So, are you surprised at the scope of what Ryan Mountcastle is not doing for the Orioles right now? Don’t be, the numbers never lie.
Back in 1983 when I started out in radio, I had the good fortune of getting to meet the very first “analytics” guy the Orioles ever had in Eddie Epstein. This was in the late 1980s. He was a one-man show. Now clubs employ analytics teams into the teens, if not more … and spend hundreds of thousand dollars on assembling such a team.
Eddie taught me something I have never forgotten in the 35-plus years since I first began to learn some important truths about baseball. One thing that always stuck with me was the importance of a hitter’s strikeout-to-walk rate. Eddie always said it wasn’t so much the strikeout number as much as it was that number compared to the number of walks. For instance, if a guy struck out 150 times but walked 80 times, that meant he had a good enough handle of the strike zone to overcome the high strikeout number.
Don’t believe the analytics guy? Let me tell you an anecdote that always worried me regarding the now-25-year-old Mountcastle. When Buck Showalter was in orange and black, he knew everything about everybody in the Orioles organization. In the spring of 2018, Showalter was telling the assembled media about a chance meeting with Mountcastle. Just one of those quick, “Hey Skip, how are you doing?” kind of meetings.
Showalter decided it was a good time to plant a seed in Mountcastle’s mind after the youngster had a big 2017 season between High-A Frederick and Double-A Bowie. “I noticed last year that you only walked 17 times,” Showalter told Mountcastle, who chuckled.
“Understand it’s not funny,” Showalter told him.
If you know Mountcastle, even a little bit, he wasn’t chuckling because he didn’t care. He was chuckling because nobody had ever confronted him about that and he was having pretty good success even without any plate discipline.
In 2017, Mountcastle batted .314/.343/.542 in 88 games with the Keys and then .222/.239/.366 with the Baysox in 39 games. He struck out 96 times and walked 17 times between the two stops. Then he spent the entire 2018 season at Bowie, where he hit .297/.341/.465 with 79 strikeouts and 26 walks.
And in 2019, Mountcastle was the International League MVP at Triple-A Norfolk. He batted .312/.344/.527 with 61 extra-base hits, but still those strikeout-to-walk numbers were more than a little alarming: 130 strikeouts to just 24 walks.
Still, that MVP season in Triple-A marked him as a very valuable asset early in Mike Elias’ tenure in Baltimore.
Mountcastle came up about halfway through that COVID-shortened 2020 season. He hit .333/.386/.492 with five homers. He struck out 30 times and walked 11 times in 140 plate appearances. No problem.
The full season in 2021 showed both the prodigious upside Mountcastle had and those alarming strikeout-to-walk numbers, whereas in 2020 maybe pitchers just didn’t see him enough to get the book on him and pass it along. But as much as his 33 homers and 89 RBIs were impressive, the .255 batting average and .309 on-base percentage were down substantially. He struck out 161 times and walked just 41 times. Not surprising.
That brings us to what is being lightly danced around as a slump. It manifested itself on Aug. 28, when Justin Verlander took him to school with a runner on third and one out in the first inning. He basically toyed with Mountcastle, taking him up the ladder with full knowledge that he, not the batter, was in control. Strike three was a swing and miss at a fastball over Mountcastle’s head. Twitter immediately did a full-fledged turn on Brandon Hyde and the player.
I found myself tweeting out that I didn’t think that batting Mountcastle cleanup while in the midst of a funk made a lot of sense. How bad has it gotten?
After play on July 3, Mountcastle was batting .283/.321/.506 with 14 home runs and 18 doubles. His BABIP was .339. But there was that nasty little secret of 74 strikeouts to just 15 walks.
No reason for alarm, right? Wrong, that strikeout-to-walk problem was about to expose a young player who was caught totally off guard that the opposing pitchers had the book on him.
From July 4 to Aug. 28, a total of 44 games, the 6-foot-4, 230-pound first baseman has batted .182/.245/.288 while striking out 48 times and walking just 14 times. In case you want to keep score, for the season Mountcastle has 122 strikeouts and 29 walks.
Eddie Epstein taught me a fact of baseball hitting life 35 years ago. I am hoping someone sits down Mountcastle and explains that he is not just hurting his team, he happens to be on a path of sabotaging a potentially very lucrative career.
The good news is this is an extraordinary athlete. If he applies himself like he did in working to become a way-better-than-average first baseman, he can accomplish this plate discipline issue. But the clock is ticking.
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox