Ages ago, or what seemed like it, Bruce Bochy mused that if he could get Adolis García back and hot, it might just be enough to change the flow of a toxic offense threatening to breach the dam and contaminate a perfectly good season.
Of course, this was so long ago, it was before Evan Carter, Marcus Semien and Corey Seager were all lost to various fractures and surgeries. Or as that time was previously known: “last week.”
Nevertheless, here the Rangers sit, a month left in the season, coming off perhaps their best offensive week of the year, and at the center of it all is a smoking Adolis García. After a 10-day stint on the injured list due to a minor ankle sprain, García went 9 for 20 (.450) with six extra base hits, including a pair of homers, and a 1.450 OPS in his first five games back. The Rangers? They went 5-1 on a homestand in which they could barely afford a loss. Next task is to carry it onto an even more critical road trip that began Friday in West Sacramento, Calif., vs. the Athletics.
“He can carry a team when he swings like that,” Bochy said of García after the homestand finale in which he doubled twice, homered and drove in five runs. “You could just see the focus and the determination since he’s come back. He’s been locked in defensively, offensively. Pitch to pitch you can see a difference.
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“He’s had his ups and downs, but I think the time that he had gave him time to reflect and go, ‘You know what? I’m going to go out there, play like I’m capable of playing, and have fun with it and keep that focus, not get so down on myself,’ like he can occasionally.”
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He’s done it mostly by dialing back his aggressiveness or repurposing it. In short, he’s simply not chasing as much as he has all season. Before the IL stint, García was chasing pitches outside the zone at a near career-high rate of 36.1%. He’d seen the 19th-most pitches outside the strike zone in the majors and had the ninth-most swings on them. It offered pitchers an easy attack plan: don’t throw strikes.
Since his return, he’s dialed back the swings. For the week, García saw 73 pitches, more than half outside the strike zone, but he simply didn’t swing nearly as often as he has all year. Of his 11 swings, four were hits and four came on two-strike pitches when it is more necessary to be in swing mode to try to defend the at-bat. And when his chases are even slightly refined, he’s a better-than-league-average hitter on pitches outside the zone. At .197, he ranks 30th of 156 players to have seen at least 1,500 pitches this year. He’s not Vladimir Guerrero, the patron saint of bad-ball hitter of all time, but he can be sneakily dangerous.
Among all the numbers since his return, maybe this sticks out as much as any: He’s only struck out twice in 22 plate appearances. He’s walked as often as he’s struck out. The 9% rate in both categories is significantly lower than his season rate for strikeouts (25%) and significantly higher than his walk rate (5.3%)
At the time the Rangers placed him on the IL, Bochy said he didn’t necessarily have a heart-to-heart conversation about challenging García, but rather encouraged him to use the IL stint as a mental break as much as anything.
“I told him to take advantage of this and clear his head,” Bochy said. “He’s gone out there every day and hasn’t had a lot of dates off this year. He grinded hard and maybe it caught up with him. So you look at the [IL] as maybe a silver lining. Catch your breath and start thinking about what your plan is.
“Since he’s come back, he’s had a better plan. It shows up in the focus. He’s had really, really, really good focus. He’s shortened up his swing, especially with two strikes when it becomes more of a team-first at-bat, and he’s picked his spots when he really wants to get his ‘A’ swings off.”
And he’s carried the Rangers. He’s capable of doing that.
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