NEWSLETTER
The start to the season has been terrible for several Cubs players, but arguably none worse than Javy Báez.
Two years removed from an MVP race, and coming off a second very good season at the plate in 2019, Báez has been so unproductive this year that he’s dropping quotes like this after last night’s game:
More Javy: "I'm not trying to suck. I'm not trying to struggle." #Cubs https://t.co/hwLPwr0BGe
— Russell Dorsey (@Russ_Dorsey1) August 23, 2020
It just makes you sad. The Cubs are a fundamentally different team when Báez is having success, and the game overall is just so much more fun when he’s feeling it.
The top-line numbers are all just so bad right now: .198/.250/.344, 4.8% BB rate, 33.7% K rate, .146 ISO, 59 wRC+. And I wish I could offer glimmers of hope in the peripherals, but they really all combine to tell you the same story: everything is pretty fundamentally “off” for Báez right now.
Báez is hitting grounders at a rate (59.0%) far higher than any past season, and among the highest rates in baseball. As an obvious corollary, his line drive rate (16.4%) and his fly ball rate (24.6%) are both terrible. His 6.8-degree launch angle is the lowest of his career. It’ll be no surprise, then, to learn that his barrel rate is way down this year, and is merely middle-of-the-pack in baseball after previously being top tier. Báez is simply not making good contact when he does make contact.
And as the strikeout rate suggests, he’s also not making a lot of contact. Báez’s 61.2% contact rate is his lowest since he was a rookie. His 71.0% contact rate in the zone is, by far, the worst of his career. And further worsening the fear that he’s just not seeing the ball well at all right now? His swing rate at pitches in the zone, 66.5%, is the lowest of his career. In other words, he’s taking more strikes than ever, and when he does swing at pitches in the zone, he’s missing them at the highest rate of his career.
One more whammy of a stat: the last two years, as Báez broke out at the plate, he was swinging at the first pitch 47% of the time. This year? He’s swinging at the first pitch just 30.8% of the time. That’s an eye-popping drop when you consider that the overall first strike percentage has only decreased slightly. That is to say, Báez is seeing nearly as many strike one pitches as ever … he’s just … not swinging at them.
Combine that stuff with the poor quality of contact, and more alarming than the bad results that you’d obviously get is the fear that he’s so off at the plate that you can’t reasonably project it’ll just come right back like a poof. This all suggests that something is actually wrong with Báez at the plate – like, something that has to be fixed. And when you have only a month left in the season, how confident can you be that a fix will be identified and implemented successfully in that time?
More realistically, you hope that SOME of the performance troubles are related to pressing, and at least THAT part can be alleviated quickly with a mindset change. I don’t know how you get from here to there for an individual like Báez, but hey, that’s why there’s a coaching staff and veterans on the team – someone needs to play the part of Pedro Strop and get Javy where he needs to be. Without an approach or mechanical fix, that probably doesn’t make Báez a huge offensive contributor, but it could at least prevent him from continuing to be one of the literal worst bats in baseball.
In the meantime? It’s probably worth considering a move down the order. I know David Ross wants to keep showing confidence in his guys and all that, and he probably knows better than we outsiders do what the risks/rewards are. but at the moment, Báez is getting more PAs than anyone on the team outside of Ian Happ and Anthony Rizzo, and that’s probably not a great idea for generating offense.
