Collette Calls: This Too Shall Pass

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses!"

Let's look at what needs to happen for these bad starts to 2018 to pass. I want to focus on two hitters and one pitcher who were top-150 players by ADP in draft season.

Ian Happ Can't Make Contact: 45 percent of his at-bats have resulted in a strikeout. Miguel Sano is right there with him, but that is to be expected of Sano. Happ did strikeout out 31 percent of the time in 2017, but did not show this propensity to have contact troubles in his brief but stellar minor league career.

The two areas that stand out on Happ's plate discipline profile are his swinging-strike rate, but more important, his swing and miss inside the strike zone. It would be one thing if the early sophomore slump were related to him expanding his strike zone, but he is not doing that. His plate discipline is very much in line where it was last year. The issue is the pitches he is swinging and missing within the strike zone. The table below shows Happ's numbers in each type of count:

The high zone-swing rate behind in the count is not surprising because batters have to protect the zone, but let's isolate his numbers above in two-strike counts:

The discipline remains the same, but his contract rate within the strike zone falls 10 percentage points while his swinging-strike rate worsens by five percentage points. He has a single hit in a two-strike count and has put seven of 62 two-strike pitches into play (image via baseballsavant). The issue with Happ is he appears to be looking for non-fastballs in two-strike count, and the league knows it because it is throwing him an inordinate amount of fastballs in those counts:

I am no hitting coach, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but one would think that if Happ adjusts his two-strike approach to sit on the fastball a bit more and adjust to the other pitches, his fortunes will improve. The league is throwing him strikes, and he is swinging through four times the number of two-strike pitches than he is taking for strike three. Perhaps the league has decided that his swing has gotten long and that he cannot catch up to fastballs. Happ and hitting coach Chili Davis are working on things in the cages at the moment, so improvements could be just around the corner.

Ian Desmond Can't Do Anything: Maybe it is the first name (sorry, Ian Kahn), but Ian Desmond is the lowest-rated player on the Fangraphs Offensive leaderboard thanks to his .151/.182/.329 start to the season. He has snuck in four homers and 11 RBIs along with nine runs scored when he has managed to put the ball in play, but that is an abysmal slash line. Desmond has never been the model of plate discipline or contact, but his walk rate is a career low, and his strikeout rate is a near career high. The plate discipline numbers show a little of the story:

Desmond is expanding an already loose zone even more and is struggling to make contact within the strike zone as he is being forced into defensive mode quicker as pitchers are getting ahead of him in the count right out of the gate.

He has seen 268 pitches this season, and many have been fastballs or sliders playing off those fastballs:

Like his Ian twin, Desmond is seeing a lot of fastballs, but unlike Happ, he sees a larger pitch mixture when he is behind in the count, particularly when he is down 0-2 or 1-2 and the slider usage steps up.

The other important part of the schedule is that the Rockies have been on the road quite a bit. As play began Sunday, Colorado had played just eight of 22 games in Coors Field. One would think that Desmond should be able to benefit by playing at home, but his numbers at Coors since joining the team are rather terrible as he has hit .236/.274/.309 at home and .269/.328/.421 on the road.

Desmond has spent the better part of the last three seasons as a below-average offensive player and is not showing many signs of a bounceback in his 2018 free fall:

If you are interested in buying low, now is your time. There is not much guarantee that there are better days ahead because he is not making much quality contact as he is topping more baseballs than he is elevating which is never a good sign:

Jon Gray Can't Pitch: I liked Gray quite a bit coming into this season, and own four shares of him in the five leagues I could draft him in. He is 1-4 with a 6.75 ERA through his first five starts, and frankly, this is not what I signed up for. I am sure I am not alone in this situation. His .375 wOBA against is terrible for a starting pitcher, and his expected weighted on-base average of .348 is still nothing to write home about it. Simply put, he has pitched some bad baseball in 2018.

The good news is that his struggles are not a velocity issue as his current velocity continues a five-year trend of Gray's velocity increasing year over year:

Look at that blue line, though. Where did his changeup go? He threw the pitch 204 times in 2016, just 39 times in 2017, but has not yet used the pitch in 2018 despite working on a new changeup grip in spring training. The changeup is a necessary weapon for pitchers to help neutralize opposite-handed batters, so something moves in the other direction and/or changes speed.

Patrick Corbin is a recent example of someone scrapping the changeup for a slow curveball as his change of pace pitch, but Gray's curveball utilization rate has not changed year-over-year, and he has instead thrown more sliders. It should come as no surprise that Gray's numbers against lefties this year have taken a step back since his repertoire against them has changed:

That image reminds me of one of my favorite quotes on pitching by then-Royals reliever and now-Cardinals pitcher Greg Holland in 2013:

"Pitchers like to pitch on the outer half of the plate — away — because it's hard to hit a pitch on the outer half of the plate out of the park. Stay on the outer half and, unless the guy has unusual opposite-field power, he's likely to stay in the park. But continually pitch on the outer half — away, away, away — and hitters start to "dive." They stride toward the outer half of the plate and now, as far as the hitter is concerned, that pitch on the outside corner is right down the middle."

I am holding with Happ and Gray, but I am moving on from Desmond in 12-team mixed leagues. The first two have a clear path forward to turning it around while Desmond's 2018 struggles are really just an extension of last year's troubles and we have seen a large enough sample size to legitimize his struggles. Kick some tires and see what it takes to roster Happ or Gray, who are in a pit of misery statistically, because brighter days are ahead.