There is a school of thought that Joey Bart’s offensive season isn’t as disastrous as it seems. Yes, he’s hitting just .153/.294/.306, but catchers on the whole are awful. Of catchers with at least 80 place appearances — Bart has 102 — he’s 20th out of 37 in wRC+. That’s basically average! He’s pretty much been an average hitting catcher this year, so yes, it’s frustrating to watch him, but this is how most fans feel about most catchers.
That’s dumb. That’s a dumb argument and if anyone makes it to you, spit in their face.
Joey Bart had a good first week of the season. In the six games from April 8 to April 15, he went 6-for-18 with four walks, a double, and two homers. That’s an 1.177 OPS, and sure, he still had 10 strikeouts in those 22 plate appearances, but as long as he could hit the ball hard when it was in the strike zone, well, the Giants were more than happy to live with that.
Friends, Joey Bart is not currently hitting the ball hard when it is in the strike zone.
Since April 16, Joey Bart is hitting .105/.250/.194 with 10 walks, two home runs, and 36 strikeouts in 80 plate appearances, and while that seems really bad, let’s remember that one of those home runs came off of Albert Pujols, so against major league quality pitchers it’s actually worse. So while it’s true that his overall numbers look, uh, passable-ish when you adjust for position, we have a month and a half of him being consistently bad as a counter-example.
We’ll get into the similarities in a minute, but for now let’s look at what’s different. During his Good Week, Bart homered on two off-speed pitches: a slider against the Marlins and a curveball against the Guardians. Since then, he’s been awful against both kinds of breaking balls. During his Good Week, Bart did a nice job hitting fastballs. Since then, he’s been average against them. He had a nice game hitting cutters, and since then…well, long story short, since then Joey Bart hasn’t been above average against any pitch.
The most likely conclusion is that during the first week of the season, Joey Bart saw a couple of hanging breaking balls that he didn’t miss. Since then, he’s missed the ones he’s seen. The league also noticed that he struggled against changeup and has thrown him more changeups, which he’s continued to struggle against. It’s been pretty consistent.
Also consistent: Bart’s plate discipline. He’s swinging at a few more pitches out of the zone than he did over the Good Week, but not enough to make a huge difference, especially considering that he’s hitting them more often now too. He’s also swinging more at pitches in the zone, and making the same amount of contact; he’s making more contact now in general and swinging through fewer pitches than he did when he was on his hot streak.
That’s all good news, right? What we want to hear? Nope! Absolutely not. Because he’s still bad at every one of those things, and in most cases incredibly bad.
Over the first week of the year, Bart got good results despite having the same flaws in his game that he has now. In this section, I’m going to compare him to qualified hitters, as in hitters who have about 3 plate appearances per game their team has played. There are 164 qualified hitters, and I’m going to tell you where Joey Bart would rank on those lists if he had enough plate appearances to qualify. For the purposes of this exercise, being 1st is bad and being 164th is as good as it gets.
O-Swing% (percentage of pitches outside the strike zone that he swings at): 70th
Z-Swing% (percentage of pitches inside the strike zone that he swings at): 34th
Swing% (percentage of total pitches that he swings at): 87th
I know what you’re thinking. “Hey Doug, this all seems not THAT bad. And couldn’t a perfectly reasonable hitter not swing at that many pitches in the zone? This is overblown.” And you’re right! None of these things are bad by themselves. Fortunately (I may not know what “fortunately” means), I have more things, all of which are bad by themselves.
O-Contact% (percentage of pitches outside the strike zone that he makes contact with): 7th
Z-Contact% (percentage of pitches outside the strike zone that he makes contact with): 2nd
Contact% (percentage of all pitches that he makes contact with): 2nd
SwStr% (swinging strike percentage): 7th
CStr% (called strike percentage): 56th
CSW% (Called and swinging strike percentage): 1st!!!!
Joey Bart’s swing decisions aren’t great, but they aren’t disastrous. The problem isn’t that he’s uniquely awful at chasing bad pitches or not swinging at good ones. The problem is that no matter where those pitches are, he can’t hit them. Every pitch that the pitcher throws has a 35% chance of ending up in the catcher’s mitt as either a swinging or called strike.
It’s not impossible to have success when you’re around those numbers — Pavin Smith and Brandon Marsh are both having passable offensive seasons while they’re just a bit better than Bart there — but it’s very, very difficult. Then you take into account that Bart isn’t doing damage on anything over the middle, and it’s easy to see the problem. It’s also easy to see the problem if you just watch a Joey Bart at-bat. That really should have been its own paragraph for effect, but it just seemed mean to make that point stand out more than it already does.
Right now, Joey Bart is not a major league hitter. The reason isn’t that he’s extraordinarily bad at swing decisions or identifying pitches. The reason is that he can’t hit strikes. He gets into pitcher’s counts because he sees so many strikes, then is perfectly good at taking balls outside the zone that the pitcher wants him to chase, but when the pitcher comes in and challenges, the pitcher wins the challenge every time.
That is a dead spot in the lineup. That is a problem that desperately needs to be solved. Right now, Joey Bart isn’t good at anything at the plate. It’s because he’s worse at making contact than everyone else in the majors.
Sure, I made you read an extra thousand words just to get to those last two sentences, but hey, now it feels like I earned that conclusion, right? Joey Bart can’t hit. That’s a problem. The Giants need to find a way to solve it.
I don't really "like" it that Joey can't hit ML pitching - but I like it that beat writers are finally being honest about it.