Pedro Alvarez Improved in a Down Year

We all know Pedro Alvarez had a pretty rough year in 2014, as he hit just 18 home runs, half of his total of 36 in 2013. That was almost the whole story, as hitting home runs (usually impressive, towering ones) is what Pedro Alvarez does well. Unfortunately, he happened to time the failure of the thing he does well with the continued failure of the thing he has never done well — making ignominious throwing errors at third base — thereby forcing the playoff-bound Pirates to take his glove out of the infield (and bat out of the lineup) by platooning him toward the end of the year.

What is less publicized is that Alvarez made some plate discipline strides last year, posting career-best walk and strikeout rates (10.1% and 25.4%, respectively), so 2014 wasn’t all bad. In fact, if you were an extremely optimistic person, you might say that 2014 was an important year for El Toro, as he seemed to make adjustments to improve the glaring holes in his plate approach. However, entering his age-28 season in 2015, a realist would say Alvarez is now facing a crucial test: given his defensive shortcomings and struggles against left-handed pitching, the prospects of a bounce-back campaign at the plate aren’t just a nice expectation, they’re now more of a necessity.

With Ike Davis out of the picture, the Pirates’ plan is to have Alvarez play first base, getting his bat back in the lineup and allowing him to almost never have to throw the ball – though you get the sense his leash as a starter might not be all that long. Let’s look into what was behind Alvarez’ power decline in 2014, and if his plate discipline improvements will help drive a return to form.

It’s not difficult to establish the 2012-2013 archetype of Alvarez: free swinger, connoisseur of the strikeout, and batsman of well-traveled baseballs. After his 2012 breakout season, a pitching adjustment started that seemed to culminate in achieving its goal in 2014. We can see that adjustment acutely in the changes in a few specific plate discipline categories. I’ve created a table with his 2013 and 2014 ranks for those categories among 272 players with 400 plate appearances, ranking him in relation to how low he is on each list for better effect:

	2012	2012 Rank	2013	2013 Rank	2014	2014 Rank
Zone %	39.9%	9th	39.5%	9th	37.5%	2nd
First Strike %	63.1%	172nd	57.8%	70th	52.8%	5th
Fastball %	48.5%	5th	47.8%	4th	45.3%	2nd

Alvarez is an extreme hitter, and pitchers have adjusted to take advantage of that extreme nature. The stat that stands out most is the change in his first strike %, in which he’s now grouped with hitters who are either feared or wildly free-swinging: the likes of Giancarlo Stanton, Carlos Santana, and Mike Moustakas. It’s no coincidence that his first-pitch strikes dropped: Alvarez hit 16 of his 84 home runs during the past three years on the first pitch of an at-bat, including nine in 2013.

To sum it up: in 2014, Alvarez might have gotten the fewest overall hard, hittable pitches in the strike zone among regular players. That’s connecting the dots a little bit, but there’s no one else who ranks anywhere near as high as he does across all three of the above categories.

With that information, we should expect his strikeout and walk rates to improve: most of that could be achieved by simply not swinging as often. Did he do that? Let’s look at how his plate discipline statistics changed from 2012 to 2014:

	2012	2013	2014
Swing%	48.0%	50.0%	48.3%
O-Swing%	34.0%	35.2%	34.8%
O-Contact%	55.6%	48.7%	56.2%
Z-Contact%	82.3%	78.9%	83.2%
Contact%	70.9%	66.1%	71.0%
Swinging Strike%	13.6%	16.4%	13.6%

He still swung — a lot. However, not mentioned above is his reduction in first-pitch swing rate by almost 6% from 2013 to 2014, down to a league-average 27%. As we can see, his contact rate improved across the board, especially his O-Contact%: last week I looked at a possible connection between higher O-Contact% and lower ISO, and while there’s no predictive value to be taken from it, the data indicates there is a relationship between the two.

Could Alvarez have made more weak contact in 2014 than years previous, partially due to hitting more pitches outside the zone? It’s a possibility, as his infield fly ball rate increased and line drive rate fell from years prior, though his 2012 O-Contact% was around his 2014 level; he didn’t have any trouble hitting the ball over the fence that year. Again, O-Contact%/ISO is certainly not a catch-all relationship. Increased weak contact would also explain his batted ball distance, which fell in 2014 (from Baseball Heat Maps):

In 2012 and 2013, Alvarez was toward the very top of the leaderboard when it came to HR/FB distance: 6th in 2012 (306 ft. average), and 3rd in 2013 (311 ft.). This fueled his incredible 7th and 2nd-best in the league HR/FB rates for those years (25% and 26.3%, respectively), but when his 2014 batted ball distance dropped to 297 ft., it brought HR/FB rate with it, down to 16.2%. That’s still a great rate, but when you’re a home run dependent hitter, that sort of drop off is going to seriously hurt your bottomline. For a guy who should be in his prime, and who wasn’t injured (or so we know), dropping 14 feet off of fly ball distance means there’s something else going on.

What is that something else? The most simple answer is that he’s not getting pitched like he used to and hasn’t made the adjustment. As we can see, pitcher’s attacked him exactly like the type of hitter he was in 2014, and they did so to great effect. Alvarez’ job in 2015 is to adjust back: take more walks, strike out less, and continue the trend of recent plate discipline improvements. His career walk rate has trended above average every year except 2013, so if he can continue to cut his strikeout rate, a return to form is completely possible.

His 2014 struggles should highlight one main point, however, and that is how susceptible hitters like him are to fluctuations year to year. For a more well-rounded hitter, the loss of 14 feet of distance on fly balls would certainly mean a down power year, but for Pedro Alvarez, his entire offensive game is thrown into question. Couple that with less playing time and defensive woes, and you have yourself a disaster. Is Alvarez just a platoon player against right-handers at this point? The fact that he showed some improvement during a terrible 2014 means there’s hope for him yet.