Dave Cameron looks at the continued improvement of Josh Donaldson. His reaching this level is impressive given the start of his professional career. He seems to be taking the path of two other hitters who get better with age:
Most hitters have to make a choice between hitting the ball hard and avoiding strikeouts. If you watch Giancarlo Stanton crush a baseball, it’s easy to see that he’s making a choice to swing as hard as possible, accepting that he’s going to miss a lot in order to get maximum value when he does make contact. Donaldson, though, is hitting the ball ever harder without sacrificing any of his contact skills; his current 77.1% Contact rate would be the second-best mark of his career, despite the fact that league average contact rates have continued to fall as pitchers throw ever harder.
Like with Daniel Murphy and Matt Carpenter, the continued improvement seems to correspond with an acceptance of the value of elevating the ball. Donaldson came into the league as a guy who hit the ball to all fields and hit roughly an average number of groundballs, but he’s been moving towards a pull approach ever since, and this year, he’s appeared to make a conscious decision to get under the ball more often.
In the book Curve Ball the authors discuss aging curves, and how home runs age differently than other hits. There is a physical part of the curve that dominates in the other hits, so players start getting fewer singles, doubles, and triples once they are past their prime in their late 20s. Home runs, however, have an experience factor to them, and early in a player’s declining years that experience keeps a player’s home run rate stable. Maybe these three players have discovered a similar thing with other aspects of offense.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/29skdMe
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