Since Last We Talked About This, Pete Crow-Armstrong Began Swinging Less. It Worked.

[Matthew Trueblood]

It's all about staying hot, now—by not letting the fact that you're hot get into your own head.

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images

Twelve days ago, Pete Crow-Armstrong was batting .211/.286/.263, and had yet to hit a home run on the young season. He was an absolute mess at the plate, but even then, you could hear the gathering thunder in his bat. He was swinging fast and generating some intriguing contact. He just needed to swing less often. We talked, then, about the fact that (unlike most hitters in such dire straits, statistically) Crow-Armstrong had a relatively simple path to being not only productive, but stellar: swing a bit less often.

The goal, there, is not even to walk more. Crow-Armstrong has actually walked plenty, throughout this season, and some of them were "bad walks"—the kind that happened only because when he got his pitch, he whiffed on it or fouled it off, and the opponent worked around him otherwise. Instead, the goal is for Crow-Armstrong to get into counts where he can sit on a particular pitch, and not worry about fighting the ball off or flipping it out into the field somewhere. As valuable as his speed is, it can't turn routine ground balls into hits, and he was making too much low-quality contact early this year.

Since that date, Crow-Armstrong has modulated his approach. Guess what happened when he did so. Since April 11, he's batting .366/.381/.654, with four home runs. He's still been very aggressive, especially within the strike zone. However, he's reduced his swing rate enough to force pitchers to approach him a bit differently, and to give himself a chance to hit a pitch of his own choosing, rather than one hand-crafted for him by an opponent.

It's worked, obviously. More to the point, for his entire young career, it's worked. When he swings less often—not less often than other people, even; just less often than he tends to the majority of the time—Crow-Armstrong finds success. He gets himself into trouble mostly when he gets too much into swing mode.

You won't find many hitters for whom overall production and swing rate move against one another this way. However, one reason why this chart looks the way it does is relatively universal: the hot hand effect. When a shooter in a basketball game or a hitter on the diamond starts to feel themselves, they get more eager to pull the trigger. That allows for the scorching stretches we sometimes see from great players—you can't score if you don't shoot, or hit the ball if you don't swing, and guys who are genuinely going well should be ready to do those things so as to take full advantage of their momentum—but it's also nature's cooling system. Eventually, you'll swing too much or shoot from too outlandish a place a few times, and the feedback will be negative. Thence another cycle of getting hot by being smart, only to get stupid as one tries to stay hot.

Because Crow-Armstrong's baseline swing rate is so high, he's vulnerable to a more extreme version of this cycle, so he'll have to learn to manage it. As you can see, his swing rate has already crept back up over the last few games. Still, he's working some deeper counts, yet. It was a 2-2 pitch Tuesday night on which he hit a key home run in the Cubs' eventful win.

That dinger bought the Cubs two extra outs of Shota Imanaga, because there was no way Craig Counsell could have asked his ace to go back out for the sixth (on a night when he was grinding and working hard against baseball's most dangerous lineup) if the lead were only one run. Because it was three, Counsell was able to get two more outs from Imanaga (albeit at the cost of another run), and you can make a case that the Cubs don't outlast the Dodgers to win that game but for the little bit of length Imanaga gave them there. It was facilitated by Crow-Armstrong, who (of course) also produced two runs on this swing, alone.

I'm not yet ready to say he's turned a corner. Indeed, he looks poised to cool off again, because he's creeping back toward swinging too much. As he demonstrates his adaptability, though, his tools shine through more clearly than ever. If this trend continues, and particularly if he can mature into a hitter who doesn't get swing-happy as soon as he starts to warm up, the data tells us that he can be a formidable force in the lower half of the Cubs lineup.

View full article