Inside Yainer Diaz’s Lab: What Surprising Secrets Are Coming to Light?
League norms are great and necessary nine times out of ten. You don’t need them here. Just look at what happened last year as compared to this year. He has lost more than two MPH on his average contact. The barrel rate is the most alarming. Think of that as how often you hit the sweet spot in golf. Hitting it there doesn’t guarantee success, but you can imagine success being a lot more likely if you do hit it there.
That brings us to the hard hit percentage. A 42.2 percent rate is actually pretty good in comparison with the rest of the league. A 28.7 is clearly not. He is making softer contact. The ball is not coming out hit as hard off his bat as it was before. He is getting jammed or hitting it off the end of the bat more often. All of these add up to the lower statcast numbers that we saw above.
I’m not a hitting coach and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but the advice to Diaz is pretty damn simple: stop swinging. We will look at those numbers below, but it should be noted that all of them lead the Astros by a wide margin. He’d shock the world if he stopped swinging at balls and might have the highest walk rate in the league. Let’s see the numbers.
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