Inside Manny Machado's slow start

The San Diego Padres superstar third baseman is not hitting the way he was last season, at least early on. What's causing him issues?

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but the highest paid player on the San Diego Padres this year is having a really hard time at the plate so far this year.

Well, let’s rewind. Most everyone in baseball is having a hard time at the plate this year, offensive numbers have been downright scary for baseball. This is why, just days ago, I argued that baseball is broken in a way that’s not going to fix itself.

That being said, the Padres are paying Manny Machado $32 million this year to be a star defensive player (which he very much still is) and star offensive player (which he is not, so far). The flip side of this coin is that he’s turned himself into an excellent team leader.

Let’s play a game. I’m going to show you four slash lines from the 2021 Padres and you try and figure out which one is Manny.

Player A: .206/.289/.353
Player B: .197/.315/.211
Player C: .219/318/.360
Player D: .215/.316/.292

To start, none of those slash lines are good. None of those are players that you want in your every day starting lineup right now because they are definitely hurting you more than helping you.

This is why players A (Jorge Mateo), B (Tommy Pham) and D (Victor Caratini) are mostly bench players at this point in the season. Manny Machado, whose slash line doesn’t really stick out from the others on the list, is player C.

We’ve seen this before

The good news is that I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Manny Machado is a streaky hitter and will probably always be a streaky hitter. He was going to have a slump at some point during the season, just like he’ll probably have a few weeks where he’s the best hitter in baseball, but starting the season with a slump is not fun for anyone.

Manny has done this type of thing before, even as a San Diego Padre. Look at his stats from the first month of the season over the last five years (skipping last season) and this is more the norm than an outlier.

Just for comparison’s sake, last year’s shortened season started with a hot month for Manny (.324 avg, 9 HRs, 25 RBIs).

That 2019 season, Manny’s first in San Diego, was disappointing for a number of reasons. Machado himself even said afterwards that he knew he needed to be better to justify his contract and help the team in the way that they needed him, which is why 2020 was such a welcome sight.

Unfortunately, right now Manny would need to get hot to catch up to those 2019 numbers. He’d have to get hot for a long time to come close to his MVP-level offensive numbers in 2020.

Slider season

There’s a lot of positive signs when looking at Machado’s advanced metrics.

He’s barreling balls at a very high rate, and his average exit velocity is higher in 2021 than it was in 2020. Actually, it’s his highest exit velocity of his career.

The problem seems to be two-fold and I’m not sure which one is having more of an impact. On one hand, he’s not hitting the “sweet spot” of the bat as much.

If this is all it is, that’s great news. That would likely just mean that it’s a simple slump where he’s coming close to hitting well but baseball is doing that thing where it’s weird and stupid and unpredictable, but the output will come around if he just keeps at it. Like a less sad version of what’s going on with Tommy Pham.

But I always wonder if maybe pitchers or defenses are doing something that’s causing the low output, and there’s a sliver of an argument to be made there as well.

Manny has always been a fastball hitter, as the majority of MLB players are. One reason for offense being down, for Manny and the league, is that pitchers getting more comfortable throwing sliders in fastball counts. Some pitchers are working off their slider as their main pitch, with the fastball just there to keep hitters honest.

So, while Machado continues to look for fastballs to hit, he’s getting less of those and more of the pitches that he has a hard time getting out of the infield.

He had never seen more than 30% of his pitches be breaking balls until this year, when that number has jumped up to 37%. Those pitches have mostly come at the expense of the fastballs, where he’s seeing a career low 54% after being around 60% in most seasons. With less fastballs, there’s less reason for pitchers to try and fool Manny with changeups, so those have dropped too.

The effect is what you’d imagine: Manny, who tries hard but is a slow runner, is hitting more groundballs than ever.

Some of this could be explained simply by him not finding his stroke yet, but that’s a pretty large jump in ground ball rate and at least part of that has to be due to the increase in breaking pitches. The opposite equation could tell you that he’s having a hard time hitting line drives (he’s a line drive hitter!) without fastballs and changeups to feast on.

Shift effect?

From everything I’ve been told, shifting against right-handed hitters is a waste of time. Especially right-handed hitters that are as good as Machado is.

However, and maybe it’s due to the increased groundballs or maybe MLB teams are trying to seem smarter than they are, teams have started shifting against Manny. Not all the time, just 20% of the time, but that’s way up from the 10% of the time they shifted last year or the 8% of the time they shifted in 2019.

The funny thing is, despite the groundballs and slow foot speed, we should probably be rooting for defenses to keep shifting against Manny. He’s hitting .351 against the shift this year, which is actually lower than last year (.402) and 2019 (.362).

So, while it would seem the shift might be playing a role in his slow start, since his numbers are going down with the shift going up….it’s probably not.

Patience is needed

As I said, Manny Machado is a streaky hitter. He also, historically, has not been a great hitter in the month of May. He’s been fine. The best we can probably hope for is an OPS around .850, which would be an improvement over his current .678 OPS.

My guess is that Manny will catch fire sometime during the summer and the stats will look good by the end of the year. However, despite being the highest paid player on the roster, he’s probably not the guy that’s going to pull the Padres out of their current offensive slump.