Alex Rodriguez’s Return to Field Signals Time to Judge Ability, Not Past
March 4, 2015 · Zachary D. Rymer · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
At long last, we have an excuse to stop talking about Alex Rodriguez the lightning rod and to start talking about Alex Rodriguez the baseball player.
In our defense, there hasn’t been much else to talk about in the last two years. Fighting and eventually serving a yearlong performance-enhancing drug suspension has taken up a lot more of A-Rod’s time than, you know, actual baseball. Entering this week, he hadn’t played in a game since 2013.
But that changed Wednesday. Rodriguez took part in the New York Yankees‘ 3-1 exhibition loss against the Philadelphia Phillies, batting second and playing designated hitter. And on the surface, his return was a good one.
In three plate appearances through the first six innings of Wednesday’s contest, A-Rod made one out and reached base twice on a first-inning single and a sixth-inning walk. That puts his spring on-base percentage at .667, which is really good!
Certainly, things could have gone a lot worse. In fact, maybe you expected them to go a lot worse. It was Rodriguez’s first game in well over a year after all, and his 0-for-2 performance against a pitching machine in a Monday intrasquad game didn’t exactly bode well.
And so, it looks like Alex Rodriguez the baseball player is making progress. It’s only one spring training game, to be sure, but the Yankees will surely take it. Especially knowing that the organization’s expectations for Rodriguez’s 2015 season have largely amounted to a collective shrug.
We could stop here and leave it at that, but…nah. This is a player with a REALLY BIG NAME making a LONG-AWAITED RETURN TO ACTION, darn it.
So naturally, we must overanalyze the heck out of what happened.
First, let’s go back to something A-Rod said about how he was feeling heading into Wednesday’s game.
“I’ll be a little nervous, for sure,” Rodriguez said Tuesday, via Bryan Hoch of MLB.com. “I haven’t been in front of our fans for a long time. I’m excited about that. I have some challenges ahead.”
You’d certainly expect at least a little anxiety from a guy who’s been through what A-Rod’s been through over the last two years. But what really makes it relevant for our purposes is how he looked the part in his first two trips to the plate Wednesday.
Rodriguez saw four pitches from right-handers Kevin Slowey and Paul Clemens and swung at all four of them. The first two were 91 mph heaters that he swung through. The third was an 89 mph heater that he lined into left field. The fourth was a 96 mph heater that he grounded to short.
By comparison, Rodriguez was a lot calmer in his third plate appearance against right-hander Ethan Martin. He worked the count to 3-2 before drawing a free pass on what looked like a slider off the outside corner, and that was one of several good takes he had in the at-bat.
So, at the least, we know this about A-Rod’s debut: He went from being overly antsy early on to more relaxed and disciplined later in the game. If we can infer anything from that, maybe it’s that he’s already over the butterflies phase of his comeback, which would be a good thing.
But more important is how A-Rod looked. More specifically, how his swing looked.
It’s been awhile since the discussion has been front and center, but maybe you recall that A-Rod’s swing was a point of concern for a while there. The eye test said it had lost its old explosiveness, seemingly due to his advancing age and his ever-growing pile of serious injuries. Since 2008, A-Rod has had surgeries on both hips, as well as knee surgery in 2011.
Thing is, it’s not just the eye test.
John Brenkus did a Sport Science segment for ESPN that broke down how the injuries to Rodriguez’s lower half had robbed him of his once-explosive hip rotation. That forced him to try to compensate by increasing the width of his stance, but pretty much every swing he took forced his upper body to do the heavy lifting anyway. Add it all up, and you get a slower, less powerful swing.
It’s easy enough to put all this in moving pictures, starting with this walk-off dinger from back in 2007:
In that swing, you can see how sturdy A-Rod’s lower half was and just how much power he generated with hip rotation alone. That’s a true home run hitter’s swing.
But now let’s go to a video from 2013:
Clearly, this swing is not like the other. A-Rod’s lower half was anything but sturdy, and his hip rotation is anything but explosive. His power was coming pretty much entirely from his upper body.
Now, one hope you could have had for A-Rod coming into spring training was that his year off from baseball would prove to be just what his body needed. Specifically where his swing mechanics were concerned, perhaps it would end up meaning a stronger lower half, quicker hip rotation and less reliance on his upper body.
So, let’s go to the video of his single on Wednesday and see what we can see:
If there’s any improvement from where A-Rod’s swing was in 2013 pictured here, it’s very subtle. His lower half still doesn’t look very sturdy, and his hip rotation still looks like a shell of what it used to be.
And though this is the only moving picture readily available, the other swings didn’t look all that different. They were just as typical of what his swing has become as he’s gotten older if not more so.
Take his two whiffs at Slowey’s 91 mph heat, for example. That’s something that’s become increasingly common for A-Rod, as figures from BaseballSavant.com say his whiff rate on 91-plus heat grew from 8.5 percent to 10.9 percent between 2008 and 2013. That’s what a slow bat looks like.
As for the ground ball A-Rod hit on Clemens’ 96 mph heater, his inability to drive good heat is also nothing new. He went from producing .197 Isolated Power against 96-plus heat between 2008 and 2010 to producing .085 Isolated Power against it from 2011 and 2013. That too is what a slow bat looks like.
So, in light of all these things, A-Rod’s spring debut didn’t quite answer all the burning baseball questions that were leftover from when we last saw him in 2013. It doesn’t appear that his year off fixed what was ailing his swing, and that could mean another year of the same old problems.
But let’s stop right here and pump our brakes on the doom talk. Just because Rodriguez didn’t look like his vintage self in one spring training game doesn’t mean that he’s, well, doomed.
For starters, yeah, that whole “one spring training game” thing is kind of important. Maybe Rodriguez got the butterflies out of his system Wednesday, but it’s going to take more than just one game for him to shake off the rust. There’s certainly a chance that his swing could look much better a couple of weeks from now once all the rust is gone.
And even if A-Rod’s swing doesn’t look different, it should be said that he might still be able to put up numbers.
Even in 2012 and 2013, when his swing was at its worst, Rodriguez was still good enough to push his OPS+ into above-average territory at 112. If the Yankees could get, say, 100 or so games of similar production in 2015, they’d probably be thrilled.
In so many words: Let’s wait and see.
There were things to like about A-Rod’s return on Wednesday, and there were things not to like. But one way or another, we’re going to need a lot more time to pass before we can know for sure what kind of player he’s going to be for the Yankees in 2015.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked.
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