Manny Are Called, Few Are Hit

Manny Machado was in the news last week for what got called an anti-analytics rant. This would’ve been a bigger deal 10 or 15 years ago, when front offices were still coming to grips with empirical study as a part of scouting and player development, but that battle’s over now. The nerds are here.

Machado said the game’s getting harder to play, and that there are “too many stats out there. Too many stats, way too many numbers. I don’t even know half of the stuff that goes up there. I look at the board sometimes, and I even ask some of the guys, like, ‘What is WCCVBB, whatever it is?’… It’s crazy to even keep up with.”

As someone who makes his living using WCCVBB, I think Machado’s actually got a point here. I’m an analyst with a social science background: There is no stat so newfangled I won’t poke it to see if it’ll teach me — or better yet, you, the fans — something new about the game.

Machado’s job isn’t to get in the lab and find new insights using bat tracking data. His job is to hit the ball and catch the ball. However useful the new alphabet soup might be to me, it’s useless to him if he can’t use it to help him hit better. And after 15 seasons of Hall of Fame-quality performance, I trust Machado to know the level of information he needs to do his job well.

Reading Machado’s comments fully, he wasn’t making a broad, principled statement about the place of empirics in baseball coaching. He acknowledged how much the game has evolved during his career, but also jabbed at the media for being negative. The Padres had just lost, and he’s not playing well, and he was upset.

Besides, numerate baseball fans don’t need Machado to have a good relationship with stats. They need him to hit. Which he’s not. Which is the real problem.

And it’s a new one. Since his major league debut in 2012, Machado has had one of the highest floors in baseball. He came into this season on a run of 13 straight seasons of at least 250 plate appearances and a wRC+ of 100 or better. Only Freddie Freeman can beat that claim. (Bryce Harper would, too, but he missed the cutoff by six plate appearances in 2020, so I’m inclined to let him by the bouncer on this fun fact, as well.)

Machado has had his ups and downs, and his injuries, but he’s never been bad before. His only full season of less than 2.5 WAR was 2017, when he hit 33 home runs in 156 games, but his defensive metrics at third base dipped from excellent to well below average for a single season.

This year is the exception. Through 65 games, Machado has a wRC+ of 68. To put that in old-timey baseball stats, he’s hitting .172/.253/.345, and he’s striking out at the highest rate of his career. (K% is under the “advanced” tab on our stats pages, but kids learn percentages in elementary school, so how advanced can it really be?)

Whether Machado has been bad is not an interesting question to me. We can tell that this is so using the stats we had in the 1950s. I want to know how it’s happening. More specifically, I want to know whether it’s going to keep happening. We see big, right-handed power hitters fall off a cliff all the time. The bat speed starts to go, and they can compensate for a while, and then it all collapses in a season or two. Presumably the Padres, who have Machado signed through 2033 at an AAV of $31.8 million, are also interested in this question.

There’s some good news right off the proverbial bat: It looks like Machado is having some truly catastrophic batted ball luck. This is a hitter with a career .295 BABIP, who’s BABIPing .176 this year. Some of that is his fault, but unless he’s forgotten which end of the bat to hold, he’s getting unlucky, too.

On to the part that is his fault. Machado’s lost 55 points of wRC+ from last year to this year, and the fury of the BABIP gods can’t explain all of it. On this graph, you can see that while he’s massively underperforming his expected stats, his quality of contact has nosedived.

That warrants a look into Machado’s swing and plate discipline. I’ll explain briefly what I was terrified of finding.

Sometimes, a power hitter will feel his bat speed going and compensate by putting more effort into the swing. That means guessing more, and selling out for power instead of balancing power with contact and plate discipline. You’ll see the home run total stay the same for a couple years, but the OBP will gradually drop, until he can no longer compensate, and all of a sudden you have late-2010s Albert Pujols.

I don’t see especially powerful evidence that that’s happening here. Machado has lost a tick of bat speed and a couple points of Z-Contact% since 2023, but he was a monster bat speed guy back then and he’s still well above average. Also, the man is 33 years old and is coming up on his 2,000th major league game — I think it’s fair to expect his physical abilities to slide a little without raising too many alarms.

Machado is chasing a little more this year, but we’re talking about a single-digit number of swings across the season. That can be explained by any number of factors, especially when he’s clearly frustrated with his performance. Either way, he’s swinging more or less how he was swinging last year, when he was really good.

There are two numbers that give me concern, and I’ll admit up front that I don’t know how these two figures alone could tank Machado’s season. We’re into the realm of educated guesswork.

Compared to the three prior seasons, Machado is letting the ball get deeper into the hitting zone before he intercepts it: roughly four inches deeper than in 2024-25, and six inches deeper than in 2023. Is that the result of a decrease in bat speed? Maybe to some extent, but he’s also standing three or four inches deeper in the box than he did in the past three years. His stance, which has always been wide open, has closed up by a couple degrees.

At the same time, he’s pulling the ball more — even pulling the ball more in the air — than he did in any of those three foregoing campaigns. He’s also lost nearly two miles per hour of EV90.

Is Machado stepping in the bucket? That’s hard to diagnose on a season-by-season basis from TV. The center field camera angle at Petco Park isn’t that good, and Machado will sometimes deliberately open his hips early to get around on an inside pitch.

The other number that disturbs me is Machado’s swing rate on pitches in the center of the strike zone.

I think I retroactively failed a statistics class with the Y-axis scale here, but the downturn is real. For most of his time in San Diego, Machado would swing at about 80% of pitches in the heart of the strike zone. This year, that’s down to 72.6%, which is significant no matter how you format the graph. Pitches in this zone aren’t always easy to hit, but they are literally always strikes when you don’t swing. And taking more strikes is bad for a hitter, for reasons you don’t need an analytics background to explain.

I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with Machado. Between the new batting position and the reduced heart-zone swing rate, I wonder if Machado is somehow not seeing the ball as well as he’s used to. Maybe he needs glasses. The fact that Fernando Tatis Jr. famously didn’t hit a home run until May 30 makes me wonder if there’s a deleterious metaphysical presence in the Padres’ clubhouse. Is there a golem? Do they all have mono or something?

I’m sympathetic to Machado’s frustration, and agree that more data might not necessarily be the answer. But something’s got to change. See the eye doctor. Get an exorcism. Wash your hands. This can’t keep going on forever.