Maikel Garcia and the Quest for Improvement

The Royals third baseman seems to be somehow both overvalued and undervalued.

On Opening Day 2023, the Royals trotted out a lineup that featured Hunter Dozier at third base. Less than two months later, he’d been released. The replacement was their top shortstop prospect, Maikel Garcia. You know that story. It’s not new. We saw Garcia briefly in 2022, but he got his first big opportunity this past season. He excelled offensively in some areas. His .272 average ranked 11th among all rookies; his .323 OBP 23rd. But his wRC+ of 84 was just 37th, his .358 SLG was 39th and his .086 ISO was 55th. This is all out of 59 rookies. He hit for enough average, he got on base roughly enough, but there was just no thump in his bat, which means that OBP needs to be better for him to succeed.

The bat isn’t the only part of the game. He was an exemplary defender. He ranked second among all third baseman with 800+ innings in outs above average (OAA) with 13, though DRS, like so many other Royals defenders, didn’t appreciate the work quite as much. Even so, he’s a strong defender and anyone who watched him shouldn’t be able to argue that. As a baserunner, he appears to be a strong runner, but Fangraphs did not rate him well. Still, he stole 23 bases and has 73rd percentile sprint speed. He has the tools to become a better runner, but that’s one of those TBD-type things.

So why is a .272/.353/.358 hitting third baseman with -2 DRS who rates as a below-average baserunner seen as someone with a big future? There are underlying numbers that suggest much more for Garcia. We can start with the expected numbers. The xBA is in line with the actual average at .274. But the xSLG was .393, which is still not great, but an extra 35 points of slugging percentage is pretty significant. Adding that takes him from a fair amount below league average to a lot closer to league average offensively. So that alone is reason for some optimism.

But there’s more to it. The quality of contact is interesting. Garcia’s 50.6 percent hard-hit rate ranked in the 93rd percentile in 2023. People can get upset all the way want about newer metrics, but the reality is that hitting the ball hard is important. Here’s the list of 18 qualified hitters with a better hard hit rate than Garcia:

Aaron Judge
Matt Chapman
Matt Olson
Juan Soto
Ronald Acuña Jr.
JD Martinez
Rafael Devers
Shohei Ohtani
Yandy Diaz
Corey Seager
Yordan Alvarez
Joc Pederson
Julio Rodriguez
Gunnar Henderson
Mike Trout
Ryan O’Hearn
Spencer Torkelson
Paul Goldschmidt

These aren’t all superstars, but there are some NAMES on this list. Hitting the ball hard is good. Hitting the ball hard more than half the time is really good. Garcia hits the ball hard more than half the time. On those batted balls, Garcia hit .474 with a .691 SLG, which sounds great, but is it? The league hit .506 with a 1.008 SLG on hard-hit balls. It would be easy to say that’s all bad luck. Some of it certainly is. It’s tough to have a slugging percentage more than 300 points below league average when hitting the ball hard without some bad luck. But a lot of it is the approach for Garcia.

Look at the launch angle on his hard hit balls compared to the league average. For Garcia, it’s 7.8 degrees. For the league, it’s 12.8 degrees. When you add five miles per hour to the exit velocity, Garcia’s launch angle drops to 6.1 degrees on average compared to 12 degrees from the league. So as he hits the ball harder, he also hits it lower. Again, you’re not getting slug on the ground. Sure, the occasional double down the line or even a low line drive to the gap, but that’s not where all the money is made. Which means that a lot of it is the swing for Garcia.

This is roughly a three-second gif, so it’s not easy to see, but you can see the path of his swing on this pitch:

That’s a 94 MPH four-seamer down the middle. Chris Martin had a great year and it’s not as simple as that, but 94 down Broadway is a pitch you should be able to load up on and crush. And Garcia hit the ball very hard. It was 104.5 MPH off the bat, but was a grounder up the middle. It was a hit, which is great, but take a look at a similar pitch Acuña hit.

So how does the gap bridge from Garcia to cousin Ronald? It’s not as simple as swing up more, but in some ways it kind of is that simple. Changing his swing plane will help Garcia quite a bit to get more loft on the ball, which will help for him to drive the ball more. The data says that balls hit 100 MPH or harder at a launch angle between 15 and 30 degrees was good for a .724 average, 2.130 SLG and 3,438 home runs last season. On the 100 MPH+ batted balls with a launch angle of below 15 degrees, the league hit .559 with a .671 SLG and two home runs.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it but they aren’t. Among batted balls at 100 MPH or harder, just 32.7 percent are hit at the launch angles above. For Garcia, that number is 24.3 percent. A launch angle below 15 degrees accounts 55.4 percent of 100 MPH+ batted balls. For Garcia, that represents 73.9 percent of his 100 MPH batted balls. That tells me that, as difficult as it is, Garcia can do a better job of getting more optimal lift on the ball. On the bright side, he almost never hits a lazy fly ball, at least not at 100 MPH or harder. Of course, lazy fly balls don’t generally come in at 100 MPH+, but I digress.

This all isn’t to say that if Garcia starts swinging up he’s going to become Acuña because that’s simply not the way the world works. For one thing, Acuña is 6’0” and 205 lbs. and Garcia is listed at 6’0” and 180 lbs. and I have to say that I don’t think he’s that heavy. There isn’t a huge difference there, but not everyone carries the same amount of pure strength. If Garcia is going to be at third base long-term, he can afford to put on additional muscle to be able to drive the ball a bit more while maintaining the quickness required at the hot corner. So I don’t think we’re staring down the barrel of a 40+ home run season from him with some swing changes, but I do think he can add something if he makes some alterations.

And while he’s been an absolute beast in the Venezuelan Winter League - .432/.548/.579 through Tuesday - he’s not doing it with significantly more power than we’ve seen in the past. He has two homers and eight doubles in 124 plate appearances. Last year, he had 13 doubles, five triples and four homers in 250 plate appearances. And you can see in videos that the swing looks pretty much the same. But what if I told you after all of this that it’s totally fine if he doesn’t change anything with his swing and he can still be better?

I do think there’s more power in the tank, both as he grows and as he evolves as a big leaguer. But even if he is someone who will get you 25-30 doubles, five or six triples and eight to 10 homers in a season, he can still be successful. What made him so intriguing in the minors was his ability to command the strike zone. In 2022, he walked 41 times and struck out 60 in Northwest Arkansas in 369 plate appearances. If you don’t want to do the math yourself, that’s an 11.1 percent walk rate and 16.3 percent strikeout rate. But he went to Omaha and the walk rate fell to 9.1 percent while the strikeout rate jumped to 22.6 percent. Without a ton of power, that doesn’t work great. He did hit seven homers and 10 doubles in 186 plate appearances, so it did work but that seems to be a bit of an anomaly for him.

Last year, in 24 games and 112 plate appearances in Omaha, he didn’t hit for power, but he did walk 14.3 percent of the time while he struck out just 19.6 percent. Then he got to the big leagues and the rates were 7.4 percent and 22.3 percent respectively. That doesn’t work if you’re not hitting for power. For Garcia, if he can improve his swing decisions, he can manage to be a productive big league leadoff hitter without doing a thing to his swing.

Take a look at what he does in various zones when he swings.

So on pitches on the edges but just off the plate, he doesn’t get much going at all, though he does hit for a decent enough average. On pitches on the edges but strikes, he’s a little better. And on pitches in the heart of the plate, he does some sort of damage. I think it’s wild to have an average exit velocity of 94.7 MPH and a hard-hit rate of 60.9 percent with just a .135 ISO, but that points to the first issue for Garcia. Overall, when he swings at pitches that are strikes, he hits .328 with a .449 SLG and a 55.4 percent hard-hit rate. When he swings at pitches that are not strikes, he’s a 225 hitter with a .245 SLG and 31 percent hard-hit rate.

You might notice that these numbers are when he swings at these pitches. I put it that way because I think Garcia may have gotten a little of whack with what he was swinging at and what he was taking last season. He was called out on strikes 48 times last season, which was tied for 10th-most in baseball. Of those 48 called third strikes, 41 were on pitches inside the zone. Now, a called third strike isn’t as simple as yelling “SWING THE BAT, DUMB DUMB!” There are any number of reasons why a player may take a third strike and it’s not fair to not give the pitching any credit. That said, the heat map for Garcia’s called third strikes is interesting.

Why is that interesting? Because he had success when swinging at pitches in those general areas, hitting .299 with a .418 SLG. Now, he didn’t hit the ball especially hard, but two of his four home runs came on pitches in those red spots above.

In all, Garcia saw 577 pitches inside the heart of the zone in 2023. He took 161 of them. I’m all for patience. I love it, in fact. But there is a place for selective aggression and while there are absolutely situations where a hitters should take no matter what, these pitches are more often than not pitches he should be swinging at. Let’s go back to Garcia’s famous cousin. He attacked pitches in the heart of the plate, taking just 151 out of 734 thrown to him. They are quite obviously very different players, but the best of the best are swinging at the pitches they can crush. Garcia simply didn’t do that enough.

Two things can happen from swinging more on the hittable pitches. One, Garcia will simply hit more. That’s likely what would happen initially. Then, as pitchers realize that he isn’t as likely to take a free strike, they’ll start throwing fewer pitches there. Among hitters who saw at least 1,500 pitches, the percentage of pitches in the heart of the plate to Garcia was tied for the 10th-highest in baseball. He was a full 2.6 percent higher than league average, which is quite a bit. So if and when he starts to see fewer pitches in a happy zone, he can use his patience to get on base more.

While the .432 average in the winter league stands out, what catches my attention even more is 27 walks and just nine strikeouts. Last year, he walked 46 times and struck out 31 in that league, which is incredible, but this ratio is even better. Is it a precursor to better swing decisions in the regular season? I wish I could tell you definitively, but you have to hope so. If he can be a little more aggressive in the zone and add 10-15 points of average and that leads to more pitches out of the zone to take, we could see him become a .280-.285 hitter with a .340-.350 or better OBP. While changing his swing path a bit can help him drive the ball more, simply swinging smarter should be enough to help take him to a much more playable offensive level and help him to become not just passable in the leadoff spot but quite good.