How A’s Matt Olson ignored the analytics and found his swing after a bad 2020.
Science and analytics are taking over Major League Baseball like termites taking over a toolshed. But sometimes, baseball is just baseball.
That’s the discovery Matt Olson made last offseason. The A’s first baseman, coming off a lousy season, watched some video, made a swing adjustment with his bat angle — and then made a more significant readjustment to his head.
“I just wanted to get back to hitting,” Olson said in a Zoom interview Tuesday. “With all the numbers and video and analytics we have nowadays, I just felt like last year I got really bogged down in that kind of stuff.
“It’s easy to do, especially when things aren’t going well. You’re constantly looking for an answer, and you feel like you should be able to find one, when sometimes you just dig yourself a deeper hole.”
Olson couldn’t have dug too much deeper. After his best season in 2019, the smoothswinging lefty hit a 2020style speedbump. He played all 60 games but hit .195, the sixthlowest batting average in the majors. His OPS dropped from .896 to .734.
For a young hitter (Olson is 27) in his prime, that was a serious dip. As much as some of us might try, you can’t blame everything on 2020 being a sucky year.
There were signs that baseball’s analytics were getting the better of Olson. Defensive shifts have been increasing dramatically in recent years, and Olson is a prime target, a lefty pull power hitter with a swing not exactly designed for chopping shiftbeating dribblers into left field.
Without doing anything dramatic, Olson is counterpunching the shifts by making more consistent contact, contributing to a careerbest .937 OPS after Wednesday’s win over Arizona.
“Last year, I really struggled to get the ball on the other (left) side of the field in general,” he said. “I’ve had a decent amount of luck here shooting balls the other way, just going with pitches that are outside.”
Olson didn’t need a computer analysis to tell him what he had to do. Sometimes, good hitters just figure stuff out.
“I think he’s taking a little bit more of what he’s given,” manager Bob Melvin said, talking about Olson dealing with the constant shifts and pitches away from his strength. “He’s not trying to do
too much with some balls on the other side of the plate, hitting the ball the other way. ... So, he’s not just a pull guy this year.”
Olson said it’s a constant struggle to decide when to go for the long ball and when to settle for the dinker to left. Homers are fun, but there is satisfaction in beating the shifters at their own game. The “gotcha” moment.
“Absolutely,” Olson said with a smile. “In a way, it’s — disrespectful is definitely not the right word — but you feel challenged as a hitter when something is just continuously given to you. You get a little excitement when you prove people wrong, when they’re giving you a groundball (base hit) to third base, saying, ‘We don’t think you can do it,’ it feels good when you do.”
What Olson is doing defies logic. Across baseball, shifts are becoming more effective, pitchers’ spin rates are soaring, power arms are dominating, many excellent hitters are working on batting averages that look like Olson’s last season, and strikeouts are at an alltime high.
Olson? Last season, he struck out 31% of the time, up from 25% the previous year. This season? He’s gotten his rate of whiffing down to less than 17% — which easily would be the lowest rate of his career over a full season.
Maybe Olson will lead an antianalytics wave with his justswing mentality. To him, there can be too much analysis. He said if you show him a seemingly perfect home run swing and tell him to analyze it, “I could find something I
need to adjust.”
It can get cluttered up there in the hitting center of the brain.
“Coming into spring, that was my thought the whole time, I wanted to get back to kind of being a feel hitter and a rhythm hitter, which is kind of what I’ve been my whole life.”
How does that square with baseball’s obsession with charts and analysis and science?
“It is a little bit of give and take,” Olson said. “You do have to be informed, especially with the stuff that guys are coming out with nowadays. You’re seeing 95 (mph) and up on a regular basis, with good breaking balls, so you have to be aware of what the (pitcher) has, how his stuff ’s going to move and what he likes to do. ...
“But this year, it’s just been, if (his swing) looks good to me, then I’m not doing anything. I’m not touching it. I’m just going up and trusting my ability. There’s definitely a fine line between all the analytics and just playing the game.”
It sounds like baseball is more fun for Olson this season.
“I think it is,” he said. “I feel like I’m just kind of showing up now . ... So, yeah, I do feel like I’m having more fun.”