Tim Beckham Has Found What Works
After a strong 2017 campaign for Tampa and Baltimore led some observers to declare, perhaps prematurely, that the former No. 1 pick had finally figured out how to sustainably deliver on his sky-high potential, Tim Beckham’s 2018 performance was sufficiently awful (a 79 wRC+ over 402 plate appearances) that the Baltimore front office declined to tender him a contract and left him to sign a $1.75 million deal with the Mariners in early January. Well, for a guy who was probably only intended to hold the middle of the field warm until J.P. Crawford gets the call up to Seattle at some point later this summer, Beckham has had a remarkably good first week in the Queen City:
G | PA | H | BB | HR | ISO | wRC+ | WAR |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
7 | 31 | 11 | 5 | 3 | 0.462 | 319 | 0.8 |
Usually, I wouldn’t note a first week like this except in passing — Preston Tucker was hitting .435 through his first seven games of 2018, after all — except for two things. First, Beckham was hurt — with a core muscle injury that required surgery — throughout much of 2018, which suggests that perhaps his poor performance over the full season was less a reflection of a regression from 2017’s breakout and more what you’d expect from a player toughing it out through a debilitating injury. Second, Beckham has actually had a pretty good five weeks, dating back to September 1st of 2018. Since that date, his wRC+ of 186 is eighth-best in the game.
Beckham has always had good power to all fields, but until 2017, that power was too often undercut by a tendency to end at-bats early by swinging at the first pitch he saw offered close to the zone. In 2017, he solved the mental hurdle that had pushed him to try to do too much and instead started taking a few pitches early in at-bats until he found the one he wanted. “These days,” he told me back then, “I want to see the ball in the zone where I can drive it, and if it’s not” — here, a pause — “I want to trust that it’s going to be a ball.” The core injury hindered his ability to execute on that mindset in 2018, yes, but since September of last year, he’s been able to put it into practice again. The results have been impressive.
“I’m seeing him swing at good pitches and hit the ball really hard,” said fellow Seattle newcomer Jay Bruce. “The quality of the at-bats he’s had lately have been really great — he’s putting himself into good counts, and not missing pitches that he gets.”
Over his first 31 plate appearances of 2019, in fact, Beckham has swung at just 22% of pitches he’s seen outside the zone — his career mark is 33% — and made contact 74% of the time (also near a career best). I say this not to suggest that Beckham can necessarily keep this level of performance up over a full season, but merely to confirm that what’s being seen with the eyes is also being recorded in the data: Tim Beckham has learned how to wait for his pitch. And he’s finding support from his hitting coach, Tim Laker.
“This year,” said Laker, “we’ve really tried to emphasize to all our hitters that we’re going to specifically target each night’s starting pitcher, and say ‘How are we going to beat this guy,’ not just go up there and say, hey, look, there’s a pitch, let me try and hit it.” So when Beckham came to the plate against Chris Sale early in last Thursday’s home opener against the Red Sox, he knew he was looking for a pitch up in the zone, somewhere in the middle of the plate appearance, and he knew what he would be trying to do with it.
“For me,” said Laker, “when you’re a right-hander facing a guy that’s a cross-fire guy, like a Bumgarner or a Sale, you’re going to have to generate power to the pull side. In the past, [Beckham] has kind of tried to hit that kind of guy the other way. But if you go the other way, you lose the barrel a bit and they get that little rise up and away and you miss under. So before that game we talked about attacking the ball at a bit of a different angle to get a bit more pull on it and take it out to left.” On a 1-2 pitch in the second inning, Beckham got a pitch he could pull, and did this:
Tim Beckham probably isn’t going to end 2019 with a 186 wRC+, and in fact I suspect that both he and the Mariners would be quite pleased if all he did was replicate 2017’s 109 mark. But he’s had a terrific first week of the season, and it’s come hot on the heels of a September that showed that, when healthy, Beckham can do serious damage to baseballs to all fields.
“I think,” said Bruce, “that before 2017 he had a tendency to try too hard sometimes, and I think staying within himself now has allowed him to ‘finish’ the at-bats and not miss the pitches that he gets. All he has to do now is stay within himself.”
Rian Watt is a contributor to FanGraphs based in Seattle. His work has appeared at Vice, Baseball Prospectus, The Athletic, FiveThirtyEight, and some other places too. By day, he works with communities around the world to end homelessness.
Seattle isn’t the Queen city (that’s Charlotte). It is the Emerald City.
It was for a little over 100 years, from 1869 to 1982, but they did indeed retire the nickname in favor of the Emerald.
Right. I prefer the sound of Queen City, and I figure with nicknames “official” isn’t the end-all be-all of standards, almost by definition. Also, wiki lists something like three dozen U.S. cities who use the name, including both Seattle and Charlotte:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_City
I support going away from simply Emerald City, but Queen City is both ambiguous (as you point out Charlotte uses it, as does Cincinnati, and also it has another use as a general statement about a city that is the largest in a state without being a capital) and not used by people who are actually from Seattle (I have lived here all my life and have literally never heard Seattle referred to by that name). Jet City and rainy city are really the only unofficial nicknames that work.
That’s a fair point! I think in a piece not about the Mariners I’d weigh the potential ambiguity a little more heavily, but I think the meaning was clear here. I do like “Jet City” too.
Now I miss Jet City pizza from when I used to live there!
Jet City Woman – great song by legendary Seattle band Queensryche
Man, I thought it was Scranton
Electric City
The Emerald City? Like in the Wizard of Oz? Who is the wizard? Who is Dorothy? The Lion?
1)Yes. 2)Sorta, but seemingly with a lot of rain. 3)Ozzie Smith. 4)Kit’s big sister. 5)Rumer Willis
The Lion is clearly Vogelbach and it has nothing to do with his personality.
The Wizard? Dee Gordon, maybe?
Dorothy? Ichiro. After all, there was no place quite like home for him (he did decide to retire in order to stay home, right?)
Amazonian Queen City? Lanyard Yards? I’d vote for “Home of the SuperSonics”, as we’re probably not even the Jet City anymore.