B-E Aggressive! Twins Hitters Are Letting The World Pass Them By

When a team is 0-9, the list of things that are going well is obviously going to be far shorter than the list of things going wrong, but pointing fingers doesn’t do much good. Any one player’s struggles would be masked if his teammates weren’t also struggling. So the question is, absent sweeping systemic changes -- Mauer leads off! DH for Byron Buxton and let the pitchers hit! -- is there a team-wide change that could help jump start the team?

Short answer: No. No silver bullet exists for an entire lineup.

Fin

Ok, fine, it won’t help everyone, but there is one thing that may help a few of the Twins’ hitters to get going, which may be enough to push an extra run or two across and steal them a win. It’s absolutely worth noting that, while these numbers accurately reflect what has happened so far and match up reasonably well with historical trends, we’re still 2-3 weeks from getting anything even remotely resembling stable data. That said, there’s enough smoke here to believe there may be fire, too.

One of the things that Sano drew quite a bit of praise for last season, and Byung-Ho Park showed this spring, was their patience. Both sluggers are willing to wait for the best possible pitch to drive, even if it means watching a few hittable pitches go by, and they’re certainly not the only Twins to adopt that philosophy. If doing so leads to more walks or better pitches to hit later in plate appearances, then so much the better, but as evidenced by the fact that the Twins have the fourth most strikeouts in baseball and have produced the fewest runs, a change in mentality may help break the team’s offensive funk.

The most patient hitter in the majors leagues so far in 2016 is the A’s Marcus Semien, who is seeing 4.88 pitches per plate appearance (P/PA). That will likely come down a bit as the top marks from 2013-2015 were 4.59, 4.45, and 4.37 respectively. Seeing four or more pitches per plate appearance is not necessarily rare, but it’s hard to argue that a player who does it lacks discipline. Right now, of the Twins’ regulars, Buxton and Park fall into that category with Sano just missing. (Oswaldo Arcia has actually seen the most P/PA on the team at 6.00, but in just four PAs, so he doesn’t really qualify. Impressive nonetheless, though.)

Park is clearly still learning the league, which makes it hard to gauge exactly what is going on with his approach. He’s seeing fewer off-speed and breaking pitches than many expected, but he isn’t performing worse against them than he is against the fastballs he has been thrown. This is good in the sense that he doesn’t have an easily identifiable weakness teams can exploit, but since he isn’t hitting anything -- hard or soft -- it’s hard to say whether he’s hitting off-speed and breaking pitches as well as he’s hitting fastballs or faring just as badly against fastballs as he is against more challenging pitches.

Much like Jung-Ho Kang’s struggles in the first half of last year, Park’s early season issues should come as little surprise given his unfamiliarity with the league, and it seems reasonable to expect that he’ll come around as he starts seeing pitchers for the second and third time. However, there is one sign of passivity that is worrisome.

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As you can see from this heat map from Brooksbaseball.net, Park is getting hittable pitches but isn’t striking at them, particularly early in counts. With two strikes, pitchers are pounding him low and out of the zone, but with 0 or 1 strike, they seem perfectly willing to challenge him in the middle third of the strike zone. He’s going to have to show that he’s capable of punishing mistakes over the plate if he’s going to command any respect from pitchers. Until he does that, they have little reason not to get strike one over the heart of the plate, then aim low and away until they catch a corner or an edge.

Buxton is a fundamentally different hitter than the others, but it’s worth looking into his approach, too, since the Twins dream of a day when he can lead off instead of praying he’ll be able to turn the lineup over. Unlike Sano and Eddie Rosario, who seem to have regressed significantly since last season, Buxton doesn’t look all that different: He still looks overmatched at the plate, though a deeper dive into the numbers would show regression from his brief 2015 stint as well.

As is often the case with hitters who don’t have a ton of power, pitchers have been challenging Buxton in the strike zone. He’s seeing a nominally above-average number of pitches in the zone (48.6 percent for Buxton compared to an average of 47.1 percent) and pitchers aren’t shy about using their fastballs against him. Buxton swings at a below-average amount of pitches, but his percentages are skewed: He swings at a well above-average amount of pitches outside the zone (35.7 percent compared to a league average of 29.2 percent) and a well below-average amount of pitches inside it (61.5 percent compared to a league average of 65.9 percent), which leaves him with a contact rate almost 9 percent below league average and almost none of it is classified as hard contact.

Of Buxton’s 24 plate appearances so far, he has gotten ahead 1-0 just eight times and fallen behind 0-1 the other 16 times. Going back to last season, Buxton has put the first pitch in play just 12 times in 163 plate appearances; pitchers know that they can get ahead with a first-pitch strike, then nibble until Buxton gets himself out by swinging at a pitch out of the zone. Obviously “swing at fewer pitches out of the strike zone” is great advice for any hitter at any level, albeit not really useful, but getting aggressive against first-pitch strikes may keep Buxton from seeing so many pitches he can’t decide which ones to attack and which ones to let pass.

Buxton could have seen first-hand the benefits of some early count aggression as Sano ambushed more than a few pitchers last season, hitting .700/.714/1.650 the 21 times he put the first pitch in play. If he had picked up right where he left off last season and were hitting the cover off the ball, Sano’s modified approach would look like maturity; given the fact that he’s still searching for his first extra-base hit, it looks a bit more like passivity.

Sano is swinging at fewer pitches overall (37.4 percent of pitches he sees compared to 40.2 percent last season) and the good news is that most of that growth is coming from a six percentage point drop in swings at pitches out of the strike zone (18.5 percent this year, down from 25.8 percent last year). The downside is that when he IS swinging, he’s making less contact. Drawing a lot of walks is essential for a hitter who strikes out a lot and is expected to produce most of his value via the home run, but Sano isn’t capitalizing when he’s ahead in the count by punishing pitchers forced to put the ball in the strike zone. Whether it’s looking for too perfect a pitch or if he’s getting fooled, Sano is using his eye to put pitchers in a precarious spot, then letting them get back into the count and work the corners when they regain their margin.

He needn’t adopt Mauer’s plate approach, but If Sano starts putting 0-0, 1-1, and 0-1 pitches into play the way he did last season, he’s liable to see more driveable pitches on 1-0, 2-1, and 3-2 counts. Sano has proven that he has the eye to take a walk when it’s given to him, what he needs to show now is that walking him is by far the safest course of action.

For inexperienced hitters, which Park, Buxton, and Sano all are in one sense or another, there are underlying issues like strike zone judgment and comfort with opposing pitchers that can make being aggressive early in counts more difficult or undesirable. However, since their outcomes can’t get much worse and the current process isn’t even producing the building blocks of success, it may be time to simplify the plan at the plate to “See ball, hit ball” since heaven knows all three of them have shown themselves to be supremely capable of doing so.

Once the pressure is off and the team has a few wins under its belt, perhaps it will make sense for Park and Sano to go back to making opposing pitchers labor during their plate appearances, but even a tired pitcher isn’t useful if no one is making him pay for his mistakes.