Javier Baez hit a hanging breaking ball over the fence for a three-run shot. Jason Heyward did the same a couple batters later. These two blasts were huge reasons the Cubs won the ballgame in Wednesday night’s tilt with the Los Angeles Dodgers. These were the highlights that a lot of fans will remember from the game, what I took out of this was Kris Bryant’s night.
Bryant, who has been struggling throughout the early season, has had several things effecting his swing. Of course there was the injury from 2018 which forced him to change his swing up a bit. He opted to go with a two-handed approach, he normally finishes with one hand on the bat releasing the top hand soon after contact. In the offseason he took two months to really work on rehabbing his shoulder, ensuring he would be healthy coming into the 2019 season. By all accounts, he is healthy.
The problem when rehabbing for much of an offseason is, you don’t get the normal work you would working on your craft. Bryant is the kind of player that goes into every offseason looking for a way to improve some component of his offensive game. He, and his dad Mike Bryant, go hard on improving his swing for three months an offseason, this year, that work was reduced to a single month.
When injury consumes an offseason, it isn’t likely to see a player in any sport return to form the following year. There is usually a period of adjustment. A period of getting used to the grind of the professional athlete’s life. A period of remembering just how fast and hard the game really is.
See, for four months of last season, when Bryant wasn’t on the DL (now the IL), he had “how do I eliminate pain” in the back of his mind. Every swing he took was a battle between the pitcher, and his own pain threshold.
In 2019, that thought isn’t there, but standing in the box is still a bit of a foreign idea without constant reminder of when I swing this bat I will feel immense pain. But there are also mechanical adjustments that are still being worked on that he just didn’t have time to do during an offseason of rehabilitation.
Example, in the early, early season, pitchers just attacked him away and he wasn’t able to cover the outside half of the plate. At the end of the 2018 season, it was those outside pitches that gave him the most issues with pain. Then, sometime in that Miami series, he made the effort to throw his hands to the ball, was able to start covering that outside pitch, and he just missed hitting a couple balls over the fence to right-center.
The next adjustment, which is still a bit of a work in progress, is… bat head. Right now he’s not strong through the zone, which could also be a product of that shoulder. This is allowing the bat head to drop further below the ball, causing more time for him to come up to contact as well as forcing him into a lot of pop-ups.
This is an easy adjustment, and one he began to make in Wednesday night’s game.
When we dive into Bryant’s numbers deeper, we see that the exit velocity is an issue, which likely results from the lowest barrel % of his career.
When you look at those numbers, remember, this includes his exit velocity from Wednesday night’s game against the Dodgers, where he averaged 107.7 MPH on his hits, and the third ball he struck was hit at 91.1 MPH. Pull last night out of the equation and Bryant is averaging 82 MPH EV. Taking Tuesday night’s game out, and he would be hovering at the 80 MPH range.
So… what does that all mean? Well, as I tweeted out on Tuesday after the game, Bryant is about to bust out. This was just a reverse way to get to that point.
In the past two ballgames, Bryant has hit balls at 82, 88.8, 91.1, 91.9, 105.2, and 110.2 MPH. While the bat head is still a tad low as it enters the zone, it isn’t as noticeable and his timing is better. Correcting these things is helping to hit the ball harder, and there is absolutely a direct correlation between hitting the ball hard and having success. Just ask Baez and Heyward. Baez is in the top 10% of baseball with a 92.5 MPH EV, which is also a career high, and Heyward’s 90.7 is his career best. Oh, and that hanging breaking ball Baez hit out last night, guess what zone it was thrown in?
So… what does this mean? I expect this stretch to continue. Right now pitchers are still attacking him away, but as he continues to cover that side of the plate and is hitting the ball with authority, they will absolutely have to come in on him. Once that starts happening is when the moonshots start happening.
One last note… nearly than half of Bryant’s hits this season are extra base hits, 8 doubles and 1 HR with 19 hits on the season. Keeping with that idea, as he continues to figure things out, he can still put together a fairly special slugging season. The HR will come back shortly, remember, he hit 26 in his rookie campaign while spending the first couple weeks in Iowa, then struggling a bit in the power department to start his big league career. He already has a 1 HR lead on the 2015 season.
