Last Saturday, manager Clint Hurdle put
Pedro Alvarez in the clean-up spot. The young third baseman had been hitting extremely well the previous two weeks and everybody felt it about time to move him up in the batting order. Regardless of the WHY, Alvarez is hitless in 15 at-bats from the four hole. He's walked five times and struck out just as many. 20 plate appearances is an incredibly small sample size, but here's a look at what's happened with Pedro at the plate since last Saturday.
First we'll look at the pitches he's gotten and compare them with the pitches he was getting before he was moved up.
hitting 4th
not hitting 4th
It's pretty obvious that Pedro is seeing more fastballs in the clean-up spot. That's a 24% difference there. His whiff rate is way down on the fastballs, which is a good thing, and nothing else has changed much. He's hitting the ball more often, they just haven't gone for hits yet. It's not that he's not driving balls too, he's hit a handful of balls deep to the outfield and most of the time he's making contact it's solid contact. His improved plate patience is probably helping bring him more fastballs, which you think would be a very good thing. Alvarez can smoke fastballs, he just hasn't quite been able to get to them; a lot of them he's just barely missing. He's seeing less of basically every other kind of pitch because of the heightened concentration of heaters. His whiff rates are up on change ups, which is probably because he's seeing more fastballs. The more hard stuff you see the harder it is to stay on a slow one.
Let's look at his spray charts now.
hitting 4th
not hitting 4th
It's hard to compare these two graphs because there are so many more dots on the second graph. However, you can see that Alvarez hasn't had any power at all to the pull side. The two balls he's put on the right side of the field were groundouts. All of his longer drives have been to left and left-center. I'm pretty sure that top graph doesn't do him justice either, because his drive on Wednesday that was caught by
Bryce Harper went further than any of those markers show. I'd probably say move back all those dots a few millimeters to get a real picture of it. It could be that Alvarez is trying to focus on going the other way with a lot of pitches, but it could also be that he's just late on fastballs. Like I said before, he's seeing a ton of them and hasn't been able to get hits on them, so him being late might have something to do with it.
Pitchers also seem to be working Alvarez away more, which isn't a surprise. Here's his called strike zones this year:
hitting 4th
not hitting 4th
He's been worked away all year long, which is a no brainer for a pitcher. Stay away from the inner half of the plate against a power hitter. Alvarez hasn't gotten too many pitches to turn on since he's been in that clean-up spot, and he hasn't capitalized on the ones he has. It happens.
From all of that, my guess for Alvarez's 0/15 streak is him being just a little bit overmatched by the fastball. Strasburg pitching last night certainly didn't help his case, but Alvarez is more than a good enough hitter to make pitchers pay for loading him up with fastballs. Eventually Alvarez is going to get to some of these balls right when he wants to and they're going to sail a long way.
Despite the struggle, Alvarez does look comfortable at the plate. He's been hitting the ball hard and eventually they'll start falling. He just needs to be a little quicker on the fastballs.Keep a close eye on Pedro this weekend.
