The Less He Swings, the More Josh Bell Dings

With a massive first-pitch home run off Aaron Nola on Wednesday afternoon, Josh Bell broke an 0-for-14 slump. He went 3-for-4 in Game 2 of the NLCS, adding an RBI single in the fourth and another base hit in the seventh to go along with his second-inning home run. It was a major improvement over his performance in the first game of the series, when he went hitless in four at-bats and struck out swinging with two runners on to end the ballgame.

When Bell is hot, he can be a terrific offensive performer, and a lineup built around him, Juan Soto and Manny Machado has the potential to be one of the most powerful in baseball. That’s exactly what A.J. Preller was counting on when he pulled off the biggest summer blockbuster in recent memory. When Bell goes cold, however, he’s dead weight in the middle of the lineup.

Just take a look at his wRC+ by month:

More of his success came with the Nationals, but Bell did have a couple of strong stretches in San Diego. From August 20 to September 10, he hit for a 152 wRC+, and did so again from October 1 through the end of the season. The Padres went 14–9 during those two stretches, and Bell led the squad with 0.84 Win Probability Added. In the rest of their games post-deadline, the team went 17–18, and Bell’s -1.55 WPA ranked dead last. When their DH was hitting, the Friars had a more complete offense, and when he wasn’t, he dragged the team down with him. That trend has continued into the postseason; in Padres wins, he is batting .294/.294/.647 with three runs and four RBI (17 PA), and in losses, he’s hitting .100/.182/.100 with no runs or runs batted in (11 PA).

Bell, it should be said, is not the only slugger to go through a slump after a midseason move to Petco Park. Soto hit a rough patch from mid-August to mid-September and ended up hitting just .236 with six home runs as a Padre. Yet he remained a high-level offensive performer thanks to his excellent plate discipline: his 19.3% walk rate post-trade deadline led the National League by a wide margin and ranked second in baseball behind only Aaron Judge. Thus, despite his uncharacteristically low batting average and slugging percentage, his wRC+ after the trade was a healthy 130.

Bell, on the other hand, was all-or-nothing at the plate this past season. When he was hot, he hit for average, he hit for power, and he drew plenty of walks. When he was cold, it all disappeared. To illustrate this, I broke his regular season down into alternating hot and cold streaks. It’s not a perfectly scientific approach — I looked at his 15-game rolling wOBA and took note of when the line started going up or down — but it’s effective for this purpose, showing the extreme highs and lows of his season:

One thing that stands out immediately is Bell’s BABIP, which was well over .300 during all his hot streaks and close to the Mendoza line (or worse) during every cold spell. A high or low BABIP, as FanGraphs readers well know, is often the driving factor behind a terrific hitting streak or an unexpected slump. But that’s not the case for Bell. Consider that every time he went into a cold streak, his walk rate dropped. Moreover, he did not hit a single home run during any of the slumps I identified. For nearly any big league hitter, you could find periods of high and low BABIPs if you looked hard enough; you could surely find homerless streaks too. What is unique here is that those fluctuations in BABIP, walk rate, and home run rate are all closely correlated with one another. Since neither homers nor walks are included in BABIP, it’s clear his streakiness was about more than just good or bad luck on balls in play.

Instead, the problem seemed to come from Bell’s approach at the plate. It makes sense: if it looks like a hitter can’t do anything right, the issue probably starts at the source. Indeed, there was a strong negative correlation between Bell’s O-Swing% this season and his offensive production. The solid blue line on this graph shows Bell’s 15-game rolling wOBA throughout the year, and the solid red line shows his 15-game rolling swing rate on pitches outside the strike zone:

What’s more, Bell wasn’t just swinging at more pitches outside the zone during his slumps; he was swinging at more pitches in general. This second graph shows his 15-game rolling wOBA and his 15-game rolling swing rate this season. Bell, it seems, was a better hitter when he was swinging at fewer pitches:

In 2021, Devan Fink wrote about O-Swing% and Z-Swing% for FanGraphs, concluding that “avoiding swings outside of the strike zone appears to be much more important than always swinging when in the zone.” In other words, the potential benefits of swinging at more strikes do not outweigh the drawbacks of chasing at too many pitches outside the zone. Furthermore, as he explains, “If the best hitters in baseball do the most damage when swinging, they better swing at pitches not only in the strike zone, but also in their own personal wheelhouse.” The point here is that good plate discipline is about more than just avoiding balls and swinging at strikes; it’s about identifying the good strikes, too.

This gets right to the core of Bell’s problems in 2022. When he was swinging too often, he was hurting himself in two ways:

1. By swinging at too many pitches outside the strike zone
2. By swinging at the wrong kind of strikes for him to hit

The detriments of chasing too much are rather straightforward, so let’s spend a minute looking at problem no. 2. Take a look at where Bell saw most of his pitches in 2022, first from the left-hand side (where he took the majority of his at-bats) and then from the right:

Now, take a look at where in the zone he saw the most success:

There’s some overlap there, especially over the middle of the plate, but the difference is clear. Bell does his best work on pitches high and away, but he’s more likely to see pitches in the lower two-thirds of the zone. Therefore, he needs to wait patiently for the right pitches to swing at if he’s going to be a truly dangerous hitter. That means swinging less often and letting some pitches go, even if those pitches are strikes. Otherwise, he’s going to waste a higher percentage of his swings on worse pitches.

Bell himself has acknowledged as much. He knows high pitches are his bread and butter. “If the pitch is elevated,” he told Jessica Camerato of MLB.com back in May, “then I’ll do damage with it.” And when pitches aren’t elevated, he’s more likely to hit ground balls. He understands that’s something he needs to avoid, especially since he lost so many potential hits into the shift this season. As he explained, he tries to avoid driving balls into the ground by hitting “low, hard line drives every at-bat.” It’s a good goal to have, and when he hits those line drives, it works wonders for him. It’s no coincidence his line drive rate went up during each of his hot streaks this season:

Not only does Bell prosper when he hits pitches high in the zone, but he also thrives when he hits the ball on a line (as most hitters do). Striving to crush elevated pitches and slap more line drives is good approach, but in order to follow through with that plan, Bell has to be patient at the plate. His hot streaks prove that he has the plate discipline skills necessary for this plan of attack, but his cold streaks demonstrate that he still has work to put in. It’s the difference between this:

…and this:

In Game 2 of the NLCS, Bell saw 13 pitches and swung just five times. Only one pitch he offered at was in the lower half of the strike zone, and even that one ended up pretty close to the middle. All three of his hits came on pitches high in the zone. It represented a clear improvement upon the plate discipline he showed during his 0-for-14 stretch, when he swung at 52% of pitches he saw, with 13 of those cuts coming on pitches in the lower third of the zone and another 13 on pitches outside of the zone altogether.

When Bell is seeing the ball well and exercising restraint with his swings, he can be one of the most fearsome hitters in baseball. The Phillies learned that the hard way on Wednesday, and they’re going to have to be a little more careful how they pitch to him for the rest of the NLCS.