The Chaotic Maybe-Breakout of Cubs Catcher Miguel Amaya

[Matthew Trueblood]

A major mechanical change made early last month has drawn a lot of attention, but it might be a bit of a red herring.

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports

As baseball fans, it can be frustratingly difficult to see the difference between a player making good moves on the mound or at the plate, and one who's failing. So many of the mechanical separators, in this game of inches played on several acres, are subtle enough to completely slip by even a relatively engaged fan. It's not an easy game to love, sometimes.

That's why, as fans, we get especially excited when a player makes a successful adjustment that runs toward the broad and obvious. It's reassuring. The game opens up for us a bit, because we feel like we can see what's happening. It's hard to figure out why Kyle Hendricks's sinker won't quite tuck into the landing spot he was aiming for anymore, but it's easy to see what changed for Miguel Amaya during the first week of July.

For those who missed the story, it was well-documented by Marquee's Andy Martinez. During an interregnum in which they gave backup catcher Tomás Nido three straight starts to reset their young catcher, the Cubs coaching staff approached Amaya about utilizing a toe drag--another name for it might be a toe turn; it involves turning the heel of the batter's front foot skyward and the sole of their cleat toward the pitcher--instead of the leg kick that had been his way of getting into his stride for his whole life to that point.

Amaya felt deeply uncomfortable, but he agreed to try it--not just because, as Martinez reported, the team asked Nelson Cruz to endorse the mechanical tweak, but because (as Cruz basically relayed to the youngster) there really wasn't much to lose. From mid-April through the time of that change, Amaya batted .164/.234/.207, in 155 plate appearances. He was, in a sense, very lucky the Cubs had no real alternatives to him throughout that time. That's a slump long and deep enough to terminate a career.

As I wrote when Statcast began publishing bat-tracking data in early May, Amaya was one of the stars of that reveal, from a Cubs perspective. However, the headline of that very article lays bare what held him back: "Miguel Amaya Has to Rediscover His Plate Discipline." He was swinging at everything, and that was holding him back, far more than any mechanical element.

That said, there's no doubt that mechanics and approach have a relationship to one another. Let's turn around the concept for a moment, to demonstrate. Here's Amaya, from early June, being frozen on a breaking ball up in the zone, the kind of pitch he should have hit and that was in the zone from the moment it left the pitcher's hand. 

Let a lot of pitches like that one go, and you don't last long in the league. The problem was that, with the leg kick, Amaya was wired into one particular pitch type every time he dug into the box. He had to guess along with pitchers, because his timing was not very adaptable. If he got the breaking ball when he was sitting on a heater, he either flailed hopelessly at it or locked up completely. Relatedly, pitchers could beat him with even mediocre fastballs on the inner half, because in order to leave anything for the breaking ball, he had to start a little bit too late to get to inside heat.

One of the chief advantages of the toe drag is that it's a very balanced, adaptable timing mechanism. Cruz is not its most famous practitioner, by a longshot: it's what Shohei Ohtani does in the box. Making the change to a toe drag has, by any reasonable criteria, worked gorgeously. Since being reinstalled in the lineup with his new setup and timing mechanism on Jul. 7, Amaya is hitting .299/.341/.506, in 85 plate appearances. He's cut his strikeout rate nearly in half. His grand slam on Thursday afternoon was an affirmation of his huge progress over the last month and a half.

There are two natural questions to ask, in the wake of this turnaround. The first is much more important: Can he sustain this? The second is purely for our intellectual curiosity: Is the improvement a direct result of the mechanical change? Unfortunately, I'm not sure the answer to either question is "yes," at least so far. Let's dig in on it.

We can start with good news. Remember that high-and-away slider that locked up Amaya with his old moves in the box? Here's a similar pitch, on the other side of his change.

You can see that extra balance, and the ability to slightly alter when he fires his hands, while tracking the ball well. This is why he's made more contact since the change, and why he's able to hit for average with the new swing--at least so far.

With a smaller set of moves in his lower half, Amaya can also get his barrel cleanly through and hit the inside fastball more squarely.

That's two different problems we could clearly identify in his attack before going to the toe drag, at least partially solved by the switch thereto. That's exciting, especially as mere anecdotes within the broader context of those gaudy numbers since the change. Why, then, should anyone think the mechanical change inessential to the improved results?

Well, consider this chart, showing the rolling average of Amaya's chase rate by week throughout the season. This is the percentage of pitches outside the strike zone at which he swings.

As we discussed above, there is almost always some relationship between mechanics and approach. Still, what the right side of this chart suggests most to me is not an epiphany about plate discipline fueled by a mechanical cleanup. Rather, it looks like an overly aggressive hitter swung less often for a while, due to a deep discomfort with a new physical swing. We don't even really have to speculate to say that. In the piece by Martinez linked above, coaches acknowledged that the transition was difficult for Amaya. If he's going to go back to swinging at nearly 40% of the non-strikes he sees now that he's comfortable in his swing again, as has been the case for much of August, the good times are not going to last.

On the other hand, swinging more because one is more comfortable can be a good thing. It can mean one has figured out how to really use a new or modified swing. In that case, it would be a good thing to see a hitter change their swing rate, within reason. They might just take off as a slugger. Indeed, Amaya and the coaches talked about his feeling weak and unable to generate power when he first made the switch to the toe drag. The cage work was uneasy, because he couldn't get the force he wanted to--the force he was used to--into his swing.

Over the last few weeks, that's changed.

That cavernous drop in his rolling average swing speed for the early part of July is Amaya really struggling to generate the bat speed that is a huge part of his game. The new swing was not an easy install. The big jump to a level beyond the one he established early this season after that, though, says he's gotten through that difficult period of adjustment. He's figured out, even without the near-superhuman strength that allowed Cruz and allows Ohtani to do it, how to create lethal bat speed with the toe drag in place of the leg kick. The homers he's hit over the last week are clear evidence of his consolidating talent.

That said and shown, though, Amaya's average and high-end exit velocities are both down since the change. Even now that he's creating more bat speed than ever, he's not squaring the ball up measurably more than he did with his old swing, in terms of getting actual exit velocity out of his swing speed. Furthermore, since ratcheting the speed of his swing back up, he's also whiffing and chasing more.

Here, then, is a grand unified theory of the Miguel Amaya Renaissance, complete with a forecast of its future:

1. Amaya needed a change that would spark a turnaround, not primarily in his address of the ball, but in his pitch selection and plate approach.
2. Multiple mechanical changes might have accomplished this, because part of the effect was designed to be akin to a placebo: Boost his confidence, so he can regain a sense of control and take a more focused tack in the box.
3. However, the toe drag nicely facilitates Amaya's natural power, as evidenced by some of its other famous users. It also directly addressed the major vulnerability of his swing, which was manipulable timing, which made the fit felicitous.
4. Some of what we've seen since the change is the result of better swing decisions, which could just as easily have been made without the mechanical tweaks. Importantly, that improved decision-making has eroded recently. Most of his future viability as a first-division backstop depends on those swing decisions.
5. Still, the simultaneous increase in swing speed and swing rate recently tells us Amaya is getting more comfortable with the new setup. In the long run, that's a good thing.

Will Amaya finish turning the corner and enter the offseason as the team's clear first-string catcher for 2025? It's hard to guess, right now. However, with this better understanding of what's been happening since he made his swing change, we can reasonably hope to have a better sense of it by the end of the season. Six more weeks to study the integration of hitting concepts with this still-new timing signature should give us some real and meaningful insight into Amaya, and either way, that insight is highly valuable. His toe drag might not be a panacea, but it's an important step in both his development and his long-term evaluation.

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[Bertz]

This came up in the gamethread yesterday, but I just don't think the team can justify Amaya entering next season as the starter more or less regardless of how the rest of the season goes.  His first half was just too bad, and that downside risk is going to follow him for another year or two (similar to Bellinger last winter still getting dinged for '21 & '22).

I am sympathetic to his first half struggles, he quickly got thrust into far more responsibility than expected because Yan Gomes aged into becoming completely unplayable.  There was also some batted ball luck that went against him as well (not as much as Morel or Swanson).

I do think his improved play potentially undercuts the need for a major upgrade at the position this winter.  If Jed doesn't want to give up e.g. Alcantara and Wicks for Logan O'Hoppe and decides to pivot to Carson Kelly in FA, that's becoming an increasingly defensible position.  Though to be clear, the former is still probably the right move.