Let’s Talk About Miguel Sano

There are a lot of rookies getting attention this season. And with good reason — it’s been a pretty good year for rookie position players. But while Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber, Joc Pederson, Jung-Ho Kang, Randal Grichuk are Carlos Correa getting lots of pub, it seems as though Miguel Sano has not generated the same volume of coverage nationally as have his peers. And that’s a shame, because he’s just as deserving of praise.

Perhaps you’ve heard some variation of that old saying, “no matter what you do, there will always be someone better.” And perhaps that’s keeping Sano out of the spotlight. For instance, he’s not the youngest rookie this season. That honor goes to Correa. Francisco Lindor and Addison Russell are also younger than Sano. Sano has also not been the best rookie hitter, in terms of either cumulative or rate stats. In terms of cumulative stats, the reason why is obvious — he’s only been in the majors for about a little over a month, while plenty of the aforementioned rookies have been up since at least June, and many even earlier. In terms of rate stats like wRC+, he comes in behind Schwarber, and not by a small margin — Schwarber has been 25% better at the dish so far in their respective careers. In terms of slugging percentage, Grichuk and Sano are 69 points behind Schwarber, and Sano comes up 23 points behind Schwarber in terms of OBP. But once you look past the fact that Sano has been second-best to Schwarber, you can see a different pattern emerging.

Namely, that Schwarber and Sano are pretty far ahead of the rookie pack, so much so that it’s beginning to look like a Brett Lawrie situation. Brett Lawrie, if you’ll recall, came up in August of 2011 and promptly lit the world on fire. In 171 plate appearances in those last two months of the 2011 season, Lawrie hit .293/.373/.580, good for a .477 wOBA and a 157 wRC+, and it looked like the Blue Jays had a future star on their hands. Lawrie, of course, hasn’t come anywhere near that season since. In his four seasons since, he’s hit .262/.312/.403, for a .314 wOBA and 97 wRC+. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not the superstar level that his rookie performance seemed to foretell.

Getting back to this year’s rookies, I took a look at all the rookies since baseball integrated in 1947 who recorded between 100 and 250 plate appearances in their rookie season, to approximate the playing time that guys like Lawrie got and Schwarber and Sano are getting right now. I found there were 2,119 such players, and only a handful of them had gone to town — “going to town” defined, in this case, as a 150 wRC+ or better:

Here, we have 27 players of varying quality, making it easy to draw the conclusions you like from this table. If you’re an optimist, you look at this table and see players like Willie McCovey, Frank Thomas and Brian Giles and conclude that Schwarber and Sano are destined for greatness. If you’re a pessimist, players like Bob Hazle, Phil Plantier and Chris Dickerson look like cautionary tales. And there are plenty of players in between.

What we can take away from this list is that even among the outliers, Sano has a pretty good walk rate. That’s not necessarily a surprise, as both before and after his injury, Sano had a great walk rate. Sano swings at five percent fewer pitches than the league average hitter, and his 4.25 pitches seen per plate appearance ranks ninth in the majors among hitters with at least 100 PA. Sano is willing to wait for his pitch.

The question he will need to answer heading into next season is whether he is too willing to wait for it. Sano has swung at less than 60% of the pitches in the strike zone, and as such pitchers are not having a tough time getting ahead of him in the count. Sano has worked a 3-0 count in just 3.55% of his plate appearances, and an 0-2 count in 34.75% of them. Contrast that with a player like a similarly patient hitter like Joey Votto, whose respective marks are 7.98% and 14.31%, and we see that Sano has some work to do to get the count in his favor. Now, that’s obviously a tough comp — Votto is basically the master of the strike zone — but even a rookie with a similar plate-discipline profile such as Joc Pederson is faring better getting into ideal counts and avoiding the opposite. Pederson has generated 3-0 counts in 5.43% of his PAs this season, and only landed in 0-2 in 21.09% of them.

One thing to keep in mind is that it won’t take Sano long to bring his percentages up, but until he does, he is going to face an uphill battle to get his strikeout rate in check. One thing that helped him this season at Double-A compared to his time there in 2013 was that he cut down his strikeouts by more than five percentage points. That hasn’t translated to the majors, but hope springs eternal that he’ll adjust. It’s the only major flaw in his game at the moment.

Among other possible flaws that his debut-season data reveals, the biggest seems to be his performance against changeups, and he hasn’t been so bad against them as to suggest some sort of fatal flaw. Likewise, he looks like he may need some work on getting to pitches up in the zone, but that’s not a big deal quite yet. As a young major leaguer, pitchers could bust Matt Holliday on the inside corner of the plate with ease. These days, that’s not really the best idea. One other thing that isn’t a flaw, per se, is that Sano isn’t going to post a .400+ BABIP for his career.

Sano doesn’t hit a ton of grounders, he is capable of taking the ball the other way, he has proven adept at handling most pitches (for instance, he ranks 27th against four-seamers, 10th against two-seamers and 18th against curveballs at the moment) and he has even done well in clutch situations. Oh, and he can do this:

There are lots of great rookies this year. But even with the Twins slowly sliding out of the playoff picture, let’s not forget to talk about Miguel Sano.