#EdgarHOF - Day 21

Hello! Yesterday things got a little busy around here when Jerry tried to sneak a trade past us in the dark of night on a holiday eve. That guy is like a character in a folktale, for real. The upshot of this means that Edgar has two new pupils in Jean Segura and Mitch Haniger. Segura has a very troubling career walk rate that initially made me wonder why Dipoto would see him as a good candidate for the land of C the Z, but his article from Beyond the Box Score discusses the improvements he made in early 2016 with his plate discipline. These numbers seem to suggest that while Segura hasn’t completely rehabilitated his inability to take a walk, he is at least making strides in that direction. A 5.6% BB rate is still microscopic, but it’s more than double what he put up in 2015 with the Brewers (although that season, during which his nine-month old son passed away from an illness, probably doesn’t best represent Segura as a player). Having the opportunity to work with Edgar, one of the most disciplined hitters of all time, might be the key Segura needs to putting together a more complete approach at the plate.

Mitch Haniger, the OF prospect, has a much more palatable BB rate at slightly above league average, and he doesn’t strike out a ton. His spray chart is pretty nifty, too:

What’s interesting here is that although all the home runs are to LF, as you would expect from a RHH, there are more flyballs being hit to the opposite field, suggesting that Haniger is actively working on not being a pure pull hitter. The spray chart Daren Willman posted is even more tantalizing when taking into account Haniger’s performance across multiple levels:

Here you can really see Haniger’s focus on using the whole field, including a decent number of opposite-field dingers. Now Haniger will work under the tutelage of one of the best right-handed hitters of all time (sixth best, if you go by this), an expert at hitting the ball all over the park.

As I was typing this up, I thought of how convenient it was that the two offensive players we netted in the trade happen to have holes in their game that are perfectly matched by the talents of our hitting coach. But really, Edgar was such a complete hitter that two players could come in with any weakness and Edgar would have insight on how to do it better. It will be interesting to see what strides forward these two players make next year.