Trea Turner’s Slide Has Not Been Smooth

It may not have ended the slump he’s fallen into since mid-April, but Trea Turner picked a very good time to snap out of a 2-for-20 skid that began last weekend. On Wednesday afternoon against the Diamondbacks, the Phillies were trailing, 5–3, and down to their final out, in danger not only of being swept in the three-game series but also of losing for the eighth time in 10 games. Then José Ruiz hung a curveball that Turner didn’t miss, pounding it for a game-tying two-run homer. The Phillies won in 10 innings, but whether this the start of a turnaround for Turner — who, like Manny Machado, is off to a rough start on his new $300 million contract — remains to be seen.

The homer was Turner’s fifth of the year and his first since May 6. Even with it and Thursday’s subsequent 0-for-5 against the Braves, his offensive numbers look a whole lot more like what the Phillies got from their shortstops (Didi Gregorius, Bryson Stott, Johan Camargo, and Edmundo Sosa) last year than what Turner did with the Dodgers:

Turner has been frank about his struggles. After Monday’s loss to the Diamondbacks, he told reporters, “I’m honest with myself, I’ve sucked.” While that may be overstating the case a bit, he hasn’t offered anything close to his superstar-level play of the past two seasons, and only through respectable (if small sample) defensive metrics at shortstop (1.6 UZR, 1 OAA, -2 DRS) is he above replacement level. Using our UZR/OAA inputs, his 0.6 WAR prorates to 2.0 over a full season — more or less average — but using DRS, his 0.3 bWAR prorates to just 1.0 WAR, or decidedly below average.

Either way, those numbers are far short of Turner’s 2021 and ’22 performances, when he was simply among the game’s elite, one of only two position players to top 6.0 WAR in both seasons (José Ramírez was the other); for the span, his 13.2 WAR ranked second only to Aaron Judge (17.0). Though his 2022 offensive numbers with the Dodgers were not as good as the year before (.328/.375/.536, 28 HR, 142 wRC+), they were exceptional enough that he netted an 11-year, $300 million contract with the reigning National League champions as he headed into his age-30 season. His addition made plenty of sense at least in the short term; he figured to slide smoothly into the Phillies’ lineup as a substantial and dynamic upgrade to a glaring weakness on a team that overcame a bad start and got as far as Game 6 of the World Series.

It’s not hard to spot where Turner is out of whack, at least superficially. He’s striking out 26.1% of the time, up from last year’s 18.5%, which coincidentally also happens to be his career mark. Other than his 44-PA cup of coffee with the Nationals in 2015, he’s never even struck out 20% of the time. His swinging-strike rate has spiked to 17.2%, up from last year’s 12.8% and well above his career mark of 10.5%. Yikes. It turns out Turner is chasing a lot more pitches than usual, part of a longer-term trend:

Through 2021, Turner had a 29.2% chase rate, with a high of 32.6% in ’16, his official rookie season. Last year, it climbed to 36.4%; this year, he’s at an astronomical 42.2%, which through Thursday ranked ninth among all batting title qualifiers. Meanwhile, his overall swing rate has climbed from 46% in 2015–21 (including 49.2% in the last of those year) to 51.1% last year and 53.7% this year. Pitchers have caught on; where they threw him strikes on 43.3% of pitches in 2021, that’s down to 37.6% this year.

As with Machado, the elevated swing and chase rates form a pattern that suggests a player might be pressing, as Eno Sarris noted a few years ago, only in this case it’s a multiyear pattern. A player putting extra pressure on himself to earn a huge contract and then to live up to it would hardly be unheard of, though. So long as we’re reading narratives from the data, there’s certainly one to glean from examining a graph of Turner’s rolling chase rate and wOBA. Here’s one going back to the start of last season using a seven-game (“week”) basis:

My admittedly subjective interpretation of this is that it looks as though early in 2022, Turner felt like he was getting too selective and too patient, and that he was rewarded for expanding his zone, at least at times. That approach didn’t work as well later in the season, however. Through the end of July, he hit .309/.351/.501 (139 wRC+) and chased 35.1% of pitches outside the zone, but from August 1 onward, he hit just .278/.328/.407 (109) and chased 38.5% of pitches. The inflated chase rate data jibes pretty well with Turner’s own explanation from Monday, when he was critical of his own swing decisions:

“I feel like it’s all decision-making. The swing’s felt pretty good now for two, three weeks. But the decision-making is pretty hit-or-miss. I feel like when you’re going good you really don’t think about any of those things. You’re just kind of hitting and reacting. I feel like at times in those last couple at bats it just felt like that. Not thinking about anything else other than seeing the baseball. Sometimes that’s easier said than done. It’s that rhythm at the plate that every one of us is looking for. Sometimes you have it and sometimes you don’t.”

Drilling down a bit further, one of the unsettling things about Turner’s performance is that he’s being eaten alive by four-seam fastballs (note that the data here and for the next few sections is through Wednesday, not Thursday):

Turner is whiffing more often and making worse contact against four-seamers than at any other point in his career, cup-of-coffee season excluded. Within these numbers is some small-sample weirdness. For example, he’s 1-for-22 against lefties on four-seamers, though his xSLG and xwOBA against them are higher than against righties. His decline here is so drastic that he’s gone from being five runs above average against the heater last year to 11 below average before we’re a third of the way through this season. In fact, no batter has been worse against a single pitch type so far:

On the assumption that he might be having more trouble with higher velocities, I checked, but that wasn’t really the case so far as I could tell; fastballs 95 mph or higher account for about two-thirds of the above, but dial up to 97 mph, and the samples get microscopic in terms of batted ball events and don’t tell us much. What is clear from the data is that Turner isn’t handling elevated four-seamers. Here’s how he’s doing against the ones in the upper third of the zone or higher:

Turner’s whiff and swinging-strike rates are about 10 points higher than last year. He’s already more than halfway to last year’s total of batted ball events in this area, and his numbers up there are abysmal. These do include him going 0-for-13 with a .070 xBA on pitches above the zone, compared to 3-for-19 with a .148 xBA all of last season. Chasing high heat too often is costing him.

Turner’s numbers against four-seamers in the middle and bottom of the zone, and below it, are down as well, albeit in smaller samples:

In both areas, his 2023 swing-and-miss rates are on par with the recent past or even better, and the expected numbers are well ahead of his actual ones, if not always up to his ’21 and ’22 performances. He’s chasing very few balls below the zone, incidentally; the chases are much more concentrated above the zone.

As for Turner’s performances against other pitch types, I’ll spare the details except to say that he’s punishing sliders (5 runs above average, via Statcast) but a run or two below average on sinkers, changeups, curves and cutters after having been a handful of runs above average against most of those over the past two seasons. Overall, his quality of contact is way down.

Not only is Turner hitting the ball in the air more often — a waste given his 99th-percentile sprint speed, particularly if it’s not offset by more power — but most of those balls are also ones he’s getting under, resulting in infield fly balls and cans of corn that rarely go for hits; he’s 2-for-46 this year on that increasingly large slice of poor contact.

Turner has already hit eight infield flies as opposed to 12 all of last season and 16 the year before. Meanwhile, he has just seven infield hits where he had 33 last year and 21 the year before. His xwOBA is down 55 points from 2022 and 84 points from ’21:

Turner is by no means the only Phillies regular who has underperformed, though of the four others with a wRC+ below 100, three (Alec Bohm, Kyle Schwarber, and Stott) are within a point or two of that mark, leaving only Sosa (87 wRC+) to accompany him in the netherworld.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this for the reigning NL champions, who at 23–27 find themselves only slightly better than they were when they fired manager Joe Girardi last year (22–29). It certainly wasn’t supposed to be like this for Turner. The man who was supposed to be the missing piece is missing way too many pitches.