Jose Abreu, Pitchers, and Ongoing Adjustments

One of the things I find most interesting about baseball is how often players seem to try new things and then how often those changes seem to make little to no difference in their overall productivity. Batters alter their stances and pitchers try new grips and patterns all the time, but it’s actually pretty rare that a player makes a small change and becomes significantly different. A whole lot of effort goes into small changes, but the vast majority of these changes don’t seem to make a big difference, yet everyone is always making them. It seems like a lot of wasted energy.

Except that it’s not wasted energy as much as it’s about context. One reason all of these tweaks don’t have huge impacts is that everyone else gets a chance to respond to the adjustment very quickly and make their own. There’s so much information available to players and they’re generally a perceptive bunch. If Clayton Kershaw suddenly threw Paul Goldschmidt a 50-grade knuckeball, I would wager that Goldschmidt wouldn’t do much damage against that first one. Theoretically, Kershaw spent lots of man hours working on the pitch, but most hitters have faced knuckeballs and they would very quickly figure out that Kershaw has one and when he likes to use it. A pitcher adjusts, and then the hitters adjust to that adjustment. It goes on and on forever. If you don’t constantly tinker, you might be left behind.

At the beginning of 2014, there were a lot of questions about how well Jose Abreu would perform in the major leagues because we didn’t have any information about Abreu in the context of the American professional regime. His raw tools had our attention, but until we saw him face professionals in the American context, our information was rather limittarget=”_blank”. The question at hand was how Abreu would adjust to the major leagues.

As you certainly know, that adjustment went very well. He burst onto the scene, posting a 158 wRC+ in April and 164 wRC+ in the first half of 2014. Abreu came to the show and dominated out of the gate. Of course we didn’t think he was immune to sample size and regression to the mean, but those early plate appearances were basically all we had and he looked amazing. If you had to characterize the relationship, he was clearly getting the better of the pitchers.

So the pitchers went to work to figure out how to limit Abreu’s productivity. Now that they had some information about Abreu as a hitter, they could use that information to adjust, hopefully in a way that decreased the damage he was doing to their stat lines and self-confidence.

The fun thing, as Sahadev Sharma noted in March, is that Abreu turned into a different hitter in the second half, but remained equally as productive overall despite the best efforts of the pitchers. He hit for less power, but got on base more often to balance it out. Abreu was one kind of hitter, and then he became another as the season wore on. He’s been worse in 2015 compared to 2014, but he remains very formidable at the plate.

Split	AVG	OBP	SLG	BABIP	BB%	K%	wRC+
2014 First	.292	.342	.630	.304	6.3%	23.4%	164
2014 Second	.350	.435	.513	.419	10.7%	18.1%	166
2015	.296	.342	.497	.341	4.5%	20.2%	129

He traded power for on-base ability in 2014, but in 2015 he’s returned to the early 2014 OBP and split the power difference. We’re still talking about less than 1,000 career PA, so it’s somewhat disingenuous to present these three splits as “different” Jose Abreus, but it’s very clear that if you divide up his career into these slices, there is a very different set of outcomes. We can begin to understand them by looking at how pitchers adjusted to him and how he adjusted back. Let’s start simply by looking at how pitches attacked the zone.

First half 2014:

 

Second half 2014:

When Jose Abreu got to the majors, pitchers thought it was a pretty good idea to pound the center of the strike zone. For some reason, they were funneling pitches right into the center of the zone. As the season went on, they increased their efforts low and away and expanded the inside edge. Clearly, Abreu was crushing their pitches and they needed to throw them in places he couldn’t hit them. Based on his high strikeout rate and low walk rate in the first half, the logic was sound. Expand the zone and when he makes contact, it will be worse contact, they thought.

Except Abreu countered and started taking his walks. If pitchers weren’t going to challenge him, he was going to trot happily to first base rather than smack one into the outfield. He walked more, struck out less, and hit for less power in the second half of 2014. As pitchers started to diversify the location of their pitches, Abreu seemingly stopped swinging out of his shoes and changed his game.

Let’s do the same thing, but this time with Abreu’s swing heatmap:

First half 2014:

 

Second half 2014:

Pitchers started working him low and away and he adapted his swing to cover that part of the plate. Presumably, doing so allowed him to avoid being exploited, but it came at the cost of less power. Pitchers learned his swing, adjusted to it, and then he countered by adjusting it for a lower strikeout, higher BABIP type of play that handled the outside part of the plate at the expense of some pop. Both worked for Abreu, as his 2014 season was very good start to finish.

If we jump forward to the present day, you might notice another set of adjustments. Observe, particularly, his big spike in contact rate (mostly outside the zone) and his drop in swing rate (largely inside the zone).

Date	O-Swing%	Z-Swing%	Swing%	O-Contact%	Z-Contact%	Contact%	Zone%
2014 First	41.6 %	72.6 %	54.7 %	53.5 %	87.4 %	72.5 %	42.4 %
2014 Second	40.4 %	73.8 %	54.2 %	56.4 %	86.6 %	73.4 %	41.3 %
2015	40.9 %	64.1 %	51.1 %	64.2 %	88.7 %	77.7 %	43.9 %

It’s another adjustment. He’s being more selective in the zone and making more contact when he swings outside the zone. That’s not usually a combination that goes together. Usually it’s fewer swings outside the zone and more contact inside it, but to each his own. You can think of it this way: Abreu is doing a better job making contact on those borderline pitches but he’s also not attacking pitches in the zone unless he really likes them.

As I noted earlier, we’re still early in his major-league career and don’t have any minor-league data of which to speak, so the actual conclusions we can draw are pretty muted. Abreu has immense raw power but it seems as if he’s made the decision to cut down his swing in order to avoid swinging through so many pitches. He’s a much less aggressive hitter now, and it’s cost him some of his danger.

Interestingly, the final column in the most recent table indicates that pitchers are responding as well. He’s swinging less in the zone, so he’s getting more pitches in the zone in an attempt to get him to take strikes. As of Bill Petti’s last Edge% update, Abreu was seeing 2.5% more pitches in the heart of the plate this year than last. Pitchers have noticed the new Abreu and they’ve readjusted by pumping more pitches over the plate to get those precious called strikes.

I fully recognize the arbitrary cutoff points I’ve imposed on Abreu in this analysis and the limitations of evaluating a player in 300 PA samples. This isn’t a wholesale evaluation of Abreu as a player, but it does offer some insight into his process and the way the league views him. Pitchers went after him early, he destroyed them, and then they tried something else. He was able to have success against the new approach, even if it was a different kind of success. Now we’ve seen pitchers counter by filling up the zone and eliminating his ability to walk. An Abreu who doesn’t walk and doesn’t hit for monster power is simply good rather than great.

A 129 wRC+ is good and the Sox won’t complain. But the projection systems buy a jump back to something in the 145 wRC+ range the rest of the way. The systems are basically splitting the difference between 2014 and 2015 because there’s only so much data, but I’m bullish on Abreu because he’s already demonstrated his ability to produce against this type of strike-zone attack. Abreu has the ability to crush pitches in the zone if he starts to look for them again, and he’s shown a willingness to adapt his approach to match the pitchers in his young career.

The White Sox had a nice offseason, even if it wasn’t enough to make them legitimate contenders. One thing they can take solace in is that they have likely the best pitcher in the American League and one of the most dangerous hitters locked up for the foreseeable future. And in addition to his prodigious power, Abreu also appears to be an adept adjuster who will be able to shift his approach as often as he needs to in order to stay ahead of the competition. There were concerns he’d be lost at the plate against high quality arms, but so far we’ve seen an Abreu willing and able to respond to feedback. The second half of 2015 will be another chance for him to do so.