Nico Hoerner Has to Get Earlier Again

It's not fair, really. In baseball, they usually just ask you to hit the ball hard, and Nico Hoerner is doing that—doing it, anyway, as much as can be expected from a player whose game really isn't centered on power. He's the best hitter in baseball at hitting the ball in the middle of his bat, according to new data out this week from Statcast. Your eyes haven't been lying to you; he has a feel for squaring the ball up that no one can top.

Unfortunately, because of Hoerner's below- average bat speed, that's not good enough. In fact, it's part of his problem right now. After a hot April, he got really locked in during May, getting on time with his swing more consistently. Instead of improving, though, his numbers got much, much worse. At the end of April, he was batting .291/.370/.449, with eight doubles and four homers. Since the start of May, he's at .206/.292/.250. In 154 plate appearances over the last six weeks, he's managed six doubles and no homers.

He's making great swing decisions (at least in a vacuum), leading to 17 walks and just six punchouts in that long span. He's squaring the ball up, at least vertically. What, then, is wrong? The answer lies here.

The differences here look tiny, and in a way, they are. After all, Hoerner is making contact at an elite rate, and he's hitting the ball harder lately than he did early in the year. I've isolated the pitches on which he got the barrel lined up with the ball, vertically, so we're throwing out the swings on which he was too high or too low by enough to produce a whiff on that basis. We shouldn't expect to see some glaring difference. This is one of those times when a great hitter and a maddeningly unproductive one are separated by mere millimeters, or milliseconds. It just happens to be the same hitter, this time.

Early in the season, Hoerner was, on average, a bit more likely to swing slightly too early when he also caught the ball correctly in a vertical dimension, and to get the ball significantly out on the end of his bat. He was, on average, hitting very slightly higher on the bat (or lower on the ball) than he has since the calendar turned to May. This level of granularity is a great way to show this, because the differences between good and bad for him are so small, but it's not quite necessary, either. Now that we know what happens when he has the ball squared up vertically and should be producing line drives, we can look at where batted balls hit well (88+ MPH, for these purposes) and in a good launch-angle range (8-32°, which Statcast labels the launch angle sweet spot) went for Hoerner through the end of April:

And where they've gone since the start of May:

All of the balls Hoerner hit out of the park early in the year (and a handful of hard, line-drive singles to left field, too) are gone. In their place lie more frustrating flyouts to center field. Many of these are not only well-struck, but relatively low liners. They're just right at the center fielder.

Hoerner is on time for most of these balls; that's why they're hit hard to center field. He's getting some of them just off the handle or the end of the bat, but the main problem is directional. For Hoerner to produce value with his caliber of power, those hard-hit air balls have to go to the gaps, or down the line. They can't go out to center. He will never have the juice to find grass or clear fences out there, against modern defenses.

Being so on time is, in a sense, a curse for Hoerner right now. He has to find a way to be early more often, again. He also has to get the sweet spot on the bat, horizontally, better than he's done lately. The key to that, as it turns out, is probably swing decisions. He'll simply have to learn to let pitchers work the outer edge against him a bit more, and then attack when they try to come back inside at all. Through the end of April, he was living on balls in the heart of the zone:

But hurlers have adjusted, slowly asking him to chase pitches on the outer third, where he's more likely to hit that impressive but harmless liner to center. He's obliging.

Most of the pitches he's swinging at are still strikes, but he has to have a bit more faith in his contact skills. He has to be willing to wait and work for the pitch with more of the plate, so he can get around it and put the sweet spot of the bat on it. He has to get the bat head out there a little bit more, risk a few more whiffs—those, he can afford more than most hitters—and rediscover the pull field. 

We could (and did) spot this issue without the new data Statcast offers. Seeing just how fine the margins are and how good he still is at timing pitchers up and hitting it squarely is a beneficial insight, though. Hoerner might need to be even more patient for a bit, and get into a right-field mindset once there are two strikes, so he can drive the ball the other way. He certainly needs to get back to living a little ahead of many pitches, where he can be early in a good way and hammer the ball to left. Until that happens, his slump will continue. Because he's such a gifted hitter (and because we can see just how tiny the adjustments necessary really are), though, you can feel fairly confident that a rebound is coming.