Well, it’s happened. The biggest prospect the Cubs have had since Mark Prior (or Corey Patterson, if we’re talking positional prospects). Kris Bryant came up to ridiculously awesome fanfare.
It didn’t last. After his third consecutive strikeout in his first game, you could already hear some of the Cubs fan yelling “you suck!” No wonder Theo likes to start out prospects on the road. It’s very likely that the 15 pitches he saw off James Shields were in the Top 25 pitches Bryant has ever seen as a professional baseball player, and they were not promising. It got to the point where in his first game, the Padres walked Anthony Rizzo to load the bases to get to Bryant. Welcome to the big leagues, Kris.
Of course, the struggles wouldn’t last forever. The very next game, Bryant went 2-2 with 3 walks. The walks were all well-earned, but neither ball was particularly well hit. Here was his first:
(I had to use Youtube because for some reason, I can’t figure out how embed MLB clips).
It’s the definition of a cheap hit, not much more than a shallow outfield fly on a broken bat that just finds some green, but it plays, and Bryant even takes 2nd on a silly throw to third.
Want to see something interesting? Here’s the zone chart for Bryant this season:
The book on Kris is to work him up and in or down and away (which, to be fair, is the book on nearly every player in baseball). It’s rare to see it played out so extreme, though: there are 33% more pitches in the up-and-in corner than there are in the ENTIRE STRIKE ZONE. Big league pitchers are both afraid of Bryant and aware that they can get him to chase. We should be mindful of the extremely low sample size here (Bryant has seen 5 pitchers in his MLB career), but we should also realize that when the data is this overwhelming, it means something.
When I say that pitchers are aware that Bryant has swing-and-miss in his game, I mean it. More from BrooksBaseball:
In 2015:
Against All Fastballs (50 seen), he has had an exceptionally poor eye (0.54 d’; 57% swing rate at pitches in the zone vs. 36% swing rate at pitches out of the zone) and a steady approach at the plate (0.09 c) with an exceptionally high likelihood to swing and miss (29% whiff/swing).Against Breaking Pitches (23 seen), he has had a poor eye (0.56 d’; 67% swing rate at pitches in the zone vs. 45% swing rate at pitches out of the zone) and a very aggressive approach at the plate (-0.15 c) with a disastrously high likelihood to swing and miss (55% whiff/swing).
Against Offspeed Pitches (15 seen), he has had an exceptionally poor eye (-0.84 d’; 0% swing rate at pitches in the zone vs. 80% swing rate at pitches out of the zone) and an aggressive approach at the plate (-0.42 c) with a disastrously high likelihood to swing and miss (58% whiff/swing).
It doesn’t get much worse than this for a start. We’ve known that Bryant’s only real Kryptonite is his helium-grade strikeout rates. The list of people who strike out more than 27% of the time in the PCL who go on to be average major leaguers is precisely zero (going back 10 years). Bryant will have to break out of that mold if he wants to be successful.
Fortunately, he has already shown that his power is not like the other animals. Usually players that strike out that much don’t walk all that often; they just don’t have any plate discipline. Kris Bryant walked 14.5% of the time last year in AAA – his strikeouts can at least partially be attributed to a patient approach at the plate. The data at the major league level has borne that out thus far – Bryant strikes out and walks in roughly equal measure, and the two outcomes account for around 50% of his plate appearances. Clearly, this is an untenable situation, but for the time being I’ll gladly accept a 20+ BB%. The interesting part is that while he’s had sky-high walk rates this season, it is mainly just a by-product of sequencing. He’s been (as stated above) aggressive in nearly every situation with an inability to make contact in those swings; he’s just had them occur in precisely the right spots where they won’t do actual damage (early in counts – not even Brett Jackson can strike out one 0-0 pitch). This is good, but not a recipe for success going forward.
In the field, Bryant has been less than stellar. He’s surprised me with his agility (both on the basepaths and on defense), but Bryant’s throws routinely take Rizzo over the bag. Rizzo is a picking machine and will make Bryant look better than he is, but eventually some of those throws are going to take Rizzo off the bag or into the baserunner. This isn’t to say that Bryant needs to move to LF right away; it IS to say that Bryant still has some defense to work on. In his defense, he is at least major-league caliber there, even if he’s in the lower third of major league guys at the position.
It’s incredibly early to make any rash declarations on Kris Bryant with 3 games (this is being written during the 4th. Soler is cookin’.), but the early signs are basically what you’d expect. Pitchers are obviously aware that Bryant is an offensive force. He has some things to work on, and his approach is aggressive. He’s impacting the game even without hitting for power, because the threat is there. He’s getting on base, and making the plays he needs to at third. We should be happy to see him.