Alex Bregman is Taking the Brunt of a Barrage of Breaking Balls

In every start he's had against right-handed opposing pitchers this year, Alex Bregman has slotted in between two left-handed hitters, or between one lefty and one switch-hitter. In theory, that should punish whichever manager is trying to outguess Craig Counsell that day for any effort to get a left-on-left matchup with the likes of Michael Busch or Moisés Ballesteros, or to turn around Ian Happ to what has historically been his weaker side. Bregman, sitting in the middle, should get an advantageous matchup.

Reality was never that well-suited to theory in this regard. Bregman has very narrow platoon splits for his career, and though he hammered them last year, he'd been pedestrian against lefties for the previous few seasons. This year, he's getting on base against them at a .400 clip, but he's only slugging .325—hardly the kind of punishment one is looking to dole out when a team wants to turn to a matchup guy for lefties on either side. Of the nine walks he's drawn, two have been intentional, when the other team decided they were fine with him being on base and elected not to risk having him beat them.

More troubling, though, is the fact that Bregman has struggled mightily against right-handed pitching so far. He's batting just .227/.301/.336 in those same-handed platoon showdowns, which is most of the reason for an ugly .661 OPS in the first 5% of his five-year deal with the Cubs. He's not hitting for power. He's not hitting much, at all.

Admittedly, there's a little bit of real cause for concern beneath the surface. Bregman's bat speed is down about 1 MPH this year. That's not a glaring issue, in a vacuum, because it's still at a level where many hitters succeed, and he's never been dependent on bat speed, anyway. He's also much slower afoot, with a sprint speed starting to reach positively plodding levels, and it's not fun to watch when Ballesteros and Bregman end up on the bases at the same time. On balance, though, Cubs fans would be fine with that—if only they (and especially Bregman) were on a bit more often. 

Most of the numbers would tell you not to worry, and if you're taking a far-sighted perspective, you shouldn't. What makes Bregman special at the plate is his command of the strike zone, and he's still chasing at an exceptionally low rate. What makes him special is his ability to hit the ball squarely and cleanly, on a line, and he's still doing that at a healthily above-average clip, too. So, why has he been so unproductive?

Bregman is hitting a few more ground balls. He's whiffing a bit more. And his swing isn't producing the pulled fly balls that made him just dangerous enough to force pitchers to throw him lots of slightly less bangable balls, which he would then deposit into the outfield for singles and doubles. The cause of all these symptoms is the same: he's seeing a crazy number of breaking balls.

This is the breakdown of pitch percentage by pitch type group and season for Bregman's whole career, but you can subdivide it in any of several ways and end up in the same place. Last month, he saw more breaking balls than he had in all but two or three previous months of his career. This month, it's much higher: he's seeing more breaking pitches than fastballs. It's true if you break things down by handedness. It's true if you break them down by count. Bregman is simply getting a steady diet of breaking stuff, and it's affecting his profile. 

As good as Bregman is, even he can't consistently square up sliders, without being unready for the fastball. As he always has, he's running great batted-ball numbers and an exceptionally low whiff rate on heaters, but much worse numbers on breaking balls. It's just that breaking balls suddenly make up a much larger share of the pitches he sees, so the bad things that happen when he goes to pitch his signature swing on a fastball and gets a breaking ball instead are piling up, while fewer of the good things that happen when he gets what he's looking for are there to counterbalance it.

The dynamic of hitting between lefties so often could be part of the issue. For most of his career, Bregman has batted in lineups loaded with righty bats, so maybe pitchers are trying some new things against him in the rhythm of a different kind of order. It's more likely, though, that they're seeing his slightly reduced bat speed and attacking it. While your first instinct might be to guess that bat speed helps one hit fast pitches, what it really does is to let one make later decisions. Bregman is still making good ball-strike decisions, but as his bat slows down, it gets harder for him to wait long enough to deliver the barrel to stuff that bends, without being too late on the stuff that's hard and straight.

That doesn't mean any of this is permanent. The rate at which the league has thrown him breaking balls over the last two weeks is surely unsustainable. It has something to do with the teams the Cubs have happened to face; it has something to do with what he's looked like on those pitches. He'll make an adjustment in the cage, and the team will face some pitchers who don't like their breaking ball as much, and it will level out. For now, though, Bregman has a real challenge on his hands. The league is assailing him with pitches that aren't his preferred targets. He'll have to figure out how to make them stop, or to profit from their refusal to do so.