If you found yourself following the 2018 White Sox (either you are a supporter of the South Side Baseball Club or, a masochist), you probably also found yourself yelling “swing the bat Moncada!” at the television at some point during the season. In 2018, Moncada’s first full season in the big leagues, he led the majors with 217 strikeouts, posting a 33.4% K-rate. Brutal.
Why was Moncada striking out so much? Casual observers will tell you that he was looking at way too many third strikes. Of his 217 strikeouts in 2018, 85 of them were third-strike looking. He wasn’t expanding the zone, and he was relying on his own (rookie) batting eye to make what he thought was the correct decision to take a borderline pitch with two strikes.
I wasn’t much of a hitter when I played travel ball growing up, but my coach always told me, “I don’t care if you strikeout, as long as you are swinging the bat on the third strike.” Moncada needed some of that approach in 2018.
In 2019, it changed. Moncada struck out a mere 154 times. His K% dropped to 27.5%. And, as any of his fantasy owners will tell you, he pounded the ball last year. So what was different? There’s a fun tool I like to use that I want to show you:
The Swing/Take Profile
Baseball Savant is a website that you should have bookmarked (along with Prospects Live!). It provides tons of ways to look at data collected by MLB on every major leaguer. Tom Tango (inventor of wOBA) has had an illustrious career looking at baseball data. He’s currently MLB’s Senior Data Architect. A lot of his ideas have been made graphically represented and searchable on Baseball Savant.
One idea of Tango’s that I love to look at is a hitter’s ‘Swing Take Profile’. You can find it in the ‘Player Apps’ section on each individual player page on Baseball Savant:
Tango’s swing take profile is based on splitting the strike zone into four separate zones with relatively self explanatory names;
Heart; the middle of the zone, where pitchers want to stay away from and hitters can do the most damage
Shadow; I always think of this as ‘the black’. It’s where pitchers want to live and where the 50/50 calls happen
Chase; off the black, these are usually the spots where the pitcher is throwing his out pitch and where hitters might still be tempted to swing
Waste; well outside of the strike zone, these pitches should be easy for batters to take as balls
Here’s the visual chart of the four zones:
2018 - Dying in the Shadows
Back to Moncada. We already established that he got rung up on a lot of third strike calls in his first full season in The Show. Here is his 2018 swing/take profile, which will help us visualize what he was doing:
This shows how many runs Moncada gained or lost in each zone. Tango assigns a run value to each pitch in the zone based on its outcome (ball, strike, home run, etc.). So you can see, for example, that Moncada gained 26 runs in the ‘chase’ zone, but lost 27 runs in the ‘shadow’ zone in 2018.
Why is that the case? Well, if you keep looking to the right, it shows the swing/take percentages for Moncada in each of the four zones. The first thing to note is that Moncada was a very passive hitter in 2018. He swung the bat at rates below the MLB average in each of the four zones. The next thing to look at is the ‘Run Value’ chart by each zone. You can see that Moncada was bad in the shadow zone; -14 runs lost to taken pitches, and -23 runs lost to swinging at pitches in the shadow. Also, in the heart of the plate, Moncada gave up six runs by not swinging frequently enough, despite the fact that he was a solid +8 on ‘swing runs’ in the heart of the zone.
2019 - Thriving in the Zone
Here is how Moncada’s swing/take profile changed in the 2019 season:
You can see that his plate approach was worth an additional +23 runs in 2019. What changed from 2018? First, Moncada was less passive in both the heart of the plate and in the shadow zone:
2018 Heart Swing %; 69%
2019 Heart Swing %; 70%
2018 Shadow Swing %; 47%
2019 Shadow Swing %; 56% (above league average!)
Moncada clearly took feedback on his 2018 results and changed his approach in 2019.
The results? Moncada still lost 11 runs by taking pitches in the shadow zone. But by swinging (and making contact more frequently) in that zone, he only lost one run there on swings in 2019 as opposed to losing twenty-three runs swinging in the shadow in 2018. And his productivity on contact in the heart of the plate doubled in 2019. You can see the difference in the overall run value change in the heart of the zone; -6 runs in the heart of the plate in 2018 flipped to +5 runs in 2019.
Moncada’s change in approach and improvement in his batting eye created one of 2019’s fantasy baseball breakouts. Using the Statcast Swing/Take Profile tool, you can mine for similar breakouts for the 2020 season. Who are you looking at to take that next step in 2020?