Reaching For An Answer To A-Rod’s Slump
Via Marc Carig:
Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long keeps an array of stats and charts. One of them tracks “reaches,” or how many times a hitter extends his hands from his body to reach for a ball. It’s obviously a bad habit, one that can rob a hitter of power, among other debilitating side effects.
Since June 5, by Long’s count, Rodriguez has reached on about 85 percent of his swings. In those 12 games, Rodriguez is hitting just .125 (5-for-40) with two homers and four RBIs. In that same span, his batting average plummeted from .253 to his current .212.
Coincidence? Maybe not.
“I was shocked at the number,” Long said of the slugger’s reach percentage. “I didn’t think it was that many.”
Rodriguez said the habit has thrown his contact point off, and the numbers seem to indicate that the slugger is indeed reaching. Rodriguez is making contact with 58.2 percent of the pitches he’s offers at that are considered outside of the strike zone. That’s his highest rate since 2002, the first year that such data became available.
“We’ve got to get it compact, we’ve got to get it tight, we’ve got to get it explosive,” Long said of Rodriguez’s swing.
Bad habit?
When I saw this report from Carig this morning, the immediate thing I thought of was that scouting report (via Jayson Stark) which I shared here on May 14th. In it, the scout said:
“But [A-Rod's] biggest problem, I think, is at the plate. He can’t get to the low, outside fastball or the slider away. He normally takes those balls the other way, but he can’t get there. And as word gets around the league, he may have more holes than he’s ever had.”
So, is the issue of Alex’s slump just a “bad habit,” or, more so, is it a matter of the league realizing that Rodriguez “can’t get to the low, outside fastball or the slider away” and that’s all they’re giving him – and that’s why he’s reaching so much now?
That’s NOT all they’re giving him.
He’s missing pitches over the heart of the plate, including, in that famous (infamous?) walk in the 9th inning on Wednesday, fouling back a FB more or less down the middle.
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I would not bet real money on the proposition that Alex has all of a sudden altogether lost the ability to hit the fastball and slider away.
I’ve heard some interesting theories on this. Pitchers are fully in the seaosn while Arod is still in spring training mode. intriguing and maybe plausible. The thing is though, arod is a caliber of hitter where this shouldn’t have been too much of an overwhelming factor quite honestly.
The other thing is his hip. Is Arod 100% from the surgery? This was only supposed to be a temporary fix and in the off season, he would get the complete surgery for the hip. This must be effecting his rhythm , his batting stance, bat speed and ultimately, his swing.