One of the time-honored traditions of the Major League Baseball season is slamming the late-April panic button. The Houston Astros are 6-17, so perhaps their reign of dominance in the American League is over. Blake Snell has been lit up in his three starts with the San Francisco Giants, so perhaps both Snell and the Giants will regret joining forces. And a bunch of very talented players are off to miserable starts, such as New York Mets' Brandon Nimmo.
Of course, baseball is a results-oriented business and to a certain extent, you are what your Baseball Reference page says you are. But for many players, the early season is an exercise in frustration and unfortunate circumstances. These guys all seem to be struggling, but a lot of that has been beyond their control.
Luckily, thanks to a revolution in quality-of-contact metrics and Statcast ballflight tracking, we're able to tell just how lucky or unlucky a player has been at any given moment in time. So today, let's unpack five players whose numbers tell us they've been at a bare minimum, subpar, but who deserve a whole lot better in reality.
Brandon Nimmo
With exactly a .200 batting average and a slugging percentage of just .338, it hasn't been a promising start to the year for the New York Mets' star leadoff hitter. And let's be clear–Brandon Nimmo has been a star for the vast majority of his career. But if we're to believe that plate discipline and hard contact are in fact good things, Nimmo is bound for a turnaround.
With a .281 expected batting average, Nimmo's 81-point xBA-AVG chasm ranks the ninth-worst in all of baseball. His xWOBA of .404 puts him in the 91st percentile of all big-league hitters. He's also got a 95th-percentile walk rate and in fact, of all 11 metrics Savant lists on their hitter pages, Nimmo ranks below league average in just one with a 47th percentile strikeout rate.
Basically, this is an All-Star caliber hitter who is bound to rebound into his regular form sooner rather than later. Already Brandon Nimmo has fought to get his OPS+ to a slightly above average 102. And in fact, he already has an on-base percentage above .400 in the month of April, so he's still being weighed down by the minuscule sample of the Mets' awful March. There should be no reason for concern that Brandon Nimmo won't be the player he's proven himself to be the rest of the way.
Christian Encarnacion-Strand
After crushing 13 home runs in just 63 games as a rookie 2023 callup, the Cincinnati Reds' Christian Encarnacion-Strand has had a brutal start to 2024 via any traditional stats. His .195 on-base percentage ranks 185th, a.k.a. dead freakin' last, among all qualified hitters. But although that accurately reflects a bad approach at the plate, Encarnacion-Strand simply hits the ball too hard, too often to be struggling this mightily.
Encarnacion-Strand's .512 expected slugging percentage ranks 36th among all hitters, while the 191-point gap between his expected and actual slugging is the fifth-largest. He's hit a ton of barrels right at outfielders and with cold weather during a lot of the Reds' games thus far, he's bound to get a bunch more extra-base hits if he just keeps hitting the exact same deep line drives.
Where Encarnacion-Strand does need to make drastic improvements are his chase rate and walk rate, which rank in the third and first percentile of all hitters, respectively. Pitchers can smell a lack of plate discipline from a mile away and if C.E.S. can't lay off the stuff those pitchers want him to chase, they'll just keep frustrating him with a bunch of junk. There's time to turn it around, but changes most certainly have to be made.
Maikel Garcia
The Kansas City Royals took a leap of faith heading into the season by not only establishing that Maikel Garcia would be their third baseman, but would get first crack at the leadoff spot in the order. On the surface, it looks like that decision has been a disaster. But perhaps Garcia is just destined to be one of baseball's most consistently victimized hitters.
Garcia has a 90th percentile chase rate, 82nd percentile barrel rate and 94th percentile outs above average at third base, numbers that should make him seem more like prime Nolan Arenado than 2023 Jean Segura. So what's going wrong? He's hitting more fly balls than ever before, which is tough to do in a cavernous ballpark like Kauffman Stadium, especially in April. And pitchers pound the zone constantly against Garcia, meaning that although he doesn't chase, he also rarely walks.
Obviously, it's still very early, but Garcia needs his luck to turn soon to convince the Royals he deserves to remain a part of their very promising future. Hitting the ball hard is great, but only if it leads to eventual success. Much like a struggling three-point shooter, Garcia just needs to see a couple of balls go through the net.
Jake Cronenworth
The San Diego Padres' leader in expected batting average isn't Fernando Tatís Jr. It's not Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts, or even Ha Seong Kim. No, Jake Cronenworth, who was one of the team's most prominent disappointments from a season ago and is in reality hitting just .241 on the new campaign, should be hitting .319 according to Baseball Savant projections.
By any quality-of-contact metric, Cronenworth is crushing the ball, light years ahead of his 2023 pace. His .543 xSLG is in the 90th percentile and his 14.9% whiff rate is in the 92nd percentile. Basically, he's routinely making good contact when he swings and that good contact is routinely heading straight in the direction of an opposing fielder. That's the type of thing that typically corrects itself over the course of 162 games.
When Cronenworth signed his 7-year, $70 million extension prior to last season, the move had a chance to backfire if he continued to be a below-league-average hitter on a team full of expensive contracts. But the move could pay off handsomely if his good approach translates into good results for the rest of this season. This is a two-time All-Star, after all, so there's always a chance he could get hot for a couple of months when San Diego needs it the most.
Jordan Walker
There were sky-high expectations set in 2024 for Jordan Walker, still just 21 years of age. It would rank high on the list of St. Louis Cardinals fans' preseason nightmares to see that on April 23, Walker was hitting .164 with a .511 OPS. But although it's still reasonable to expect a lot more from Walker, he's also been excruciatingly unlucky.
There aren't too many things to love about Walker's Savant page, but the 89th percentile average exit velo still sticks out like a sore thumb. As was the case in 2023, he's still got to hit the ball in the air more often, but he's too talented a hitter not to stay in the lineup until he figures this out. And his batting average against fastballs has dropped from .291 to .125 between last year and this one. Sometimes, it takes hitters an uncomfortably long amount of time to get used to velocity in a new season.
Obviously, it's still early and the Cardinals still expect Walker to be a big part of their future. So the onus is on him to prove that this early cold stretch is more bad luck than bad process. There are plenty of reasons to keep the faith, but those reasons all come with an expiration date.
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