The new-look Lourdes Gurriel Jr. has been mashing breaking balls
When Lourdes Gurriel Jr. was sent to the minor leagues in mid-April he was lost. He looked incapable of playing his position and his bat had been silenced after a promising rookie season.
On the surface his stint in Buffalo didn’t seem too revelatory. He was below league-average at the dish per wRC+ and was only able to log 58 innings at his new position in the outfield. Nothing about his numbers screamed “MLB breakout” and yet since his return to the bigs he’s been on cruise control, hitting .325/.374/.699 with eight home runs.
While the jury’s out on his defence so far — for what it’s worth, Statcast scores him as a slight negative in left — his offence has been beyond reproach. Before we go overboard with optimism, it’s worth mentioning that we’ve been here before, as Gurriel Jr. got approximately this hot last year during a multi-hit game streak that didn’t result in an offensive renaissance:
However, there’s something different about Gurriel Jr.’s recent hot stretch: an unprecedented mashing of breaking balls. Last year, the 25-year-old hit just .232 and slugged .329 against breaking stuff - with even worse expected stats. That trend continued in the beginning of 2019.
Prior to getting sent down, he hit just .143 on breaking balls, slugging just .286 with a truly morbid whiff rate of 51.9 percent. Opponents could clearly attack him with sliders and curveballs and expect to be successful. Since he returned that hasn’t been the case. The following is a chart of his slugging percentage on breaking balls by month for his MLB career to date.
It’s not a pretty graph on aesthetics alone, but it definitely tells a story.
In this 23-game span Gurriel Jr. has hit five home runs off breaking balls compared to just two in his prior 78 games at the highest level. He has 11 hits total, good for a .344 average.
Gurriel Jr.’s newfound ability to attack the nastiest pitches in the sport has come in two forms lately. The first has been a simple matter of improved execution. When opposing pitchers have hung their breaking stuff to him he hasn’t missed it.
His third home run of the season may have been the best example of this. There’s no world in which Matt Wisler is looking to leave a slider here:
Getting big hits on brutal mistakes like that one may seem cheap, but pitchers miss their spot more than most realize, and the best hitters in the game are often those who punish errors most frequently.
The other way Gurriel Jr. has found success against breaking balls has been by covering the outside edge of the plate — where pitchers are trying to throw their sliders — and driving them to centre or right.
Perhaps the best example of that came on Gurriel Jr.’s single off Yankees reliever Chad Green.
That’s a pretty nice slider, and what you might refer to as a “good piece of hitting” if you were a colour commentator with no aversion to cliches. You could even argue it’s more impressive than a home run off a hanging slider or curve — although it’s probably best not to feed into the fetishization of singles we’re experiencing in the current high-strikeout, high-dinger environment.
Clearly Green more or less hit his spot and yet Gurriel Jr. was able to reach out and flip it into centre. It’s not a pitch you can truly put a charge into and the 25-year-old didn’t try to, instead just putting the head out and taking what he was given.
This particular hit has added interest because Gurriel Jr. makes a mid at-bat adjustment. Two pitches earlier he saw a very similar pitch, geared back for a big cut and found only air:
Considering how small a sample we’re dealing with here — this is a 23-game hot streak after all — it’s too early to definitively say Gurriel Jr. has figured out breaking balls. Realistically, no one has figured out breaking balls, that’s why they’re the most effective pitches in the sport.
He’s clearly improved, though, and if he can be half as good as he’s been lately, he’ll still have made a significant gain.
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