later in the year and as someone in the heart of the order, he may have felt the need to press. 

Similarly, Miranda may have also been aware that pitchers were throwing him more offspeed and breaking balls and the added movement was meant to keep him back for a split second longer. However, it is hard to subscribe to the latter theory since he was so successful against breaking stuff previous to the late season issues. 

Admittedly, Miranda would get to the same launch point (which some would argue is more essential than anything else) at roughly the same time but it’s hard not to conclude that the additional movement is mucking up the system in his timing and swing pattern to some degree. Fractions of inches and seconds matter a lot when trying to get to a round ball on time. 

The combination of the two – a change in how teams were attacking him as well as the small adjustment in his swing pattern – may have been a reason why his late season performance dipped. 

There is a lot to like about Miranda’s future based on his recent past. You have to appreciate how well he was able to hit spin as well as fastballs. The key will be to adjust to that outside slider and stay locked in on spin middle-in. His flatter bat path allowed him to maintain optimal launch angle better than most rookies (31.7% of his balls in play were between 10 and 30 degrees – 3rd highest rate among rookies) and allowed him to spray the ball to all fields with strength in the barrel (his 93 MPH average exit velo to center was the 2nd highest among rookies). 

As hot as Miranda was for the two month stretch in June and July, it is difficult to envision him maintaining that pace over an entire season. Likewise, with his offensive tools and consistent ability to perform at every minor league level, it’s hard to see him replicating the September/October performance for a long stretch, too. 

Based on his swing and his tendency to adjust, Jose Miranda will continue to find success at the plate. Look for him to be an offensive force in the middle of the order.