- .218 BA- Last among 12 qualified/26th out of 29 w/ at least 100 plate appearances
- .275 OBP- Last qualified/27th out of 29
- .370 SLG- Last/25th
- .286 wOBA- Last/26th
- 75 wRC+- Last/26th
- 0.5 fWAR- Last/24th
- 5.6% BB rate- 11th/22nd
The only thing keeping his offensive ship afloat is the 7 HR he's popped (tied for 2nd best among all catchers) and the 22 RBI that puts him comfortably in the top 10. The only thing he's truly done well this season has been catch. McCann is generating almost all his value from what he's doing behind the plate. What he's doing at the plate only seems to be getting worse.
He's got this weird toe tap he's doing before his swing now, he's got a ton of extra hand motion in his pre-swing load, his follow through is inconsistent, and he's taking a lot of bad-looking swings at both good and bad pitches to hit. Watching him on Monday against the Cards, I cringed at how ugly some of his swings were. Not only is he complicating his mechanics to try to help his timing, he's also either not picking up the ball well or he's up there guessing. None of that factors into a slump-busting formula.
At this point, I don't know whether to chalk it up to over-aggressiveness, a failure to fully adjust to the shift, or plain old bad luck. McCann's .216 BABIP is criminally low, but I could see that being because of his own doing equally as much as bad luck if he's swinging at too many bad pitches and hitting into the shift a lot. What I do know is that it's plenty long enough in the season to start calling this an issue. The Yankees don't know what they're going to get from Beltran and Teix going forward and for how long, Gardner and Ellsbury aren't the types of hitters who can carry a team, and Soriano and Jeter look fried. They need McCann to start figuring it out and start hitting like they expected him to and they need it to happen now.
He's got this weird toe tap he's doing before his swing now, he's got a ton of extra hand motion in his pre-swing load, his follow through is inconsistent, and he's taking a lot of bad-looking swings at both good and bad pitches to hit. Watching him on Monday against the Cards, I cringed at how ugly some of his swings were. Not only is he complicating his mechanics to try to help his timing, he's also either not picking up the ball well or he's up there guessing. None of that factors into a slump-busting formula.
At this point, I don't know whether to chalk it up to over-aggressiveness, a failure to fully adjust to the shift, or plain old bad luck. McCann's .216 BABIP is criminally low, but I could see that being because of his own doing equally as much as bad luck if he's swinging at too many bad pitches and hitting into the shift a lot. What I do know is that it's plenty long enough in the season to start calling this an issue. The Yankees don't know what they're going to get from Beltran and Teix going forward and for how long, Gardner and Ellsbury aren't the types of hitters who can carry a team, and Soriano and Jeter look fried. They need McCann to start figuring it out and start hitting like they expected him to and they need it to happen now.
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1 comment:
Several years ago McCann led all of MLB in stolen bases allowed. He also couldn't beat the shift in the NL and tried bunting. In other words, he's had five years to beat the shift and hasn't done it yet.
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