Here is my first update on how Jarred’s swing decisions are trending down in AAA and boy howdy, let me remind you that development isn’t linear. Jarred had a really tough week at the plate against the Salt Lake Bees. He saw a diet of almost exclusively change ups for a couple games and really struggled handling it.
My writeup on Jarred’s first 30 games in AAA is available
here.A bit on my process from the first article: I made an Excel spreadsheet and filled a few notebook pages with tallies going through every pitch he has seen in a Rainiers uniform. I am just a human tallying pitches up and though I was being careful, it is totally possible I made some mistakes. Basically, build some error bars into these numbers and don’t take them as exact, but we are here to do trend analysis anyway. Additionally, I put splitters in the fastball bucket, whereas I believe a lot of sources count the split finger fastball as an offspeed pitch, so probably a systemic error on my part (he didn’t see too many splitters anyway). For the sake of total clarity, my buckets are:
Fastballs – four seam, cutter, sinker, and splitter
Breaking – Curve, knuckle curve, slider
Offspeed – Breaking and changeups
The numbers in the tables below are up to date through the 5th of July. He has played a grand total of 36 games in AAA, with 167 plate appearances, and 648 total pitches. Of those pitches 48% were offspeed (312 total).
This time, I broke the results in to two chunks to try and increase the sample size. With 36 games down in AAA, I did the first 18 games as ‘first half’ and the next 18 games as ‘second half’. I also included his most recent 10 games, which is just to show you what he has done lately with a very small sample size. I would recommend focusing mostly on the second half numbers to get an idea of how he is doing!
Plate Discipline (%)
|
First half |
Second Half |
Last 10 |
Overall |
League Avg. |
Swing% |
48.5 |
48.4 |
50.0 |
48.5 |
47.4 |
O-Swing% |
30.9 |
31.9 |
33.7 |
31.4 |
32.3 |
Z-Swing% |
72.2 |
67.4 |
67.7 |
69.8 |
69.0 |
Contact% |
68.9 |
71.3 |
71.1 |
70.1 |
76.6 |
O-Contact% |
50.0 |
47.2 |
44.1 |
48.7 |
63.6 |
Z-Contact% |
79.8 |
84.5 |
85.7 |
82.1 |
85.3 |
CSW (%) + Whiffs
|
First half |
Second Half |
Last 10 |
Overall |
League Avg. |
CSW% |
30.2 |
30.6 |
32.5 |
30.4 |
27.5 |
CSW%Break |
45.6 |
34.8 |
41.5 |
40.0 |
X |
CSW%Off |
43.2 |
35.5 |
39.8 |
39.1 |
X |
Whiff% |
30.5 |
28.0 |
27.8 |
29.3 |
X |
Whiff%Break |
52.4 |
44.7 |
47.6 |
48.8 |
X |
Whiff%Off |
58.3 |
44.9 |
47.7 |
55.1 |
X |
And here is a 10-game rolling CSW% graph, for the visual learners:
I believe the graph shows clearly his struggles last week. Even then, his overall plate discipline numbers above still seem to be trending in the right direction. He took a lot more called strikes this week, shown in the difference between CSW% and Whiff%. Again, we are living in the world of small samples here, but his second half numbers still look pretty good. With his improved plate discipline still intact, despite having a rough few games, I expect that CSW% will turn around fairly quickly. Additionally, a down week for him now is still better than when he was first sent down results wise.
I will update this again on the next Rainiers off day! Let me know what you think. If there are other pieces of data you would like to see or a better way I can meaningfully present this data, let me know!
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