Can Heyward Lay Off Breaking Balls in the Dirt?
Watching the Braves’ game on Sunday, I think, the announcer noted that Jason Heyward was having trouble laying-off breaking pitches in the dirt, and that is what it looked like to me in the couple of at-bats I have seen from him. I turned to the pitchf/x data to see whether that was the case. Here I plot all non-fastballs Heyward has seen so far: the pitches are color-coded with the FanGraphs PitchF/X section’s color scheme: whiffed pitches are encircled and contacted ones ex-ed. The graph is from the catcher’s perspective, so Heyward, a lefty, stands to the right of the zone, and the location indicated is where the pitch crosses the plate.
That is a striking trend. Of the 18 non-fastballs below the zone, he has swung at 12 of them and not made contact with one. On non-fastballs in the zone, on the other hand, he has 16 swings and just one whiff — and actually swings at a smaller percentage of non-fastballs in the zone than below the zone. So it does look like Heyward is having quite a problem laying off those pitches, and that results in tons of swinging strikes.
At just twenty years old, even a player as phenomenal as Heyward is going to have a transition period — Dave C. talked a little bit about this in yesterday’s podcast. In 31 PAs so far Heyward has an encouraging three HRs and five walks, but also ten strikeouts. So it looks like a big part of this transition period might be these low breaking balls and changeups that will result in a number of swinging strikes. And he will only see more of these pitches going forward if he continues to struggle with them.
Dave Allen's other baseball work can be found at Baseball Analysts.
You’re a bit late on this, as he was swinging and whiffing on all those pitches early, but has already made an adjustment. He now appears to be taking all those pitches low and not swinging at all (however, I cannot recall if all the low pitches he’s been taking were breaking balls or not)
Might be a bit early to declare that “He’s already made the adjustment,” but over the past 3 games, he’s laid off those and only has 2 strike outs against 4 walks. Small sample size, but then again, we’re looking at a trend from the first 7 games, so that’s 43% of available data.
True, it’s probably a little early for either declaration but it looks to me like he’s already made an adjustment. I’m sure Carlos Marmol sliders have done much worse damage that putting a 20-year-old in a 3 game mini-slump. He already looked much better against Lincecum and a tough lefty in Dan Runzler.
Well yea, I mean I wouldn’t use small sample sizes if the original post didn’t also use small sample sizes.
Yea, he’s seen 7 changeups, 6 sliders, and 5 curves the past 2 days and he whiffed on only 3 changeups. He swung at 5 of the changeups, 2 of the sliders, and 4 of the curves.
The changeup whiffs are all due to Mr. Lincecum, who Heyward faced on Sunday.
Make that he swung at 1 curve (and fouled it off).
He was clearly outmatched against Lincecum. But who isn’t? He homered off the next pitcher he saw.