Gleyber pursuit of patience paying off
Gleyber Torres during the playoffs has been the epitome of “it’s how you finish.”
Torres has excelled at the plate. After Thursday’s two-run bomb assured a Yankees’ victory, Torres’ slash line went up .405/.593/.750.
The transformation from earlier this season, when he started on a five for 42 death spiral, obscures a turnaround that began at his lowest moment, which the Yankees are reaping the benefits from during their playoff race.
The biggest change Torres made? He’s stopped chasing pitches outside the strike zone.
Already accomplished as a hitter, making All-Star teams his first two seasons, Torres’ outside swing percentage — let’s call it “chase rate” — plummeted from 31.1% and 30.9% in 2018 and 2019, respectively, down to just 20.9% this year. But I don’t think he’s become too passive. He’s making contact on over 60% of pitches outside the zone in 2020, up from 55.6% last year. It’s coincided with Torres nearly doubling his walk rate from 7.5% in 2019 to 13.8% in 2020.
Torres said his hitting coaches, Marcus Thames and assistant PJ Pilittere, were essential to his leap in selectivity.
“PJ and Marcus — they always have a video, and we have a really good conversation,” Torres said. “I tell him what I feel, and we figure it out (the adjustment) real quick.”
I think the adjustment came right around the middle of August, when a quick drop in his chase rate coincided with a dramatic leap in his OPS, which leaps out when viewed as a graph.
From August 9, he’s taken his base on 17.4% of his plate appearances. Over the course of a 650 PA regular season, that amounts to about 113 walks. If Torres walked that much in 2019, he would have been third in all of baseball behind just Alex Bregman and Rhys Hoskins’s 2019 seasons, and slotted one spot higher than Mike Trout — the American League’s reigning MVP and consensus best player of his generation.
Torres has had seven walks in six games this postseason. Even when he failed to reach base, he left the opposing pitcher bruised, working deep counts nearly every time out.
plenty of pitching available at the trade deadline anyway.
Instead, the Yankees tried to beat the Rays at their own game, and failed miserably. The only reason that the Rays play the game that way in the first place is that they don’t have the Yankees’ willingness to spend. If the Rays invested an extra $150 million in payroll to match the Yankees, you can bet they wouldn’t be furiously scrambling to come up with workarounds that disguise their roster limitations. The Yankees shouldn’t have those same limitations! And inevitably a team that is used to planning with them will be better at it, as was clear when Garcia appeared to not fully understand the plan and Happ was not remotely comfortable with it.
This is now the second straight year that the Yankees crashed out of the playoffs because their starting pitching wasn’t good enough. Again, Cashman might say that last year’s dejuiced ball and this year’s surprisingly compressed schedule would have changed their deadline approach; again, I’d respond that the Yankees should be impervious to marginal changes in conditions.
It’s tempting to laud the Yankees for being the most aggressive spenders in baseball, and compared to the union-busting Rays and A’s and noncompetitive Red Sox,they are indeed the good guys. But the Yankees bank so much more cash than every other team that they can’t be compared to the rest of MLB; they can only properly be compared to themselves. And the post-2009 Yankees are hoarding more profits th as of 2018 they actually spent the lowest percentage of revenue on players of any team in baseball. The World Series drought isn’t quite a coincidence.
This was a likable Yankees team, one that would have been a blast to watch against the Dodgers in the World Series. Instead, the AL will be represented by either the skinflint Rays or the loathsome, McKinsey-optimized Astros. You can thank the Steinbrenners for that. Again.