Inside Nick Swisher’s season-long slump

(Note: All numbers in this post are through games of Tuesday, May 24, and do not include yesterday afternoon’s contest against the Blue Jays, in which he went 0-3 with a walk).

I last took a look at a little over a month ago, and came to the following conclusion:

“Pitchers aren’t really attacking him any differently than they were last year, and ultimately it looks like Swish could probably stand to be a bit more patient/selective moving forward. While he’s walking at a better rate than last season (10.2% to 9.1%), he’s seeing far fewer pitches per at-bat than he usually does (3.63 — 152nd among qualified hitters — compared to 4.21 for his career) and his BABIP is way down from last year’s career-high .335, at .283. Curiously, that’s almost exactly in line with his career mark of .286, which again suggests that Swish is perhaps having some difficulty discerning which pitches he should be swinging at to really drive the ball.”

Matt Imbrogno also delved into Swish a few weeks ago, and concluded that Nick was experiencing some pretty bad luck. However, we’re nearly a third of the way the through the season and Nick has yet to figure things out — his triple slash of .208/.322/.295 through the team’s first 47 games this season is actually worse than his .206/.337/.325 through his first 47 games with the 2008 Chicago White Sox. So what’s going on with Swish?

Last time we looked at a table of his L/R splits, so here’s an updated version:

I’ve made a point of highlighting his BABIP, LD% and FB% in a few of the selected splits. In 2010, the MLB average LD% was 18.3%, while the average FB% was 38.1%. Swish has exceeded those numbers as a lefty going to left field, as a lefty going to center field, as a righty going to center field (well, not in FB%), and as a righty going to right field. However, his BABIPs in these profiles are almost comically low, with the exception of as a righty to center.

While a higher FB% is a BABIP suppressant, Swish is still hitting nearly 30% Line Drives as a lefty going to center (41.2% FB%) and as a righty going to right (60% FB%) and only has a .118 and .200 BABIP, respectively, to show for it. Conversely, he’s hit 33.3% Line Drives as a righty to center (33.3% FB%) and has a .667 BABIP in that split. While admittedly we’re dealing with small samples here (and high FB%s), and though league average BABIP on line drives is .715, and Swish’s overall BABIP on line drives is .696 (with an sOPS+ of 86) — slightly off league average but not dramatically so — it still appears he’s been somewhat snakebitten on batted balls.

The other slightly baffling thing is, taken as a whole, Swish’s LD% on the season is 23.5%,which would be a career high, though his FB% is 41.7%, which would be a career low. Yet his overall BABIP is only .257, which would be the second-lowest mark of his career (after 2008′s .249). He’s also walking at a higher rate than his career BB% and striking out at almost the exact same rate as he has for his career, so it’s not like we can write the low BABIP off due to significantly fewer instances of putting the ball in play. While Swish’s at-bats at times haven’t looked all that pretty this season, the luck monster seems to have played a fairly large role in devouring his productivity (Edited to Add: I wasn’t aware of his piece prior to publishing mine, but I want to note that Jason Catania at Rotographs also took a look at Swisher’s confusing LD% and BABIP the other day.)

Of course, it’s not all about luck. Here’s a line graph of Swish’s plate discipline over the years:

A couple of things here — thus far Swish is swinging at almost the exact same percentage of pitches out of the zone, in the zone and overall, as he did last year. However, he’s making more bad contact (63.1% Out-of-Zone) than he did last year (61.4%) and way more than he has in his career (53.1%) and also making less contact In the Zone (84.5%) than last season (88.1%), which would seem to indicate that his timing/swing is slightly messed up.

Pitchers are taking advantage of Swish’s Out-of-Zone tendencies, throwing him less In-the-Zone pitches than ever before (40.7% Zone%, compared to 44% last season and 47.2% on his career), and he’s helping them out by swinging-and-missing at his highest rate (9.5%) since 2006.

This data led me to wonder whether Swish was being pitched to differently:

Except he really hasn’t been, with the exception of a slight uptick in sliders, which he actually has a positive run value on. Despite seeing the exact same percentage of fastballs as he did last season, Swish has been disastrous against the fastball, with -2.5 runs above average compared with 21.9 last season. I don’t have the wherewithal to calculate this for every player in baseball, but that’s likely one of the more dramatic decreases in wFB of anyone in MLB. Even in his lousy 2008 he still managed to be positive against the fastball (though he was pretty wretched against every other pitch type).

I also wanted to see whether he was getting himself out. The below table takes a look at some of Swish’s key batting splits and compares them to his OPS in all situations (tOPS+; where better than 100 means the batter did better in a given split than usual and vice versa) and compared to the league OPS for that split (sOPS+, where better than 100 means the batter did better than the league and vice versa).

The red areas are trouble spots. While Nick has performed quite well when he gets to a three-ball count, he’s been less-than-useless after falling behind. Clearly the pitcher is favored as the pitcher gets further and further ahead, but even so, Swish has managed to perform 70%-plus worse than the league After 0-2, 1-2 and even 2-2 counts. I’m not crazy about the -100 sOPS+ on 0-2 counts and -19 sOPS+ on 1-2 counts, but that’s at least somewhat understandable. Performing that wretchedly even after you’ve been in those counts but managed to work into something presumably more favorable is problematic, and that’s firmly on Swisher.

So yes, continues to be pretty unlucky in 2011, but he’s also not exactly helping his cause by swinging at more bad pitches than he should be and seemingly being a non-entity at the plate once he falls behind in the count. If there’s any good news, it’s that, 2008 aside, Swish’s track record is solid enough that we know he’s not this bad. Even though he’s been swinging at some ugly pitches, he’s still walking at a strong clip — his 13.9% BB% is the 11th-best mark in the American League, and he’d probably have one of the top OBPs in the league if he wasn’t hitting .208. He’s also improved his pitches-per-plate-appearance mark, bringing it up to a much more Swisherian 4.11 (15th-best in the AL, and 3rd-best on the Yankees after and ) from 3.63 when I checked in on him April 19.

Though it’s been a forgettable first two months of the season for Swish, the underlying numbers give me confidence that once the hits start dropping in he’ll get back to producing at closer to the levels Yankee fans had gotten used to during the last two seasons.