Miguel Amaya Has to Rediscover His Plate Discipline

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs have had to thrust their young catcher into a truly primary role a bit sooner than they expected or preferred. So far, he's responded by pressing at the plate, but plenty of promise remains.

Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

After an uneven but interesting rookie season in 2023, Miguel Amaya came to camp this spring and quickly emerged as the better option to start often behind the plate for the Cubs. Amaya's development has been slowed and distorted by injuries, but he's flashed impressive tools throughout his professional career, and even while he was being half-wasted by a manager reluctant to trust young players, he carried that over into his first MLB action.

Defensively, Amaya has been respectable since becoming the team's de facto starter at catcher. He's struggled mightily in his efforts to control the running game, but his framing numbers have been strong, and he's learning quickly when it comes to calling games and coaxing pitchers through difficult sequences. Offensively, however, Amaya isn't producing at anywhere near his potential level, and it's been a conspicuous problem for a Cubs offense often down one or two of its best hitters over the first seven weeks.

On the season, Amaya's numbers are hideous: .195/.261/.280. If Yan Gomes weren't running an OBP (.213) 13 points worse than John Smoltz's, the Cubs would have had to demote their would-be catcher of the future, before he could even become the catcher of the present. He has to be much, much better than this, or he'll join the very long but utterly forgotten list of catchers of the past. There's hope that he can avoid that, but he has to make some big adjustments.

Amaya's fundamental offensive skills aren't bad. He swings and misses slightly more often than an average hitter, but only slightly. He hits the ball hard enough to produce good power, though he doesn't elevate it as consistently as the team hopes he eventually will. With the new bat-tracking data that came out Sunday at Baseball Savant, we gained some unexpected insight: Amaya not only has average-plus bat speed, but pairs that with a short swing length. In other words, his bat takes a more compact and direct path to the ball than one would expect, given the speed at which he swings.

That combination of traits is valuable, because if Amaya can lock in on a location and deliver his bat to that spot accurately, he can be a bit early and still catch the ball on the fat part of the bat. That's what happened on his home run in Seattle last month.

Alternatively, because the combination of good bat speed and a short swing leads to a short time from starting one's swing to the (real or theoretical) contact point and solid acceleration through contact, he can be a little bit late and still drive the ball, as he did on a scalded single against the Brewers earlier this month.

Pitcher List's Kyle Bland created an app for scraping and visualizing some of the new bat-tracking data, and it includes two numbers not reported by Statcast, but easily derived from the data the new metrics do report: time to contact point (from start of swing) and acceleration at the moment of contact (the rate of change in speed, rather than raw speed). These are valuable ways to discern which hitters can quickly get to the ball, even if they're mostly determined by swing speed and swing length.

Of the 312 hitters with at least 100 measured swings so far in 2024, Amaya has the 18th-shortest swing time. He also has the 36th-highest acceleration. He's near-elite in this regard, and when he connects cleanly on tough pitches like that 97-MPH sinker from Elvis Peguero, it's not hard to see the value in that--or the offensive upside it gives him.

Alas, right now, that upside is going to waste, for the simplest, oldest reason why any young hitter in professional baseball fails. Amaya is swinging at everything. Pitchers are being aggressive with him, since he hits at the bottom of the order and has enough of a penchant to whiff to make it worth the risks that come with being aggressive in the zone. Perhaps thrown off by that approach, or perhaps out of an overweening desire to help his team achieve more explosiveness and consistency, Amaya is just getting way too eager. His swing rate is up from 46.3% in 2023 to 56.3%, and his chase rate on pitches outside the zone is up from a perfectly healthy 28.1% to a calamitous 39.1%. A swing time as short as Amaya's gives him about 10 milliseconds longer to make a swing decision than the average hitter has. In the flight of an MLB pitch, that's an eternity. He's not using the extra time to make good decisions, though.

He's actually whiffing on a lower share of swings than he did last year, and his strikeout rate is down. So is his walk rate, though, and more importantly, because he's being so injudicious with a swing that can so readily reach so many pitches, he's mishitting the ball more often than a hitter with his gifts should. If he can reorganize his strike zone and develop a better approach, Amaya can pretty easily add .200 to his OPS. The tools are all here, from a sufficient feel for contact to the bat speed and efficiency to generate good power. If he can't find a plan that allows him to key in on pitches and square them up more often, though, the team will continue to have an untenable blemish at the bottom of their batting order throughout the season.

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