Dude has picked it up lately
Sometimes we forget that baseball is a long season. Football schedule mentality, the need to win every single game no matter the cost, has ruined that point of view for some of the casual fans, so when a player is off to a slow start, that player is torn up a bit by the fanbase. Alec Bohm is one of those players that this happened to this year. He was not good at all in the first weeks of April and the way he carried himself showed it. Frustration was visible, but knowing that this is a marathon and not a sprint helped.
The other day, in the weekly look at three players playing well, Alec Bohm was the first name I mentioned. In it, I picked April 18 as an arbitrary end point for the struggles Bohm had at the beginning of the season. At that time, Bohm was hitting .177/.188/.228 and simply looked lost at the plate. Wiser people than I mentioned batted ball luck and other rates that Bohm had that indicated that he was perhaps a bit unlucky. A lot of what he did last year was the same, therefore it stood to reason that he, and the stats one gets paid for in arbitration, were bound to improve.
Fast forward to now.
Since the games of April 19th and through the games on Monday, Bohm is tied for 31st (of 174 qualified hitters) in wRC+ with a number of 141. Who is that better than? Here’s a list of names for you that Bohm’s 141 wRC+ is better than since that date:
- Kyle Schwarber (138)
- Pete Crow-Armstrong (135)
- Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. (131)
- Fernando Tatis, Jr. (116)
- Bryce Harper (116)
That’s a list of players, a few of which were in early season talks for MVP of their respective leagues. It’s nothing to sneeze at and a testament to how much Bohm has picked it up in these last few months. How has he done it?
What’s been impressive is that Bohm’s under the hood numbers have stayed relatively flate this whole season. Nothing has really changed outside of one outlier number from the start of the year. It’s that he’s hitting the fastball more often and with more authority.
In April, pitchers began seeing that they could throw the fastball past Bohm a bit more, so they figured, why not increase the amount you’re going to throw it? To his credit, Bohm has responded by hitting the fastball more often. He’s not hitting any harder now than he did in the first month of the season; he’s just not missing it as much. Get a fastball and do damage against it – it ain’t a hard concept. He’s still not where he has been in past seasons. By run value, he’s still at -1 for the season against fastballs, representing his lowest mark against fastballs four years. Teams likely will see this and adjust to using pitches that aren’t fastballs more often, so we’ll have to see how he adjusts.
Everything else has remained more or less the same as it was in the beginning of the season. Hard hit rate, chase rate, it’s all pretty much in line with what he had done at the beginning of the season. It’s just that now, he’s starting to hit the ball, in baseball terminology, where they ain’t. It’s amazing what a bit of batted ball luck will do to a player in either direction.
For an offense to be consistently good, players need to come to step up and do what they’ve usually done in their careers. This year is an example of that for Bohm. After that rough start, he’s gotten himself back on track and has performed well. For this offense, one that has gotten some up and down performances, it’s been much needed.