Xander Bogaerts' Disaster 2014, Sneaky Intriguing 2015, and Continued Star Potential
Xander Bogaerts entered 2014 coming off a World Series winning postseason in which he ran Will Middlebrooks out of the starting lineup with a .296/.412/.481 line. He had a top-2 prospect ranking in just about every major publication. You couldn’t find a 2014 season preview or sportsbook that didn’t tote him as the odds-on AL Rookie of the Year.
Then the season happened. Why’s he making so many errors? Can he really play shortstop at the Major League level? Maybe when he fills out he’ll profile as a third baseman anyways? Maybe we should bring Stephen Drew in? Why’d Xander stop hitting? Can he hit breaking balls?
It was a mess. He failed to live up to his brief 30-game 2013 sample and saw his offensive numbers fall from .268/.357/.408 to a meager .240/.297/.362. Perhaps more disturbing was the defense; his hands looked slow, his range looked limited, and he flirted with a full blown case of the yips all season that ultimately resulting in 20 errors, the second highest figure in the AL. The advanced numbers are even uglier: his UZR/150 (essentially, defensive runs above or below average standardized to 150 games) at third base was a staggering low -29.4, 135th of 136 AL players with 350 innings played at a single position, and at shortstop his -3.7 was good for just 83rd.
When the season mercifully ended, many people, me included, were more than willing to write it off for the Red Sox and Xander alike. It was a disaster filled with distractions, controversy, and 50/50 decisions that all seemed to go wrong. The Red Sox brain trust would take 2014 as a lesson, formulate a plan in the offseason, correct their mistakes, and start over with a new team in 2015. Our young shortstop would do the same on an individual level and we’d try to kick off 2013 2.0 in April.
Well, April has come and gone for the Sox. We’re a little over an eighth of the way through the 2015 season and it’s a reasonable time to start looking at the progress that’s been made. On the team level it’s pretty evident where things are working (Hanley) and where they aren’t (pitching). But what can we say about our once-upon-a-time sure-fire superstar shortstop?
Advertisement
Through 19 starts he’s hitting .274/.338/.356 with a homer, three extra-base hits and 10 RBI. It’s nice to see that average and on-base percentage up from last year’s final numbers, but where is the power? Even while collecting hits at a much higher rate, the slugging percentage has dropped and he’s hitting the ball for extra bases fewer than once every six games. Moreover, through his first 19 games last season, Xander had posted a .273/.407/.348 line that’s good for an OPS 62 points higher than his 2015 start. In the field he’s passed the eye test at a much higher rate this year but his UZR/150 sits at -6.2; while it’s admittedly dangerous to project a player’s defensive results over 150 games based on just over 175 innings, this year’s current leaderboard looks very similar to last year’s final results.
This leaves us in a confusing place. Our eyes tell us that Xander has improved; he looks smoother in the field back at shortstop, he has some of that 2013 playoff run poise and confidence at the plate, and he just seems to be more comfortable. Yet the numbers tell us that he’s in a very similar place as he was at this point last season. The real evidence of progress exists on the peripheries.
Last season pitchers were still learning how to attack Xander early in the season. A lot of attention was given to the Stephen Drew signing and Xander’s move to third as it was easy to point to the resulting mental effect as the reason for his lowly performance at the plate. It was undoubtedly a factor, but it’s a little convenient to place all the blame for Xander’s struggles on that. On the day Drew was signed, Xander had a .283/.381/.401 line and seemed on his way to the Rookie of the Year Award despite his defensive issues; from that point on he dropped to a .223/.262/.347 line. Part of that may have been Drew displacing him at his position, part of it may have been the ever-building pressure to perform from team and fans alike. But the largest part was the pitches that he was seeing.
In that early part of the season, two thirds of the pitches he saw were fastballs and he hit .320 and slugged .490 on them. He was seeing so many pitchers test him that his .177 average on breaking balls and .250 average on offspeed pitches didn’t really matter. He saw a fastball and he hit it. Then pitchers stopped trying to test him quite so often. He wasn’t seeing first pitch fastballs at a 70% clip. The total percentage of hard stuff thrown his way dropped to 58%. He looked confused. He started to guess. He became so concerned with soft stuff that he couldn’t react to the hard anymore. His average on breaking balls for the rest of the season remained identical at .177, his average on offspeed pitches was nearly so at .246, but his average on hard stuff dropped 75 points from the early .320 mark to just .245.
This year, his approach at the plate has returned as something closer to the brief glimpse of potential we saw in 2013. He’s seeing hard stuff 63.5% of the time and hitting .296 on those pitches; obviously that’s not back into the .320 realm, but it’s the .296 combined with his performance on breaking balls that indicate we may be seeing a Bogaerts ready to take a leap. Xander is up to .269 this year on the breaking stuff; it may not sound like much on its own, but .269 from .177 is massive. The combination of .296 on hard stuff and .269 on breaking balls versus what we saw last year suggests a much more mature hitter. It suggests that he’s seeing the ball better and has vastly improved his ability to recognize pitches. To the naked eye, that’s what we see as his returned poise and confidence at the plate.
It also suggest that he will only improve as he continues to get at-bats. It will become more and more natural to see the ball, identify the pitch, and react. As it becomes more natural, and he’s able to react that hundredth or even thousandth of a second faster, we’ll see more power return. Barring injury I’m comfortable guaranteeing that he won’t end up with the mere 22 extra-base hits he’s currently on pace for.
Have I mentioned that this is Xander’s age-22 season by the way? Between the early hype, the 2013 postseason, the 2014 disaster, and the start of this season it feels like he’s been around forever, but he doesn’t turn 23 until October. By my count there have been about 11 star shortstops in the last 20 years: Alex Rodriguez, Cal Ripken Jr., Derek Jeter, Hanley Ramirez, Rafael Furcal, Jimmy Rollins, Troy Tulowitzki, Jose Reyes, Nomar, Barry Larkin, and Miguel Tejada.
Advertisement
A-Rod’s true breakout came in his second season when he was just 20-years old and Ripken’s came when he was just 21 as a rookie. Jeter, Hanley, Furcal, Rollins, Tulo, and Reyes all announced themselves to the world when they were 22. Nomar was 23 for his 1997 Rookie of the Year campaign. Larkin was 24 when he broke out after an age 23 season that produced numbers eerily similar to Xander’s 2014. Miguel Tejada didn’t really become Miguel Tejada until he was 25. Xander is still right on pace to join the club.
The Red Sox have a 22-year-old shortstop with all the potential in the world and the signs point to him just starting to figure out how to really play the game at the highest level. A .274/.338/.356 line over the first month of a season may not look like a guy who’s ready to takeoff on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see that we may still have a star on our hands. The rest of 2015 looks bright for Xander Bogaerts.
PS: “Can he pitch?” Beat you to it, think of something new.
PPS: Batting numbers come from Baseball-Reference, fielding stats from FanGraphs, and pitch data from Brooks Baseball. They are all the best.