Was Will Venable Focusing on the Right Things?

Padres outfielder Will Venable was sent to the minor leagues today. Amazingly for a 28-year old with a .224/.293/.291 line and a neutral-looking .300 BABIP, it’s actually worth wondering if he deserved this fate. His case may help us understand something about focus and areas of improvement — because Will Venable has actually made some improvements this year, but perhaps not in the right areas.

The book on the toosly outfielder going into the season was that it was all about contact. Striking out in a third of his at-bats was not going to allow him to take full advantage of his speed and power, or so went the accepted thought. And of course, the on-base percentage on a strikeout is zero, so there is merit to this line of reasoning.

Venable revamped his swing, condensing and simplifying, but mostly just standing taller at the plate. In some ways, it looks to have worked early in the 2011 season. His swinging-strike and strikeout rates both hit three-year lows. He was swinging less than usual and making more contact. The new approach even had him hitting line drives at a career-best rate.

Put it all together and it looks like Venable did exactly what was asked of him. And yet he was sent down and asked to work on his swing even more. This might be a shame because it’s possible that luck still played a factor in his poor performance to date, and beyond that, the team may have asked him to focus on the wrong part of his game.

He does have a .300 BABIP, and BABIPs do trend toward that number across baseball. But not every player has the same batted-ball mix, and not every player deserves the same BABIP. Using the xBABIP calculator set up here, Venable’s mix of line drives, infield hits, ground balls and fly balls have an xBABIP of .353. That’s right, his early season BABIP could have easily been as much as 20% better than it is currently. He’s been hitting the ball on the ground, and is obviously a speedy fellow (with an improved strikeout rate!), so this passes the sniff test to an extent.

But bringing up Venable’s batted-ball profile does open up a can of worms. Over his career, the Padres outfielder has hit more ground balls than fly balls, which isn’t a philosophy that takes full advantage of his nascent power. Last year, Venable finally nudged that ratio in favor of fly balls and was rewarded with a career high in home runs despite being a left-handed hitter in the toughest park for left-handed power hitters in the league. This year? He’s showing his second-worst ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio (1.21) and his power has completely disappeared (.067 2011 ISO, .152 career).

Venable is a speedy guy, and sometimes the fleet-footed are asked to put the ball on the ground and fly. But this fast outfielder is not made in the slap-hitter mold, and with his strikeouts, he would never sport a great batting average. Even with incremental improvements. So, if the team did ask Venable to focus on cutting the strikeouts, they may have been guilty of focusing in the wrong area.

A better use of Venable’s time may have been to think about adding loft to the ball, which might have allowed him to harness his power and make him a valuable player despite his contact issues. Then again, PetCo park suppresses home runs by left-handed hitters by a whopping 41%, so that approach would have had its pitfalls as well.

The question of focus is not a zero-sum game. Asking Venable to cut down the strikeouts does not mean that he couldn’t also spend time thinking about getting the ball in the air more. It’s possible for Venable to take his improvement in contact and add it to his power when it returns. We do know ISO takes the longest to stabilize. But it’s also worth wondering if all the attention that has been on his strikeouts has been a little misguided. If he’s never going to feature contact as a major part of his game, then he should find an approach that gets the most of the tools he has. That might mean working on hitting some more balls in the air while he’s down on the farm.

Oh, and he shouldn’t forget to work on cutting down strikeouts.