Let's talk about Eric Hosmer
The Padres first baseman has good stats and bad metrics. What does that mean for the rest of this season?
Before the season started, I said (either here or on a podcast), that the key to the Padres offense this year wouldn’t lie with Tatis and Machado. Those guys are so consistent that we know what we can expect from them. It would be dependent on the production of Wil Myers, Eric Hosmer, Tommy Pham, Jurickson Profar, and all of the other players that could have great years or bad years.
The good news, so far? Wil Myers and Eric Hosmer have been the two best hitters on the team through seven games.
The bad news? Tatis is injured, and both Pham and Machado are off to slow starts.
Even with some stellar pitching across the board, the 4-3 Padres are proving you can’t win if you can’t score runs….and that it’s harder to score runs if your superstars aren’t producing.
Here comes the DH
I’ll do a full preview of the Padres/Rangers series tomorrow, but the good news right now is that the Padres will be traveling to an AL ballpark to get back something they sorely miss: the designated hitter.
Last season, the Padres got good offensive production from every position but catcher. They also had a designated hitter instead of the pitcher, which means there was really only 1 weak hitter that other teams could target in the lineup each night.
So far this season, the Padres are getting at least decent offensive production from just 4.5 positions (1B, 2B, RF, LF, Caratini)….and no DH when playing at home.
Jorge Mateo has been good offensively, but doesn’t have a spot in the every day lineup. The DH will help with that, and bump the Padres up to 5.5 spots out of 9 that can be counted on. That’s enough to get some guys on base and bring them home before a pitcher can pitch to the struggling parts of the lineup.
Still, to do any real damage, the Padres are going to need something more from their stars. Both Machado and Pham are streaky hitters, so it’s not like anyone is panicking, but it’s already difficult for this team to put runs on the board without Tatis, Grisham, and Nola. It gets nearly impossible without more from the first third of the lineup.
The Hosmer dilemma
Just like I’m not worried about Machado and Pham, I don’t know that I’m taking much from the early season performance of Eric Hosmer. Yes, this is (somewhat) about launch angle.
Hosmer is currently hitting .391/.440/.739, which are all incredibly high numbers that would destroy previous career highs. His BABIP through two series is a hilarious .467 (meaning he’s getting extremely lucky in an unsustainable way). Oh, and remember all of that talk last year about how Hosmer had changed his swing to match the times and was now getting underneath the baseball?
Even if that was true, and it was for a short while, it’s not anymore. If you dig a little deeper than launch angle, this is easy to see.
Let’s start here. Hosmer is hitting the ball hard (EV) but he’s not barreling the ball as much as he did last year and his launch angle has once again gone negative (which means that, on average, he’s hitting the ball into the ground). That’s probably hard to do when you’ve hit 2 HRs in six games, but Hosmer has really done nothing but hit the ball into the dirt when he’s not hitting it out of the park.
Looking at his batted ball profile backs up what we’ve seen. That’s a career high in ground ball percentage and an incredibly low for fly ball percentage.
You can see that whatever he was doing last year was working. He was grounding out less and hitting more line drives. He’s kept the line drives this year, but he won’t be very good if that ground ball % doesn’t go down.
As with most of his trends, you can see them getting better in 2019, really getting better in 2020, and now bouncing back to pre-2019 numbers to start the 2021 season. This one is particularly interesting to me because it makes the least amount of sense:
For the last two seasons, Hosmer been a lot more aggressive. He started chasing more pitches out of the strike zone than ever before, and in 2019 he did so successfully, making more contact than he had since 2015. And now he’s both being aggressive (swinging at the first pitch) and not (chase % super low)….and when he does chase, he’s not making any sort of contact.
Oh, and he’s been abysmal as a defender, but that’s been true since forever.
I’m trying to not to take too much away from the first seven games of the season, and Hosmer is making that easy. Despite putting up good stats and contributing to wins, Eric Hosmer is a poor fielder who is grounding out at a rate that would get him benched if he were less lucky.
Maybe it all eventually catches up to Hosmer and the Padres. Maybe, somehow, it doesn’t. What’s most likely is that Hosmer finishes the season being the same replacement level player that he’s been since joining the Padres, with last year’s shortened season being the outlier.