Matt Carpenter Must Be More Aggressive

If Matt Carpenter is known for anything in the major leagues, it’s for what hedoesn’t do: swing the bat. That may seem counterintuitive for a player generally considered to be one of the best hitters on one of baseball’s best teams, but it’s an accurate depiction of Carpenter’s approach at the plate. Last year, no qualified hitter offered at fewer pitches than Carpenter, who had only a 32.8 percent swing rate. Over the course of his three full seasons, his 36.1 percent swing rate is easily the lowest. In other words, approximately two times out of three, Carpenter watches the pitch go by.

To put it another way, some hitters swing at pitches outside the strike zone more often than Carpenter swings at pitches overall. It’s simply who he is, and it’s a large part of how he has managed to find success in the big leagues; over the past two seasons, he’s 15th in walk rate and ninth in on-base percentage. His patience has made him a star — he was one of only 15 hitters worth at least 10 WAR combined in 2013-14 — and it also has made him rich, as the Cardinals guaranteed him $52 million over six years through 2019.

With that kind of recent track record, it’s easy to think that Carpenter should just keep on doing exactly what he’s doing and continued success would follow. But despite the excellent on-base skills and overall value, a quiet truth of Carpenter’s 2014 was that his slugging percentage dropped more than 100 points from the year prior, and Carpenter turned from an elite bat into merely a good one. With an aging Cardinals offense relying more than ever on Carpenter this year, the numbers demand that Carpenter change his approach. Simply put, he has to swing more. He has to be, in some ways, the anti-Matt Carpenter. And he can start in Sunday night’s season opener (8 ET, ESPN2) against the Cubs.

Obviously no one’s suggesting that Carpenter turn into Pablo Sandoval or Salvador Perez, players who swing at anything and everything. There’s plenty of merit in the idea that simply “making contact” is overrated when that contact is on a diving or outside pitch that’s just impossible to drive, leading to weak grounders. The problem, however, comes when “being patient and working the count” leads to watching hittable pitches early in counts go by for the sake of patience, leading to counts that are increasingly favorable to the pitcher.

That’s not limited to Carpenter, either, because they’re called “pitcher’s counts” for a reason. Last year across MLB, hitters had an .867 OPS on the first pitch, a .786 OPS with zero strikes … and just a .506 OPS with two strikes. Those numbers held up in 2013 (.882 first pitch, .941 with zero strikes, .514 two strikes), and pretty much for as far back as count statistics have been kept. In 1990, for example, it was .782 on the first pitch, .835 with no strikes and a mere .520 with two. By allowing hittable balls to go past just to “work the count,” you end up in a bad spot.

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For Carpenter, there was a clear difference between 2013 and 2014 in his plate discipline, to the point that he was arguably too patient. Two years ago, he got to a two-strike count 53 percent of the time. Last year that jumped to 58 percent, in a sport in which the average was just 50 percent, and that includes pitchers’ at-bats. Since Carpenter, like pretty much every other hitter in the sport, becomes less effective with two strikes — he has a .683 career OPS — getting deeper into counts might add to the pitcher’s workload, but it doesn’t always put Carpenter in a better position to hit the ball hard.

Let’s go back to the overall swing rate, because it’s not just about “swinging less.” It’s about where he’s swinging. As you’ll see in the table below, his swing percentage has been steadily declining each year, which we already knew. As you can see, his O-swing — that’s the percentage of pitches outside the strike zone a batter swings at — fell last year as well, which is great, because it means he offered at fewer lousy pitches. In fact, it was less often than any qualified player in baseball.

But the Z-swing percentage decline is concerning, because that shows how often he offered at pitches in the zone, i.e., likely strikes. Every strike isn’t a pitch worth swinging at, but the more you watch go by, the more often you find yourself down in the count. Whether it’s on the first pitch of a plate appearance or the fourth or the eighth, when you get that fastball down the middle, you want to hammer it, and that almost always comes earlier in the count.

That manifested itself in 2014, when Carpenter struck out 13 more times than he did the previous year, in eight fewer plate appearances, despite the fact that he actually made more contact overall. (His swinging-strike rate fell from 4.1 percent to 3.3; both are excellent numbers.) That affected mostly his power, and while dropping from 11 homers to eight doesn’t look like that much, the 106-point drop in slugging percentage is. In 2013, his slugging was basically identical to Giancarlo Stanton‘s ’13 slugging percentage; in 2014, it was slightly under that of Dee Gordon’s, which is a shocking drop.

That’s mostly because Carpenter went from 55 doubles in 2013 to 33 last year, and it’s easy to draw the line from that to the idea that he was watching hittable pitches go by. The good news is that Carpenter knows this, telling reporters near the beginning of camp that he was fully aware of the fact that being more aggressive would be beneficial to his performance.

In fact, we might have already seen the beginning of the turnaround. Carpenter claimed he began focusing on it last postseason, when he had eight extra-base hits — including four homers — against the Dodgers and Giants. The first two of those homers, against Los Angeles lefties Clayton Kershaw and J.P. Howell, came on the first pitch, as did one of the doubles. The next two homers, against Hyun-Jin Ryu and Jake Peavy, required a total of seven pitches.

Carpenter is never going to completely change who he is, nor should he. After all, that’s the approach that got him to the bigs and kept him there. But just a slight change, just a little more aggressiveness against the right pitches, could make a big difference in returning a bit more power to his game. For a Cardinals team that may be more vulnerable than it has been in years in what’s suddenly an incredibly competitive NL Central, more production from Carpenter isn’t just nice to have — it’s a must.