Coming into the season, the Giants had a plan. They didn’t have the superstar power found elsewhere in the division — Trevor Story! Ketel Marte! Wow! — but they had enough effective hitters that they could mix and match and get good results. Alex Dickerson could play left field against righties and Austin Slater could play against lefties, and together they’d Voltron their way into solid production.
This, uh, has not worked.
Last night, with runners on first and second in the seventh inning of a 1-run game, Gabe Kapler let Dickerson hit against a left-hander (he flew out). Then, with runners on second and third with one out against a righty in the eighth inning, instead of going with Slater or Mauricio Dubon, Kapler went to Curt Casali, the backup catcher who was hitting .169 coming into the at-bat (he struck out). This is because both Slater and Dubon have been very bad.
Please, pick your jaw up off the ground. It’s not sanitary there and you need a clean jaw to eat food.
In the month of June, Dubon has hit .205/.244/.333, but since we’re not going to talk about him more today, you can say farewell to Mauricio Dubon for the time being. Slater, to be outdone, has hit an astonishing .111/.158/.111. Sometimes, players are clearly hitting into rotten luck and can’t catch a break; if you haven’t been watching all the games, I assure you that is not the case with these two. They have both looked exactly as bad as their lines would indicate, and right now, I wouldn’t trust either of them in a big situation either. This is not to say I trust Casali either, but, well, the options were limited.
But why were the options limited? What’s going wrong here? Slater was at least doing a nice job as of the end of May. Combining his April and May, he was hitting .228/.321/.431 in 140 plate appearances. His batting average was obviously still very low, and his strikeouts were too high, but he was still a productive player. Then he fell into a smoking crater, only emerging to hit a ton of ground balls that infielders easily converted into outs.
So far this year, Slater is hitting the ball into the ground, and he’s doing it more softly than over the last couple years, and his launch angle is lower than last year, and he’s hitting fewer line drives, and he’s hitting more balls weakly, and he’s barreling balls less, and he’s not going the opposite way as often, and he’s walking less and striking out more. Now, besides all that…
It’s tough to point to any one thing here, because what’s happening is everything is going wrong. His swing numbers do provide this clue, though: pitchers are throwing Austin Slater strikes, and he is swinging through them. He’s seeing more strikes than in any year since 2017 (54.5% according to Pitch Info, compared with 50.6% the previous year), he’s swinging slightly-but-not-statistically-relevantly less at them (61.2%, compared with 61.9%), and he’s making less contact (78.6%, compared with 83.7%). He’s also swinging more at pitches outside of the zone, which he’s missing more than he ever has.
In short, Austin Slater is not hitting the ball the way he usually does. For example, he’s getting eaten alive on sliders, batting just .154 against them with a .269 slugging percentage. In 2020, he hit .400 against sliders with a .700 SLG. The year before: .265 and .471; the year before that, .286 and .343. The point is not that Slater is some legendary world-beater against sliders; it’s that he’s generally perfectly fine against them and this year he’s suddenly much worse. It’s not just sliders, either. The trend holds against curveballs and changeups, all of which he has been adequate or good at hitting in the past, and all of which he’s been utterly hopeless on in the present.
Slater was one of the better hitters on a very strong offensive team while he was healthy last year, so this is all a bit of a shock. Even looking at fastballs, against which he’s a good hitter on the year, his numbers have declined from 2020: he’s swinging through 26% of them instead of 20%, and hit exit velocity is 2 MPH slower.
To me, this all points to a mechanical problem. Maybe Slater’s trying to fix something or maybe the team wants him to adjust some aspect of his game, but he is clearly out of whack right now. It does look like he’s gotten more pull-happy than usual, which often leads to weak grounders to the left side, but on the whole, Austin Slater is just bad right now. He should probably stop being bad, in my opinion. I don’t know why he hasn’t thought of this yet.