I’m a fan of the Blue Jays, so I get a chance to watch most of their games. After Snider’s day off tonight against the White Sox, I decided to take a look see at exactly what’s going wrong.
Snider’s currently hitting .107 with a 32% K-Rate and absolutely no power. Why is Snider, who’s patience seems drastically improved playing so poorly?
Well, it’s Cito’s fault. After looking through the statistics and the ABs, it’s fairly clear to me what’s happening: Snider’s not getting anything to hit. With Snider batting 8th in the Jay’s line-up, his current protection consists of a John McDonald (.276 OBP) /Mike McCoy (~.300 OBP) platoon followed by the Blue Jays’ 1 and 2 Hitters. Unfortunately, the Jays’ one and two hitters are Jose Bautista (.326 OBP) and Alex Gonzalez (.294 OBP).
There’s absolutely no reason to believe that pitchers would have any reason to throw strikes to Travis Snider. The evidence, while slim, shows that Snider’s seeing about 42.7% of pitches in the strike-zone. Over the past few years, he’s seen about 47.2% of pitches in the zone compared to the MLB average of 49%.
Everything else points to Snider improving:
1. Swinging at fewer pitches outside of the zone (-5%)
2. Swinging at more pitches in the zone (+3%)
3. Making more contact on pitches in the zone (+1%)
4. Starting off with fewer 0-1 counts (-13%)
5. Taking fewer swinging strikes (-1%)
In my opinion, Cito Gaston openly acknowledged that Snider had confidence problems when he guaranteed Snider a job. Cito’s belief was that Snider would benefit from knowing that he didn’t have to perform in order to stay in the line-up.
Yet, knowing that Snider needed to build up confidence, Cito has essentially put him in a spot where he’ll see fewer hittable pitches.
This may only make sense to me, but if you’re concerned about a kid’s confidence, why not put him in a position to succeed? You don’t need statistics to understand that a 22-year old might get frustrated seeing garbage, being intentionally walked, and hearing about his .100 batting average.
What’s Snider doing with this junk? He’s walking 18% of the time, a drastic improvement.
Batted ball data is almost useless, but it’s clear that Snider’s hitting more weak grounders and fewer deep flies. However, he is squaring up hittable pitches pretty well and driving them to the gap (21% LD)
(In most cases, when the bases are loaded in the MLB Game Day Screen Shot, it just means that Snider ended the Inning. )
So while this isn’t particularly fantasy based, go ahead and take a look at Snider’s ABs and tell me if these are the types of pitches you want your former Baseball America #6 overall prospect.
