HEDGES HAS PLAN TO RAISE HIS OBP
Catcher knows he has to get on base more
Whatever we think we see in the batting stance Austin Hedges is using — Are his feet closer together? Is he standing taller? Are his hands raised higher? — he is ascribing little to those changes.
“Things are pretty simple from a mechanical standpoint,” Hedges said Monday. “But it’s about 99 percent mental.”
And the man who at one point in the middle of last season said he had tried “1,000 different things” to pump life into his flat-lined bat vows he will not be tinkering this season.
“I’ve got an approach I’m ready to go execute, and I’m going to ride or die with it,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to stick with something when it doesn’t work for a couple days. You want to change. I’m going to stay pretty stubborn with this.”
The approach, as it is with essentially the entire roster on a team that finished 26th out of 30 major league teams in on-base percentage last season after a string of five straight years with MLB’S lowest OBP, is to get on base.
Yes, here we are again with Hedges.
Arguably the game’s most productive defensive catcher, Hedges is on the opposite end of offensive measurements.
He ranked second among major league catchers last season in defensive runs above average, a metric that gives context to a player’s value relative to league average. He was also second in defensive runs saved, thanks mostly to his ability to frame borderline pitches as strikes.
Meanwhile, his .252 on-base percentage was 29th out of 30 catchers with at least 300 plate appearances. His .176 batting average was not only last out of those 30 catchers but it also was the second lowest by a catcher since 1976.
In 1,268 plate appearances since 2015, Hedges has a .201 batting average and .257 OBP. The inability to get on base consistently has overshadowed the fact he has hit a home run every 23.3 at-bats over the past three years, the fourth-highest rate among catchers with at least 1,000 at-bats in that span.
Multiple people in the organization have lamented in the past few years that if Hedges could just hit .220 or so, there would be no problem playing him most games. When a catcher helps pitchers as much as Hedges with his strike zone manipulation, game management and soothing concern,
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