Yasiel Puig has always been a divisive player, for reasons that everyone and their dog probably know by now. He’s brash. He’s undisciplined. He’s wild. He’s young.
Personally, I’ve always been a staunch member of the pro-Puig camp. I have no issue with a headstrong young man learning to be an adult on a national stage, and one who’s gone from poverty to millions of dollars in a remarkably short time. For better or worse, personality is always going to be part of Puig being Puig. However, Puig is also very good at his job, and sometimes that gets lost in the race to criticize the man for his brashness on the field. One of the biggest criticisms of Puig’s game was his aggressiveness at the plate. He seemingly swung at everything, which resulted in a 22.5% K rate and only 8.3% walk rate. Puig addressed a lot of that this year, having evened those two rates out to 18.8% and 11.0%, respectively.
Something odd’s happened in the past month, though. Over the month of August, Puig is hitting a measley .221/.309/.244, without a single home run. That’s very unlike him. Everyone goes through cold streaks, and it stands to reason that Puig will heat back up at some point soon. Yet what exactly has happened to him over the past month? Let’s find out.
The first thing that’s caught my eye is one of Puig’s batted ball stats, his infield fly balls. A fly ball in the infield (a very stuffy way of saying “pop-up”) is almost always an out, and the league average IFFB% this year is 9.6%. In August, Puig’s is 22.7%. That’s a lot of free outs. Pop-ups are generally a result of bad contact, which can be induced through proper pitching. Below are a couple of charts (formed at the wonderful BrooksBaseball.net) that sort of speak to this. The first is the location of pitches to Puig from the start of the season (not sure if the park in Sydney was outfitted with Pitch f/x cameras or not, but oh well) through the end of July, and the second is pitches to Puig in August.
There’s a subtle shift there. In August, Puig has seen a lot more pitches down, and fewer inside the zone. I made sure the discrepancy between the two charts isn’t just the result of a trend that was forming over the course of the first few months too, as here’s the chart using only data from July. In July, Puig had a huge 210 wRC+ (which means he was 110 points better than league average), in August he’s at 66 wRC+.
It’s also worth noting Puig was dealing with some hamstring issues at the start of the month, and may still be tender from them. He also missed a game with a bad back. Between the pain in his legs and pitchers giving him less to hit, it seems as though a perfect storm of bad luck has taken Puig by storm. These bad pitches and bad legs have resulted in, of course, bad contact. It’s not just his pop-ups that are up, but his ground balls as well. In his fabulous July, Puig had a 42.9% ground ball rate. Now, more than half of his contact (56.7%) is resulting in ground balls. Grounders find holes sometimes, but there’s a reason inducing ground balls is emphasized in pitcher development.
It’s not reasonable to expect that Puig will continue to hit like this, of course. He’s been banged up of late. That’s perfectly reasonable to see in the dog days of August, and fatigue is probably setting in as well. Those problems are going to be alleviated at some point. It’s the pitching adjustments that Puig will have to counteract, and it seems that’s already begun. He’s hitless over his last five games, but he’s drawn six walks in that time frame, including two in both of his most recent games. While hits are of course more productive than walks (can’t knock a runner in from second with a walk), but he’s getting on base and giving the bats behind him a chance to hit him in, as well as making opposing pitchers work. It’s an approach like this that shows that Puig has in fact matured to some degree. His baserunning, well…
That’s a work in progress. Yet his batting has been the main issue of late, and it seems Puig is starting to do work to change that. Baseball is a game of adjustments, and over the last month pitching has clearly adjusted to the force that is Yasiel Puig. The big hits will surely return as he gets healthier, but for now he’s perfectly fine with pitchers giving him free passes by pitching below the zone. That’s what making adjustments looks like. Staying power for hitters is the ability to adjust to pitching adjustments, and for Puig the pitching changes have happened in the midst of some nagging injuries. More often than not, that will lead to a bad month. Puig’s changes are happening, which is much easier said than done. For that, he should be lauded.
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