Manny Machado Is Looking for His Cookie

Per at-bat, Manny Machado is better this year than he was last year. That’ll happen with a 24-year-old. Or at least that’s what people tell me, I don’t remember those halcyon days myself. What’s most interesting, of course, is how he’s done it. You can tell that he’s hitting for a bit more power by hitting more fly balls, and that he’s improved against breaking balls. That much is on the player pages. But was it the result of a mechanical adjustment, or an approach adjustment? Ask the player, and the answer is yes. And no!

“I haven’t really changed anything,” the Orioles infielder said recently of his swing. “You get a little smarter with the pitches they’re going to throw to you, what they are trying to do to you. Try to look more for a pitch you can drive.” When pushed on that particular subject, he admitted what most hitters would probably admit if they were being honest. “I’m sitting dead red. Looking for a fastball down the middle, more or less.”

“What’s my power, what’s my cookie?” he added with a smile. As for his answer, it does appear as though the fastball up has rewarded him with the best results. He’s been more aggressive on the fastball out over the plate and that’s resulted in more fly balls and power. Here’s his swing rate on fastballs last year (left) and this year (right).

Sitting on that high fastball has made the low pitches look less attractive — the same thing Adrian Beltre found when he started looking for the high fastball — and that has, in turn, dampened Machado’s ground-ball rate on fastballs.

As we continue talking, it appears as though it’s not completely true that Machado has left his mechanics totally unaltered. But even then, he makes it sound like it was born in a refinement of his approach.

“This offseason, I worked a little more on the slider down and away,” Machado told me. “That was a pitch people used to always get me out with, and I kind of used to chase it a lot more last year and years past. So now I’m trying to stay in my body more and drive that ball to right field.”

If you’re wondering how his pull rate could be up and his oppo rate down after saying something like this, he clarified a bit. “That’s worked, I’m getting more pitches up, but I’m also trying to lay off those pitches down and away because you’re not going to do much with them,” he continued. “You might get a hit here or there, but those are pitchers’ pitches. So I’m just trying to see something up, something I can drive. Even if they throw a curveball, they’re going to hang them.”

That fits with the “high/fly” philosophy we saw above. And it leads to a much better approach against breaking balls. He’s swinging less against them the last two years — and, this year, he’s added the ability to do a little more with them when he does put them in play. Take a look at his production relative to league average on breaking balls last year (left) and this year (right) and that dark blue hole on the outside corner has severely softened.

Maybe this doesn’t seem so refined. Maybe this isn’t the mechanical fix you wanted to find. Maybe you’d like to hear more than “I see fastball, I swing,” as Machado put it to me. But hitters are made in different molds. “If it’s coming in hot, I’m going to swing,” shrugging off the idea that some batters gather more information before deciding. “I’m not that kind of hitter.”

It works! And, maybe more importantly, it’s organic to his own philosophy. He hasn’t changed himself, he’s only made himself a little better with a couple tweaks in his approach. “Stay aggressive,” the infielder said. “Don’t try to change what kind of hitter you are. You know what your strengths and weaknesses are. Don’t go up there while you are struggling and try to change much. Stick with it.”