After attending all three Yankee games to open their 2023 season against the San Francisco Giants, I came away with a few takeaways. Anthony Volpe was a menace on the bases, Aaron Judge and the rest of the boom-or-bust power hitters looked good (except for Josh Donaldson), and that DJ LeMahieu didn’t look good. I’ve read plenty of articles about how DJ’s foot injury is no longer a problem for him, as it was last season when it kept him out of the playoffs, and how his exit velocity has been off the charts when he puts the ball in play. All of that is fantastic (hitting the ball hard makes good things happen, after all), but the reason why I'm a little worried about DJ’s full-time return to the lineup was his uncharacteristically off-putting plate discipline.
Little do people talk about it enough, but DJ LeMahieu has some awesome peripherals when it comes to plate appearance process. Last year, he ranked among the top hitters in baseball in contact rate (7th at 87.4%), swinging strike rate (5th at 5.0%), and strikeout rate (14th at 13.1%). In other words, while his triple slash line stats suffered in 2022 due to injury, the way he approached his plate appearances were not only objectively good but were on par with the rest of his career, given that he’s in his 30s. That’s the DJ LeMahieu that rightfully bats lead-off for the Yankees, an exemplary contact hitter than doesn’t swing at stupid pitches, gets on base through a solid approach, and drives in runners in scoring position because that’s what good contact hitters do.
So far this year, however, he’s a different breed, a mixed breed, if you will. His average exit velocity is a full 3mph higher than his career average (93.7mph this year, compared to his career average EV of 90.7mph), while his hard-hit rate, the rate at which balls in play are batted at 95mph or higher, is 25% higher than his career average (69.2% in 2023 through six games, compared to his lifetime hard-hit rate of 44%). It’s wild to see DJ produce so many hard-hit balls, but those great crushing numbers look a lot worse when you compare them to his bread-and-butter plate discipline statistics: a 72.2% contact rate, a 12.3% swinging strike rate, and a whopping 31.8% strikeout rate. Those numbers look like Kyle Schwarber’s plate discipline statistics from a year ago. Schwarber won the NL home run title in 2022 but is notorious for striking out too much.
This is an intriguing stretch of baseball for DJ, as he gets used to being fully healthy for the first time in almost two years. He’s certainly making contact like he’s healthy, but so far, it seems like he’s sacrificing good plate appearances because of how hungry he is to rake on pitchers with this boosted swing. How am I coming to this conclusion? Well, the rate at which he makes contact with pitches that he swings at outside the zone has been virtually halved in 2023 as compared to his career rate (76.0% lifetime versus 38.5% in 2023). A lot of those pitches have come on the shadow of the plate, meaning that depending on the umpire they could be strikes or balls, but going off just the numbers, it doesn’t seem worth it to try to swing at those pitches in the first place.
I wouldn’t bring up this topic if we were talking about Aaron Judge because he’s not the same hitter as DJ LeMahieu. DJ is such a unique hitter in an age of power and strikeouts that to see him regress to the league-wide mean of plate discipline is throwing off my perception of his season (I know it's six games, but still). I’m sure he’s angry about these stats (I mean, just look at the guy), but I’m also sure that he will revert to his old self in some capacity as the season moves on. The only question is: by how much? If this is a new power-hitting hybrid version of LeMahieu, will the Yankees keep him in the lead-off spot if his on-base percentage starts to fall? Will he get his plate discipline stats back to normal but keep his hard-hit rate as it stands six games into the season? What will his growth mean for his rest schedule, as managed by Yankees manager Aaron Boone? What I’m trying to say is that this is a new DJ LeMahieu in both positive and negative ways, but we’re not even five percent into the season. Let’s see to what degree he changes his hitting approach before we say the two-time batting champ is back in business or doomed for another subpar, not-worth-fifteen-million-dollars-a-year season.
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