What’s Going On With Tim Anderson?

Tim Anderson’s game has always been a high-wire act. He never walks, he chases constantly, he’s completely BABIP-dependent and allergic to hitting the ball in the air, and his defense at shortstop has never quite been great enough to cover for a down year at the plate. Over the last four seasons, as projection systems crunched the underlying numbers and predicted that he’d plummet to the earth, Anderson refused to look down, putting up a 123 wRC+ and 13.6 WAR. Factoring in the time he lost to injuries and a global pandemic, that’s a 4.1-win pace per 500 PAs, or a 5.9-win pace per 162 games. Despite all the time he missed, Anderson was the 27th-most valuable position player in baseball over that span; only one of the 26 players ahead of him appeared in fewer games.

Anderson’s ability to shoot singles into right field and spray line drives across the entire diamond won him a batting title and a Silver Slugger, and earned him berths in the World Baseball Classic and two All-Star Games. It also made him fun to watch, a throwback who put the ball in play and used his legs, but also had the pop to blow a game wide open.

This season, the wire has snapped. The homerless Anderson has been worth -0.9 WAR, and his 49 wRC+ is the worst among all qualified players. After running a .347 BABIP last year, right at his career average, Anderson’s BABIP is .294. Maybe gravity was always going to kick in this fast when Anderson’s Wile E. Coyote routine stopped working, but it feels awfully sudden for a player who put up a 110 wRC+ just last year:

ZiPS now projects Anderson to be worth 0.7 WAR in 2024, down from his preseason projection of 2.0. That difference of 1.26 put him in for seventh place on Dan Szymborski’s list of ZiPS projection decliners and makes it unlikely that his $14 million option gets picked up. Obviously, whenever a player’s wRC+ drops from 110 to 49, more than one thing is going wrong. (For the rest of this article, all stats are through Tuesday night’s action.)

Let’s start with injuries. Anderson hasn’t played more than 123 games since 2018. He spent time on the IL with a knee strain this year, and his sprint speed dropped a full tick, going from 28.3 mph in 2022 to 27.2 mph this year. He is now slightly below average as a runner, and a drop that sudden makes it fair to wonder whether his legs are back to 100%. His 4.8% infield hit rate is not just the lowest it’s ever been, it’s less than half of the rate he ran in each of the last three seasons. It seems at least possible that the 30-year-old Anderson could improve if and when his lower half gets back to full strength.

Anderson missed the second half of the 2022 season after surgery to repair the sagittal band in his left middle finger, which he tore on a checked swing in early August. It’s reasonable to expect a dip in power after that kind of hand injury, but while Anderson’s hard-hit rate is down from 41.2% to 40.4%, his 88.2 mph average exit velocity is identical to last year’s mark, and his 95th-percentile EV and max EV are actually better. Anderson’s ISO has fallen from .093 to .041, so power is definitely part of the problem, but it doesn’t appear that it can be explained by a loss of strength.

That said, Anderson has really struggled with velocity this season:

He’s seen almost the exact same proportion of pitches at or above 95 mph as he did last year (just over 14%), but those pitches account for a disproportionately large share of his struggles. Strength may not be Anderson’s issue, but whatever is happening seems like it’s affecting his ability to catch up to a fastball.

At this point, I’d normally dive into Anderson’s plate discipline, but I’d like to look at his batted ball profile first, because it’s the real headline. If you venture over to our batted ball leaderboard and sort by the rate of groundballs to fly balls, here’s what you’ll see:

Anderson has always run high groundball rates, but he now has the highest groundball rate and lowest fly ball rate in the league, both by nearly 10 percentage points. He’s hitting more than four groundballs for every fly ball. His ratio is nearly twice that of Christian Yelich in second place. Do you know how many groundballs you have to hit to leave Christian Yelich eating your dust? I pulled numbers going all the way back to 2000. The only qualified player who ever had a GB/FB as high as Anderson’s was Ben Revere, at 4.61 in 2012 and 4.51 in 2014. Revere was a slash-and-dash specialist who hit seven career home runs. In other words, he wasn’t at all the kind of player Anderson is.

Anderson’s wOBA on groundballs this year is .206, a career low. However, his xwOBA is .242, right in line with previous seasons. He might just be getting unlucky on groundballs, extraordinarily inopportune timing given that they make up nearly two-thirds of his balls in play. But keep in mind that while Anderson’s GB/FB took a huge jump this year, it’s actually been increasing every single season since 2018.

Anderson’s .535 wOBA on line drives is again far below his .657 xwOBA. His exit velocity is actually up on line drives, from 93 mph to 94.3 this year. So again, there could be some bad luck at play, but look the heat maps of where Anderson has been hitting his line drives over the past four years:

Back in 2020 and 2021, he was spraying line drives all over the field. In the past two years, his line drives have shrunk to the point where they’re either being dumped into right field for singles or hit right at the shortstop or first baseman. When he hits one deeper, it’s usually directly at the right fielder for an easy out. As I mentioned, Anderson’s xwOBA on line drives has stayed roughly around .665 over the past three years, but his wOBA has declined from .730 to .661 to .535. Combine that with the heat maps, and there’s more than bad luck going on here. Here’s a quick refresher on the directional value of line drives over the course of the Statcast era:

As for fly balls, keep in mind that we’re dealing with an extremely small sample size. Over 309 plate appearances and 228 balls in play this year, Anderson has only hit 24 fly balls! And it’s not just that he’s not hitting fewer fly balls. It’s that when he does, he’s hitting them worse:

That’s a career low for average exit velocity on fly balls. I won’t make you look at another set of heat maps, but there’s a similar phenomenon going on. Anderson has been progressively losing the ability to drive the ball to the pull side. To his detriment, his swing is now geared more toward hitting the ball on the ground.

With all that in mind, now we can take a look at Anderson’s plate discipline. Every season of his career is listed below. It’s a big chart, but I’d just like you to notice two things:

The first is that Anderson’s zone rate is higher than it’s been since 2017. Pitchers have noticed that Anderson isn’t as dangerous when he puts the ball in play, and they’re happy to let him do so. The second is that Anderson’s swing rates this year most closely resemble those from his first three seasons in the big leagues, before he became a true threat at the plate.

Over the course of Anderson’s career, aggression has been correlated with success. I mean that literally: the correlation coefficient between his chase rate and his wRC+ is .66. He has always chased more than the analysts and the projections would have liked, but that’s what worked for him.

Last year, Robert Orr introduced the idea of a hitter’s “bad decision rate.” Rather than simply look at plate discipline in terms of swing rate on pitches either inside or outside the zone, he looked at the areas where hitters did the most or least damage. Anderson was Orr’s poster boy, with the largest difference between his chase rate and bad decision rate, because he made great contact on pitches off the edge of the plate down and away.

Here’s what that looks like in a heat map. On the left, is Anderson’s slugging percentage on balls in play from 2018-2022. In the middle is his swing rate during those years. On the right is his swing rate this year:

On the left, we can see that Anderson was best on pitches over the middle and slightly down, but there was still plenty of yellow all over the zone (except the corners), as well as slightly below the zone and outside, as Orr noted. In the middle, we can see that his swing decisions reflected that knowledge. He swung at everything, particularly low and away. On the right is this year’s swing rate. Anderson still runs a very high chase rate, but he’s much more focused middle away. That’s further away from the areas where he does the most damage, and it’s also a great recipe for hitting the ball on the ground the other way.

It’s not just that Anderson is looking down and away, it’s that a higher proportion of his swings are at pitches that tend to end up there:

His swing rate on breaking pitches has dropped just a hair, but his swing rates against fastballs and offspeed pitches have dropped dramatically. That’s a pretty terrible tradeoff, because Anderson has a career wOBA of .346 when he swings at fastballs and .321 when he swings at offspeed stuff, but just .260 when he swings at breaking balls. I don’t know what came first. Maybe Anderson is laying off fastballs because he knows he can’t handle them right now, or maybe his more passive approach is the reason that he’s not geared up enough to catch up with them.

None of this is for lack of effort. “I’ve have been working. I have been hitting, hitting a ton,” Anderson recently told MLB.com. “It’s just part of the process. It’s going to help me in the future. We can’t see it yet, but it’s something that everybody has their turn of going through something.”

I’ve written a whole lot of words here, and I’m not as near to a conclusion as I would like. For whatever reason, Anderson has been too passive this year. Not too passive for a normal hitter, but too passive for Anderson. As is so often the case, passivity in pitch selection has turned into passivity during the pitch. He’s less likely to swing at the inside pitch. He’s less likely to attack a pitch out in front of the plate, where he could do more damage and lift the ball. He’s more content than ever to let the ball get deep and shoot it the other way, but he’s less adept at it than in previous years.

I don’t imagine he’s got another 140 wRC+ season in him, but I’d be surprised if this is the end for Anderson. His game is a high-wire act, but it has worked before, and the contact skills he possesses typically aren’t ones that disappear the exact moment a player turns 30. Besides, anyone who drops 60 points of wRC+ with a 45-point gap between their wOBA and xwOBA is going to be due for some regression. DRC+, which uses more than results to measure a batter’s contributions, never loved Anderson as much as wRC+ did when he was flying high (115 DRC+ in 2020, as opposed to 140 wRC+), but it hates him much less now that he’s going splat (76 DRC+, as opposed to 49 wRC+).

The White Sox might not pick up his option for next year, but manager Pedro Grifol is determined to demonstrate his faith in Anderson, batting him in the two-hole every day and telling reporters, “I trust him. I believe he’s going to turn this around and be the player he’s always been.” Anderson has certainly earned the chance to try.