Father Time comes for us all. No matter how much we try and get away from him, keeping our bodies in tip top shape, eating the proper way a person is supposed to, one cannot outrun getting older. It happens to us all and when it does, it’s painful. For those watching athletes, seeing them age and get juuuuuuust a little bit worse each season can be something that we don’t want to admit.
J.T. Realmuto has gotten older and had seen his numbers fall to levels he (and the fanbase) were not used to. When the calendar fell away and changed to the month of June, there was legitimate concern about his place in the lineup. Not only was he hitting quite poorly (.222/.293/.361), his defense felt like it was slipping as well. The relationship he and the organization had built was growing shakier and shakier with the impending decision looming about his role in free agency. With his apparent decline, was the team going to sink significant money into retaining him when it was clear that he was not the same?
Since then, Realmuto has caught fire. Since June 1, Realmuto has hit .333/.366/.444 and given the team another bat lower in the lineup that has helped the offense get back on track a bit. His isolated power is still a bit low in that timeframe (.111), but he’s enough of a threat that the bottom portion of that lineup cannot be overlooked. While he is undoubtedly on some kind of heater right now now, the question becomes what has he done differently to make himself back into an above average hitter (remember, this isn’t some one week thing), and can he continue to perform at that level?
The answer to the second question is always easier: we’ll see. Until we actually start seeing him playing in the dog days of August, we won’t know how he’ll respond. One would assume that as the team continues to fight for first place in their division, their stated plan of giving Realmuto more rest in-season will once again fall by the wayside, the best laid plans and all that. But what I’m interested in is how he has gotten to this point again. What has changed?
Let’s first look at his stance and swing. Watching Realmuto over the years, you have likely become accustomed to how he starts and swings at pitches. When a player is having struggles like Realmuto was at the beginning of the year, there might be some subtle changes he makes to get back to where he needs to be as a hitter. Here is his setup, left side from April and right side from July.
Small changes, but the bat is tighter to his body while his stance is opened up a bit more. And guess what, we can prove that now!
God bless Baseball Savant.
What this slightly more opened stance has done to help Realmuto improve at the plate is probably a trade secret that no one will divulge, but it is interesting to note. The more he’s opened up his stance, the better he has gotten. Is there a direct correlation? Maybe.
Another thing that I noticed was how pitchers were approaching him. What has changed in their arsenals?
Judging from the evidence, teams were starting to back away from the fastball and lean into the breaking stuff. Since May, the amount of breaking pitches that Realmuto has seen has gone up about 6% while the amount of fastballs he has seen has dropped about 3%. Why would they stop throwing him fastballs? At the beginning of the season and through May, you can see that he wasn’t doing much with them. It’s the other pitches that he has improved on as the season has gone along.
When it comes to the fastball, he’s been pretty much the same outside of May when it seems he struggled with the pitch. Yet as we see in graph above that, the league started throwing him more breaking pitches. It wasn’t a huge jump from May to June, and has actually leveled off a bit this month with the percentage points being about the same, but what has instead happened is Realmuto has started feasting on that breaking stuff.
It’s interesting that there are more breaking pitches being thrown his way. It could be as simple as, based on the above information, he was better at hitting fastballs than he was at breaking and offspeed stuff. If that’s the case, why not throw him more of those pitches? Makes sense, right? The good thing is that Realmuto has seen this change, adjusted and is now hitting breaking and offspeed stuff much, much better than he was at the beginning of the season. Baseball is a game of adjustments and Realmuto has adjusted.
The question becomes: will the league adjust back?
Should he continue to punish those kinds of pitches the way he has so far this season, the league will probably up their percentage of fastballs and/or offspeed stuff in a way to try and get Realmuto back off track. What will be important is that he be ready for this adjustment and is able to make sure it is not successful. Having Realmuto as a solid right handed bat in this lineup does wonders, as we have seen more of late. We don’t know if the team will be adding another bat to the lineup at the deadline, so having Realmuto keep on producing is going to be important to the team’s playoff push. So, when the adjustment comes, and it will come, it is important that he be ready.