What Happens When Delino DeShields Swings More?

As we sat at the table and took questions—first from the crowd, and then from Ben Rogers, who was moderating the Newberg Report Book Release night—Delino DeShields leaned into the microphone and spoke in his usual soft tone: “Center field, left field, second base, first base, I don’t care (…) I just want to play.” He perked up when the conversation turned to base-stealing, (calling it “art”) and confessed to having a particular talent for stealing and relaying signs to the hitters from second base. It was a great “inside baseball” experience for fans.

But later, Rogers put me on the spot: “What is Delino DeShields’ ceiling?”

It’s easy to hop online and write “Kyle Lohse? More like yle Lose (because he has no K get it?)”. I can now tell you that it is a different situation altogether when you’re sitting one foot to the left of the player. I laughed and looked over to see DeShields smiling and raising his eyebrows as if to say “Yeah, Twitter guy – what’s my ceiling?” I demurred. I am neither evaluator nor scout, and I had no desire to pretend otherwise in front of a room of baseball fans.

But the question did make me think. The Rangers appear prepared to enter 2018 with DeShields as the everyday starting center fielder. I still won’t claim to know his ceiling, but I think I have stumbled upon a way that he can improve, and it’s exactly the opposite of how I would suggest that a few of his teammates improve:

Swing more. 

DeShields has already proven he can get on base: his .347 last season was third-best on the team behind Adrian Beltre and Shin-Soo Choo. But there appears to be room for improvement if DeShields can do two things: keep improving his center field defense, and put the ball in play more.

His defense has improved every year, and there’s reason to believe that will continue. That’s another article for another time. For today, here is a much more interesting set of numbers…

Delino DeShields struck out 109 times in 2017. He was one of eight Rangers to strike out 100+ times (an MLB record), but it wasn’t because he was chasing pitches. Quite the opposite, in fact: Delino DeShields swung at just 56.8% of pitches he saw in the strike zone¹.

By contrast, Rougned Odor swung at 73.6%, Joey Gallo swung at 74.3%, Adrian Beltre swung at 64%, and hey, just for kicks, Joey Votto swung at 71.4%.

But perhaps those are unfair comparisons. There were some very good hitters (Matt Carpenter – 54.7, Mookie Betts – 53.8%, Joe Mauer – 53.4%) who compared more closely to DeShields in this category in 2017. The strategy for DeShields is obvious: when you have the foot speed of a hungry bobcat, a walk is a powerful weapon.

The only problem: DeShields only walked 44 times in 2017. That’s five fewer than Mike Napoli in just 45 fewer plate appearances. The conclusion: pitchers felt comfortable throwing the ball over the plate, because DeShields let a lot of strikes go by.

It’s not because he can’t hit: when DeShields did swing, the results were fantastic. He had a .358 Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) in 2017. By comparison, here are the numbers on the other guys I mentioned above:

Rougned Odor: .224
Joey Gallo: .250
Adrian Beltre: .321
Joey Votto: .321
Matt Carpenter: .274
Joe Mauer: .349
Mookie Betts: .268

In fact, among qualifiers, here is a comprehensive list of hitters with a higher BAPIP than Delino DeShields in 2017: Chris Taylor, Domingo Santana, Tim Beckham, Tommy Pham, Jose Altuve, Charlie Blackmon, and Avisail Garcia (who hit an absurd .391 on balls in play).

Of course, there’s the argument that DeShields’ BABIP was so high because he waited on not-just-a-strike, but his pitch. And you don’t want to turn Delino DeShields into yet another free-swingin’ Ranger. But there appears to be reason to believe that if his pitch recognition improves just enough that he begins swinging at even 60-65% of pitches in the zone, not only will his speed translate to beating out more base hits, but pitchers will begin to respect the danger of DeShields’ home-to-first speed as much as they do his first-to-second, which could lead to more walks.

Fewer strikeouts, more walks, and more hits? At just 24, with that speed?

I’d have been a fool to pretend to know what that ceiling looks like.

¹ For this article, I am using the Baseball Info Solutions version of the statistic. There’s another version, provided by Pitch Info, that varies slightly from the version I used, but they’re close enough that you can kinda just pick one and the conclusions remain the same. All of this information is up on DeShields’ FanGraphs page.