Seattle Times: Baker: Scoring runners

There’s clutchy clutchness and then there’s Geoff Baker…I mean Adrian Beltre.

The overall numbers show a rapid decline in Beltre’s hitting—for average and power—as the season progressed. His on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS) dropped from .928 in April, to .624 in May, down to .379 in June. So, his hitting has declined overall. But there is still a big discrepancy between his .721 OPS overall and his .578 number with RISP. As a batting average, it’s .222 versus .143.

That’s a big discrepancy. Part of it, as I mentioned, can be attributed to luck. But those of us who keep watching Beltre’s at-bats on a regular basis have noticed he tends to look much tighter with RISP. He seems to swing at more balls out of the zone. Even when he makes contact, the pitches don’t seem as hittable and result in outs more often than not.

I decided to look at Beltre’s strikeout rate (per at-bat) with RISP and found he whiffs 28.6 percent of the time in such situations. With nobody on, he fans 15 percent of the time. Now, admittedly, the sample sizes are small. But I’m not going to dismiss the discussion based merely on that. This team has fallen off a cliff and there is a reason for it. If the sample sizes are big enough to conclude “bad luck” is one factor hurting Beltre, then they are big enough to look at other factors.