JABO: Lucas Duda Ends His Slump
Coming into game four of the NLCS, Lucas Duda was having the worst postseason of any hitter on any team who qualified for the postseason. During the playoffs, he had come to the plate 27 times and made 22 outs, 13 of them via the strikeout. All three of his hits were singles, and the only run he had knocked in came on a groundout. Things were going so poorly for Duda that, in game three, he attempted a bunt after Yoenis Cespedes led off the sixth inning with a single to right field. When your slugging first baseman is just trying to beat the shift to get himself on when the go-ahead run is already standing on first base, you know he’s not exactly abounding in confidence in his own abilities.
So when Jason Hammel watched Curtis Granderson steal second base during Cespedes’ first inning at-bat tonight, part of him had to be okay with that; it opened up first base, and with two outs and a slumping Duda on deck, pitching around Cespedes become the obvious course of action. It wasn’t officially an intentional walk, but Hammel wasn’t pound the strike zone, and seemed quite content to face Duda with men on rather than letting Cespedes get a real shot at driving Granderson in.
So, after four balls to Cespedes, up stepped Duda. Hammel, struggling with his command, fell behind 2-0, but then challenged him with a fastball right down the middle; Duda fouled it off. Of course he did. Hammel then came back with a curveball on the inner half, and Duda swung through that, pushing the count to 2-2. Hammel was just one strike away from getting out of the inning unscathed, and one strike away against a guy with a 49% strikeout rate in October.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Add to this the fact that Duda is legitimately streaky, and I’m excited about him going forward. But not excited about the four day wait for game 1.
Yeah, to whatever extent “momentum” is a (psychological) thing, it would seem the delay would work against it. It certainly works against my momentum to watch more playoff baseball. Here’s hoping the Jays win the next one so we at least have one game 7 to fill up the time.
He also had a nice diving stop and a nice scoop at first. The 2 doubles, how hard did they go? They looked fairly identical, low liners that skipped to center right.
Duda has always been a “streaky” hitter in the sense that his hits and his good-looking swings/good contact *seem* to cluster more than you’d expect in single games; he can look terrible at the plate for stretches (as playoff viewers have seen). But playoff slump or no playoff slump, that HR against Hammel was as predictable as a HR ever is; you could see he was dialing in his timing on the previous pitches. I don’t believe I’m the only fan, at least among people who watch Lucas Duda regularly, who saw it coming.
Duda is a career 136 WRC hitter vs righties. Pitching around cespedes to get to him is just dumb, certainly not the “obvious” course of action. Smart pitchers/managers don’t believe in streaks. But dumb ones like Mattingly… look at all those pinch hits he did looking at short term stats.
There’s no way that The Duda was worse than Ryan Goins during this post season.