Everything Is Bigger in Texas, Except Adolis García’s Concept of the Strike Zone

Back in February, I took a look at Adolis García, a player who had long vexed me. Here was one of the few remaining survivors of the Rangers’ late-2010s rebuild, coming off back-to-back three-win seasons just as his club was swinging back into contention.

García may have been an above-average all-around right fielder, but he got there creatively: Good defense, aggressive baserunning, and hard contact when he got wood on the ball. But because he swung the bat more or less indiscriminately, he never walked and contact was hard to come by.

I try not to be too much of a sabermetrics 2.0 stick-in-the-mud, but OBP is really important, particularly at a position like right field, which comes with high offensive expectations. The ability to get on base might be the single thing I’d value most in a corner player, and García just wasn’t good at it.

Nevertheless, I concluded that because García’s quality of contact seemed durable, the Rangers could count on him going forward as they filled out the rest of the lineup with big league-quality hitters for the first time in several years. This was a purposely charitable reading of the situation, possibly even pollyanna-ish. One commenter predicted that “the bottom is going to fall out.” A defensible, even reasonable position to take, I thought. García was headed into his age-30 season, and any slowdown in his bat speed would be cataclysmic, given the shape of his offensive game.

In the last week of the regular season, the Rangers have one hand on the AL West title and a first-round bye. Now seems like a good time to check in García’s bottom. It has not fallen out. Far from it; he is putting the finishing touches on a season I never thought he had in him.

García is hitting .245/.327/.505 with 37 home runs. And get this: he’s walking 10.2% of the time. This guy, who was in the bottom 10% of the league in chase and whiff rate and was running OBPs in the .280s, is now above-average in both OBP and walk rate. A player who a year ago was a bit of an oddity, teetering perilously close to an offensive cliff, is now just your garden variety All-Star-level corner outfielder.

One of my favorite pages on Baseball Savant is the year-to-year change leaderboard, which shows (as you might suspect) how much a player has gone up or down in a certain stat from year to year, and how great that change is relative to other players in the league. This leaderboard is particularly kind to García:

The Rangers right fielder has one of the biggest increases in walk rate from 2022 to 2023, and he’s done it for the most obvious reason you can think of: He’s not swinging at pitches outside the zone as much.

Last year, García had one of the 10 highest O-Swing rates in baseball; in 2023, he’s still been above average, but 54th out of 135 qualified hitters isn’t bad at all. The hitters around him on the leaderboard are guys like Alec Bohm, Corey Seager, and Shohei Ohtani — definitely aggressive hitters, but hardly profligate.

Here’s the exciting part, or at least the part that could become interesting if it means what I think it means. García has become more selective out of the zone on fastballs, but not by a huge margin. Almost all of his gains have come on breaking balls and off-speed pitches. His wOBA against breaking balls is up more than 100 points from 2022. His wOBA against off-speed pitches has dropped from .343 in 2022 to .268 in 2023, but his xwOBA against that pitch class is only down from .313 to .308, so some of that regression could be noise or bad luck. If that represents a real improvement in pitch recognition, it could be a game changer for a player who hits the ball as hard as García does.

Speaking of which: In addition to improving his plate discipline and walk rate, García is hitting the ball in the air more. His improvement in that area is remarkable; according to Baseball Savant’s numbers, his FB% has jumped 10 points from last year to this one, which is the biggest improvement in the league.

Small wonder that García already has a new career high with 37 home runs despite a stint on the IL earlier this month. That’s also the highest total by any Rangers hitter since Joey Gallo in 2018. It’s not out of the question that García could get to 40 by the end of the final weekend of the season.

The Rangers lost 94 games last year and put enormous resources into improving the pitching staff by acquiring Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Jordan Montgomery, Nathan Eovaldi, Andrew Heaney, and Aroldis Chapman. (Some of those acquisitions have been better value for money than others so far.) But Texas also had to improve its offense as well. In 2022, the Rangers were 12th in runs scored but 20th in wRC+. Every team that made the postseason last year finished in the top 16, with a three-digit team wRC+. That includes the Rays and Guardians, who famously struggled to produce much offense in October.

The Rangers have more than made up their offensive gap to their competition and currently sit third in the league in both runs scored and wRC+. Most of the credit for that improvement is going to go to Seager, who was fine last year and is hitting like the second coming of Honus Wagner this year, and rookie third baseman Josh Jung. But it was imperative that García at least remain an above-average hitter, and he’s done far more than that. He might not be as weird a player as he was in previous years, but the Rangers won’t mind.