The Good News About Xander Bogaerts

Xander Bogaerts has been on the major-league scene for so long that it’s easy to forget he’s still just 25 years old, young enough to be considered part of what is perhaps the best crop of young shortstops in the game’s history. He’s had his ups and downs through his four full seasons, with the second half of last year representing a particularly down one.

His recent trip to the disabled list with a non-displaced fracture of the talus bone in his left ankle might seem like a continuation of Bogaerts’ misfortune. But there’s good news: not only is the injury expected to keep Bogaerts sidelined for only 10 to 14 days but the shortstop’s performance to begin the season has rivaled Bryce Harper and Didi Gregorius as one of the young season’s best. What’s more: the underlying indicators suggest that a fundamental change is partially to credit for Bogaerts’ success.

Bogaerts injured the ankle during the seventh inning of Sunday’s 8-7 comeback victory over the Rays. He had mishandled a relay throw from J.D. Martinez, and sped towards the Tampa Bay dugout, on the third-base side of Fenway Park. He stopped the ball before it could roll into the dugout, which would have added another run onto the Rays’ 6-2 lead, but came up limping after sliding into the dugout himself. Adding insult to injury, Joey Wendle, who wound up on third after hitting the Green Monster shot that Martinez relayed, scored on a sacrifice fly anyway once Bogaerts departed, though the Red Sox rallied for six eighth-inning runs to steal the game and climb to 7-1 on the season.

On Friday, Bogaerts had been the hero in the Red Sox’ 10-3 win, driving in six runs with a two-run double and a grand slam, both off Jake Faria. The outburst ran Bogaerts’ league-leading doubles total to seven; throw in his two homers and only Gregorius has more extra-base hits. Through nine games, Bogaerts is hitting .368/.400..711, good for sole ownership or a share of third in the AL in slugging percentage, wRC+ (213), and WAR (0.7).

Faria, coincidentally, loomed large in the arc of Bogaerts’ 2017 season: it was that same right-hander who injured Bogaerts’ wrist by way of a hit by pitch on July 6, after which date the shortstop’s offensive production took a nosedive. Prior to that, Bogaerts had basically matched his 2015-16 offensive production:

Bogaerts missed just one game at the time but batted only .164/.222/.194 from the point of injury through the end of July. In late August, he conceded that he had been playing through continued pain in his right hand and wrist, and altered the mechanics of his swing, telling the Providence Journal’s Tim Britton, “I started creating a lot of bad habits, and some of them have stuck still with me… I changed [my swing], and I can’t find it back. That’s the trouble swinging the way I used to swing: it would hurt a lot. So I started creating bad habits, and that’s where I am right now — bad.”

As the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier observed, Bogaerts “lunged at pitches in an effort to make one-handed contact as opposed to standing tall and synching up his legs, hips, and hands to create power.”

With the help of new hitting coach Tim Hyers, Bogaerts has worked on standing more upright at the plate, using his legs more and — you knew this was coming — finding a swing plane to optimize his launch angle. So far, it’s paying off. Bogaerts has cut way down on his ground-ball rate. Meanwhile, his average exit velocity, launch angle, and expected wOBA on batted balls have risen dramatically:

Yowzah. Obviously, small samples for 2018, and who knows how long it will take Bogaerts to get his groove back once he returns from the injury, but thus far this year, it’s been exciting to see him reassert his place in the Great Shortstop Cohort, not only underscoring the extent to which last year’s fall-off was indeed injury induced but his capacity to adjust and continue his growth.

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About the aforementioned Cohort: the Play Index link in the first paragraph is via a 2016 piece by Ted Berg at USA Today’s For the Win blog. Berg used the Baseball-Reference Play Index to count the number of shortstops 25 and under with seasons of at least 2.0 WAR — average players or better, in other words — in any given year. He found a record 10 such shortstops (players who got at least 50% of their time at the position) in 2016, up from eight in 2015, which had matched the previous high from 1942. Rerunning his query, the 2017 season actually surpassed that mark, featuring 11 such shortstops. The FanGraphs version of WAR doesn’t make quite as strong a case for the Class of 2017, but the season is still tied for third by this count:

The players who didn’t make the 2017 cut according to FanGraphs’ version were Orlando Arcia, Jorge Polanco, Russell, and Story. The 1942 and 1978 groups each included three Hall of Famers, with Boudreau, Reese, and Rizzuto in the former and Smith, Trammell, and Yount in the latter. If you’re wondering about the Alex Rodriguez/Derek Jeter/Nomar Garciaparra trinity, they qualified together only from 1997 to -99, with the last season one of 19 (!) featuring five such shortstops.