Khris Davis and Others Who Have Pressed Before

Khris Davis has maintained excellent exit velocity all year, and has 33 home runs to his name, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t pressed at times with his new team. His walk rate is less than half what it used to be, and his swinging-strike rate is up nearly 20%.

The Oakland outfielder admitted that his decision on when to swing hasn’t been at its finest this year. “I was putting pressure on myself in a new environment,” he told me recently before a game against the Indians. “It was mental. Just kinda settled down.”

It’s something we can easily see in his swing percentages — but, perhaps more importantly, it’s totally normal and has happened very often to other big bats changing teams.

Take a look at Davis’ swing graphs, and you can see him settling down in graphical format. Watch his swing rate explode early in his Athletics’ tenure, and then decline steadily towards his personal career average with time.

This is one of those “baseball players are humans” moments, and it’s totally intuitive. But not every human being reacts to the same situations in the same way, and so I’d usually treat this as a “story” moment — a moment that could be true for Khris Davis without being true for everyone.

I thought it might be interesting to test how universal the situation is, though. In order to capture other Khris Davises of the past, I looked for batters coming off seasons of good production at the plate (offense that was 20% above league average or better) in a hearty sample (400 plate appearances or more) who then changed teams in the offseason. Because I had to do this by hand, I went back three years. In order to judge “pressing” I used overall swing percentage and also reach percentage.

Davis was pressing by these measures, since he’s swinging and reaching more than he has in his career, both in the first month and for his first year with the Athletics. He’s worse than average when it comes to the swing difference, and about average when it comes to the difference in reaching.

And that’s interesting! Twenty-nine different slugger-years, and these guys have swung more often and reached more often when they landed on new shores.

You can quibble with the selection process, but these are the best bats that have changed teams in the last three years, mostly. And there could be some regression happening, but the figures produced with each player’s new club differ (in most cases) from established career rates — even while batters mostly just swing less as they get older — so this flies in the face of normal age effects to some extent.

Not all of these guys are created the same, of course. Marlon Byrd shows up as a league leader in all formats, but he was in the midst of a philosophy change that meant more aggression in order to achieve more power. That pre-dated his move, but also didn’t exist long enough to change his career numbers. Maybe that’s true of others.

But it certainly looks like Adam Lind (this year) and Hanley Ramirez (last year) were among the biggest pressers of the last three years. That’s not to shame them, not at all. The point here, if there is one, is that this is a nigh universal thing. Only one player in the sample (Jason Heyward this year) came to a new team and promptly began swinging less across the board. That takes some fortitude, really.

And that’s my personal takeaway from this. As a fan, these numbers could be used as a salve — this new player is pressing, yes, but not in a way that can’t be undone! Not in a way that hasn’t happened before! Things will be fine, most likely. These numbers will regress to their career averages, most likely. Khris Davis will take a walk again.