Positive Data Points Jays Batters Part 2

Time for Part 2 of this brief series on early season data points, I was hoping there might be more positives to take away from yesterdays game but alas the beat or baseball season goes on.

Today I will be taking a look at a group of lefty hitters where half of them are off to pretty good starts!! The other two however have been major letdowns.

Andres Gimenez 268/318/463 – 127 WRC+

Gimenez much like the start of last season has started this season hot and he currently leads the Jays in slugging which is good for him but anytime Gimenez leads the team in slugging is likely to bad for the Jays.

For Gimenez the big data point over this small sample is him absolutely crushing right handed pitching, against RHP he is hitting 346/393/654!!!!

Yes unfortunately there is some over performance based on balls in play and quality of contact and he is highly unlikely to maintain this kind of batting line against RHP for the whole season but if you break his splits against RHP by all months where he has seen at least 150 pitches so far this month would rank 2nd in expected batting average, 3rd in expected slugging, 2nd in xWOBA and 2nd in barrel rate.

This month still has lots of time left so not really a fair comparison but so far the first 11 games of the season has been one of the better 11 game hitting stretches against RHP of his career.

Daulton Varsho 171/275/229 47 WRC+

Varsho is clearly off to a rough start especially after being so hot during Spring Training, during the Spring Varsho was doing a great job pairing his new found hard contact from last season with much more contact.

Since the start of the regular season he has so far done a good job maintaining the contact and has raised his contact% all the way up to 82.7% from last seasons 71.7% which has cut his K rate from 28.4% to 15% and he has paired this with a much higher line drive rate of 31% compared to last seasons 16.9%.

Way less Ks and more line drives you would expect this to be a good thing but unfortunately the quality of contact has really fallen off with his hard hit rate dropping from 40.3% to 24.12% and his average exit velocity currently down 7.8 MPH.

It is early but if Varsho can find a happy medium between the all power high K hitter he was last season and the low K line drive guy he has been this season he should be able to help this Jays roster score some runs.

Jesus Sanchez 286/375/429 141 WRC+

I will keep this one pretty short because the Jays have to be happy with what they have received from Sanchez in the batting lineup this season and based on quality of contact he has actually underperformed his expected batted ball stats!!!

A 47.6% hard hit rate, 9.5% barrel rate to go with a 21.9% K rate is a pretty great start to his Blue Jays career.

Addison Barger 053/174/105 – Minus 11 WRC+

Ahhh yeah not a great start to the season for Barger and he is of course now on the IL with an injury.

Even Barger’s 1 hit on the season was a ball that should have been a HR but the RF brought it back and dropped the ball so he was able to get a double but Barger is one dropped HR robbery from still having a 000 batting average.

Digging thru Barger’s data and honestly I don’t have much positives to take away, he is making more contact on both in zone and out of zone pitches so if he gets back to last season’s chase rate he could make some real progress on his K rate

He has still been hitting the ball hard with a 50% hard hit rate so hopefully the IL stint allows him to reset and come back with a better approach and he can combine the new contact rates with his regular quality of contact and get on a roll.