Quick Hit: What To Do With The Struggling Manny Machado?

by Eric Stashin (aka The Rotoprofessor)

Manny Machado is supposed to be one of the elite players in the game, though his numbers over the first two months of the season don’t indicate that.  He does have 10 HR and 25 RBI, so it’s not a complete loss, but it’s come courtesy of a .205 AVG.  Exactly where has he gone wrong?  There are a lot of different factors, though not one glaring cause to the problems:

Line Drive Rate – 11.2%
Fly Ball Rate – 45.4%
Strikeout Rate – 21.9%
SwStr% – 12.3%

The increased fly ball rate is going to help him maintain the home run pace, but generally that’s going to lead to a lower BABIP (especially since it’s coming at the expense of his line drive rate).  His fly ball rate has been trending up over the past few years as well:

• 2014 – 30.9%
• 2015 – 38.5%
• 2016 – 42.7%
• 2017 – 45.4%

That would indicate a concerted effort to hit for more power, and the increased strikeout rate would also indicate that.  Opposing pitchers could be exploiting that aggressiveness, as he’s swinging and missing a lot against breaking balls (20.31% Whiff%) and offspeed pitches (16.67% Whiff%).  While that has always been a problem, he’s seeing these pitches about 44% of the time thus far (up from about 40.50% last season).

So what can we expect moving forward?  Will he continue down this path, or will he make the necessary adjustments?  Given his track record and potential, how can we not expect him to figure it out.  It’s a slump, and a bad one, but he’s going to rebound.  All he needs to do is improve his production against fourseam fastballs (.141 AVG, courtesy of a .146 BABIP) to get there.

If you are thinking about pushing the panic button, don’t.

Sources – Fangraphs, Brooks Baseball

Make sure to check out all of our updated rankings: