Which players' slow starts should scare you, and why


Dan Syzmborski
ESPN INSIDER
"It's still early!" is the motto of April baseball. Everyone knows in their hearts that the guy on pace for 324 home runs after Opening Day and the slugger hitting .090 are not going to finish the season anywhere near those figures. But as April turns into May and a sixth of the season goes into the books, it gets harder and harder to argue that those rough starts aren't cause for concern, worry or sometimes straight-out run-through-the-streets-warning-about-end-times panic.

To steal a delightful, old Baseball Prospectus term I was recently informed of for the time to start being concerned about players with poor starts, Cinco do Samplo is almost upon us, and individual performances need to be taken seriously



.Avisail Garcia, Chicago White Sox: A lot of times, with starts this poor (.233/.250/.315 with one home run), an unusually low BABIP is a likely source of the fluky start, as it was with Carlos Santana a few years ago. That's not the problem here. While Avi's .286 BABIP is a bit lower than you'd expect from him, it's not a dramatically low number that is unsustainable; you sometimes see players with poor starts having that number under .200.The larger problem is that Garcia's contributions require him to have a crazy-high number. A lot of his 2017 success was due to his simply having a .392 BABIP, a freakishly high number that almost no player could maintain year in and year out. Only eight hitters in history with more than 3,000 plate appearances have a career BABIP above .360, and the most recent one to step on the field was Rogers Hornsby in 1937.Plate discipline numbers tend to stabilize very quickly, which isn't good news for Avi, who has swung at 48 percent of out-of-zone pitches, the worst in baseball among players with 30 or more plate appearances. And being a bad-ball hitter isn't an excuse; the other 29 hitters in the top 30 in out-of-zone swing rate have averaged a 64 percent contact rate there. Combine a worse approach than ever before with the abandonment by Lady Luck and Garcia is now at radioactive levels of hands-off.



Giancarlo Stanton, New York Yankees: OK, so now that I've put him here, I'm not in panic mode with Stanton, not by a long shot, but he's the star player I have the most concern about right now. Before the season, I ran the ZiPS projections for players if home runs levels dropped back to 2015 levels. Stanton had the largest drop-off, losing 1.6 WAR in his projection with a lower level of league offense. That was almost enough to erase the projected two-game lead ZiPS gave the Yankees over the Red Sox coming into the season.Home runs haven't dropped quite to 2015 levels, but at 1.09 home runs per team per game, it's a world away from 2017's rate of 1.26 per team per game. So even an unchanged Stanton would be less valuable in this environment.But Stanton isn't unchanged; his struggles are very real. His .317 BABIP (through Saturday) is actually the same as his career number and well above the .290 he has put up over the past three seasons. He's swinging at more pitches than in recent years and making contact on fewer of them, a bad combination that has his strikeout rate at a career-high 33 percent and his walk rate at nearly a career low. While I think Stanton is still a good player, there's a lot of reason to worry about him right now.Marcus Stroman, Toronto Blue Jays: In fairness to Stroman, while his ERA is a bloated 8.88, his FIP of 4.52 and a BABIP against of .354 suggest that he also has been plagued by some amount of bad luck. But what can't be chalked up to bad luck is an increase in his walk rate in his five starts -- 84 percent over his career numbers. Even in a small sample size, this is a number that becomes very predictive, very quickly.While his control was better in his most recent start against the Rangers, Stroman still is being hit very hard. His 93 mph average exit velocity against ranks 13th-worst of 331 starters in 2018, a marked decline from his 89 mph against in 2017.


The Colorado Rockies' offense: While the Rockies as a team aren't off to a terrible start, hovering a little above .500, the team's success has very little to do with an offense that is eighth in the NL in runs scored (with an OPS+ of just 81) despite calling the best hitters' park in baseball home. It's certainly not the fault of Colorado's stars, either. Nolan Arenado and Charlie Blackmon have started off the season hitting like the legitimate MVP candidates they were in 2017.What's dragging down the Rockies has been a trio of veterans -- Carlos Gonzalez, Gerardo Parra and Ian Desmond. Those three combined for minus-0.5 WAR in 2017 and were simply handed their full-time jobs back this spring on a silver platter.This year, they've combined to hit .212/.255/.359 with eight home runs in 231 at-bats (through Saturday), with a WAR of minus-0.6. In 2017, the Arenado-Blackmon-DJ LeMahieu troika combined for 16.1 WAR, with every other Rockies hitter combined contributing a total of minus-0.1 WAR. Somehow that's even worse this year, with the good threesome at 2.9 WAR and the rest of the team's offense at minus-2.1 WAR.If the Rockies want to stay in serious contention this year, it's time to bench or release all three of Desmond, Parra and Gonzalez. David Dahl, Ryan McMahon and Raimel Tapia ought to be starting in their places for the rest of the year.


Jason Kipnis, Cleveland Indians: This was supposed to be Kipnis' comeback season after an injury-filled .232/.291/.414 campaign in 2017. Instead, he has only six extra-base hits in 2018, none of them home runs, and an OPS well short of even the .500 mark. The ZiPS projections thought Kipnis had a pretty good shot at being a league-average player this season, with a 1.8 WAR and .753 OPS projection. The computer is now projecting him to finish at 0.6 WAR with a .669 OPS. While 31 is still on the young side for a middle infielder to drop off the face of the earth, it's also not without precedent.


Luis Castillo, Cincinnati Reds: A lot has gone wrong with the Reds in 2018, and rather than start the team toward eventual contention, they've in fact gone even further backward. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the most concerning is Castillo's struggles in the early going. The strikeouts have gone down, the walks have gone up, and like Stroman he's simply being hit a lot harder than he was in 2017, with his average exit velocities against going up from 84.9 to 89.7 mph.Also causing me to furrow my brow a bit is the missing 2 mph on his fastball, something that can't simply be blamed on the cold weather in April (the league has lost only 0.4 mph on the average fastball this year from 2017's totals). Given that the Reds' season will not end in a surprise playoff appearance, I think Castillo might benefit from a few weeks in Triple-A after his most recent drubbing.


Albert Pujols, Los Angeles Angels: Even if Pujols were on a one-year contract for the league minimum, it wouldn't prevent his march to 3,000 hits from becoming more of a sad trudge to a round number rather than one final career highlight. Pujols' walk rate is a sixth of what it was in his prime. Pujols had a career out-of-zone swing rate of 20 percent through 2010; he's at 45 percent this year. Superstar Pujols is long gone. The bigger problem is that "Passable Slugger" Pujols also is in the rearview mirror.ZiPS projects Pujols to hit .255/.298/.404 and I think I'd actually take the under there. While the Angels aren't overflowing with good options, Pujols has fallen so far off the cliff that I think some combination of Jefry Marte, Chris Carter and Jabari Blash getting his at-bats instead would give the team a better chance to catch the Astros this season.


Adam Jones, Baltimore Orioles: While he's not having a completely horrific season like some of the players here, there are some incredibly scary signs when looking at Jones' numbers with the Orioles in 2018. This is especially important for the O's because if the team ever faces reality and starts selling aggressively, free-agent-to-be Jones is one of the players it ought to be shopping.What's extremely worrisome about Jones is that he has been nearly helpless against fastballs this year, a frightening thing for an older hitter who gets so much of his value from power. Jones is whiffing more often against fastballs than ever before. Over the course of his career, he has swung at 54 percent of fastballs thrown to him, and missed only 22 percent of those he has swung at (while hitting for a .283 average and slugging .521). This year, he's missing nearly a third of fastballs, while hitting just .148 and slugging .370.With 26 strikeouts against just two walks this season, you'd think Jones was swinging more aggressively than ever. In fact, he's swinging at fewer pitches than he has in a long time. Teams aren't going to be caught unaware by his profile as he keeps teetering on the edge of oblivion, and the O's may get very little for their longtime center fielder this year.


Sonny Gray, New York Yankees: Over at FanGraphs, Sheryl Ring recently wrote about how Gray is throwing fewer fastballs than usual.

While a different approach can be remedied with a decision, Gray's ballooning walk rate (now at 6.9 BB/9) seems to be more than a location problem. He's actually throwing more pitches in the strike zone than in his very successful 2017 (43 vs. 42 percent). It's just that nobody's biting, as his swing rate on those out-of-zone pitches is at a career-low 23 percent (against his 28 percent career rate where 29 percent is league average, and after he got that number up to 32 percent in 2017). That's just not a pitch selection thing either, with the whiff rate of all his pitches except for his curve down dramatically. There's still time for pitching coach Larry Rothschild to iron out Gray's problem, but his struggles remain cause for serious worry.


Chris Davis, Baltimore Orioles: Start with Davis' average exit velocities by year, going forward from 2015: 92 mph, 91 mph, 90 mph, 86 mph. That last number ranks 276th among 322 players with 25 batted balls in 2018, just barely edging out that other noted slugging Davis, Khr... oh, Rajai Davis. Hitting the ball hard is literally Davis' only contribution and if he's not doing that, the Orioles are going to end up eating most of his contract. There's not enough Old Bay in the world for a Marylander to be able to keep that meal down.