Tommy Pham is back
The hottest hitter on the San Diego Padres is the team's coldest hitter from the first six weeks of the season. Tommy Pham has found his groove.
I’m an impatient person, and one that has always struggled with the concept of faith, so it shouldn’t be that surprising that my analysis of Tommy Pham this year went from “He’s very unlucky, it’ll turn around” to “I can’t figure it out, maybe he’s just bad?”
But, as per usual, I was (eventually) wrong. Had I been a little more patient, I could be bragging right now about how right I was. Instead, I was as wrong as everyone else that gave up on Pham, because he has suddenly morphed back into the pre-2020 Tommy Pham that we’ve been waiting for.
Hot Tommy
To recap, here is Tommy’s slash line from April:
.179/.309/.194
That is horrendous. Sure, he was walking quite a bit, but the batting average under .200 and the slugging percentage under .200 made still him a big gaping hole in the lineup.
Somewhat hilariously, Tommy really started turning things on when the team started on this brutal stretch of their schedule. The team has already played 12 games in 12 days and Tommy has a hit in all but two of them. He’s gotten on base in all of them (12-game on-base streak) currently has a 7-game hitting streak.
While everyone else gets beaten down by playing every day, it’s apparently exactly what the doctor ordered for whatever was ailing Pham (probably just bad luck).
As such, here are some actual good slash lines for Pham:
Last 7 days: .367/.441/.600
Last 15 days: .294/.429/.569
And these aren’t really out of character for Pham. These numbers are similar to what he put up in 2017 (with the Cardinals) and 2018 (with the Rays).
Bad luck
Now that it’s behind us, we can try to navigate exactly what happened here. How did a borderline all-star with 9 years of MLB experience suddenly have such a terrible month and a half?
It’s easy to point at his offseason stabbing incident as one that might’ve affected him, especially when the team was saying in spring training that he wasn’t yet 100%, and maybe there’s some truth to that. Not mentally, just physically. Perhaps this is just him finally getting his body to a point where he feels good again.
Also in spring training, the team refused to put Pham on the bench. They said something about how he works out so hard on off days they were worried that he would hurt himself, which would both explain why he’s played in more games in this season than everyone not named Jake Cronenworth and why he’s playing well in this streak of consecutive games.
(I’m not going to speak like I understand anything about Tommy Pham’s life, but the paragraph above is a neat trick for someone that likes to be on the field: creating some reason why you might actually be in danger if you aren’t out there. It’s like when a spouse purposefully screws up the laundry so that they never have to do it again, except the exact opposite. He might hurt himself when there’s no laundry and so he needs to do laundry every day.)
But, beyond all of the physical stuff, the numbers told a pretty clear story during that slow stretch for Pham: He’s getting very unlucky. He was amongst the best in baseball at walking, making contact, and hitting the ball hard. It just wasn’t turning into anything but outs.
Eventually, if everyone waited, he would turn it around and probably catch fire.
Wait, maybe I called this after all?
No. I’m an idiot. But I did write a post on this here newsletter/blog titled Is the Tommy Pham breakout coming? literally right when the Tommy Pham breakout was coming. If you read it, you’ll find out that I thought the answer was “No”.
Still, I was right to look at his performance against fastballs. Just like Ha-Seong Kim, and honestly a bunch of other MLB players, the new baseball has not been kind to Tommy Pham. He can handle a low-90s fastball and has even put a couple of them over the outfield wall in the last few weeks, but it’s the upper-90s fastballs that he will probably continue to struggle against.
Fortunately for Pham, there are less pitchers in MLB right now that throw their fastball above 95mph than you might think. Only about 30-40, actually, and a lot of them are relievers.
And no player is perfect. Maybe Pham has always struggled against upper-90s fastballs and the evolution in pitching means he sees them more but he’s never actually changed a thing? Who knows.
The good news is that the baseballs coming off Tommy Pham’s bat are finding themselves landing on grass or dirt more often than not these days. He has, officially, caught fire. He might be the best offensive player in the San Diego Padres lineup right now, with Fernando Tatis Jr. day-to-day with oblique tightness, at a juncture when the team needs him the most.