Luis Matos was sent down to AAA yesterday, after his scorching hot Player Of The Week start turned into a freezing cold Opposite Of Player Of The Week for multiple weeks. At the end of the day on May 18, Matos was hitting .385/.385/.731, for an OPS of 1.115; since then, he’s hit .164/.203/.164. Currently, that line is sitting at .224/.247/.329, which is an OPS of .577, around half of what it was at that high watermark.
Matos, then, has been awful for several weeks. And yet, when he was sent down in favor of Austin Slater, whose season so far could be best described as Why Is He On The Roster Instead Of Luis Matos, it seemed a bit iffy. Like, sure, .577 is a bad OPS, but you know what’s worse? .441 is worse, and that’s what Slater has done in his 53 plate appearances this year.
Which is all to say, I think it’s fine that Matos was sent down.
Now, this might seem inconsistent with Tuesday’s argument that the Giants should have tried harder to make Heliot Ramos happen last year. And it is! I contain multitudes.
But there’s a key difference in the two situations. Last year, Ramos wasn’t making enough contact, but the contact he was making was really good. He was hitting the ball hard when he hit it, but he was swinging through too much. While he will never be a low-strikeout player, cutting down on strikeouts as much as possible — he’s marginally decreased them this year, thanks to a 20% reduction in swings on pitches out of the strike zone — will help him blossom. Like we saw yesterday!
Matos, on the other hand, is making too much contact. He has a preternatural ability to make contact on any pitch that’s similar to Pablo Sandoval’s, but he doesn’t drive the pitches. When Sandoval swung at a nasty curveball at his ankles, he had a good shot of lining it up the middle, leading to two fun results: (1) A base hit for the San Francisco Giants, my preferred sports team, and (2) A shot of the pitcher looking absolutely befuddled, as he saw a pitch fail him when it had historically always worked.
But when Matos swing at that pitch, even though he doesn’t swing through it, he doesn’t hit it hard. The pitch turns into a soft groundout to shortstop, and then he walks back to the dugout and tries it again a couple innings later. It’s frustrating, when you’ve seen someone at his best, to see him consistently get beaten on a pitch like that.
And that’s why I think it’s fine for Matos to get some more time in Sacramento. Because I think that kind of plate discipline is something you can work on there. Ramos was consistently beating the pitchers in the PCL, and so he was either a AAAA player or he needed to be challenged and learn in the majors, but he didn’t have a lot left to learn down on the farm. By comparison, Matos wasn’t even good this year in AAA. He just happened to get called up and catch fire, which made us forget that he was hitting an abysmal .218/.308/.355 in the minors.
Learning to lay off pitches out of the zone is something that you can do in the minors. Figuring out the strike zone a little better — Matos will always swing a lot and be a high contact player, which is fine, but he could use more plate discipline — can be done in the minors. Working on defense — Baseball Reference has him as replacement level on defense, and Statcast has him at -3 Outs Above Average, especially impressive considering he made multiple spectacular catches during his great week this year — can be done in the minors.
Sending Matos down is not giving up on him, or insulting him. Sometimes it just has to happen. You think a guy is ready, he plays some, and it turns out he wasn’t ready. Last year, Matos rushed through the upper minors on his way to his major league debut, never failing enough to have to learn from that failure. This year has been mostly failure, and it’s time for him to take some lessons away from that.
Baseball is hard, and you fail more often than you succeed. For Matos to succeed, he needs to change his approach at the plate, even if it’s a marginal change. Doing that is going to be a lot easier in a slightly lower stakes environment than in the majors, with the massive pressure to succeed in every at bat. I think it makes the team better both in the short term and in the long term, and it’s the right move to send him down.
But, uh, if Austin Slater could get a few hits in the meantime to make this take look better, I would appreciate it.
Completely agree with all of this. Sort of reminiscent of the '2023 Casey Schmitt Experience' and we've seen that the book hasn't been closed on that one either, in spite of Casey's efforts to prove he can't play shortstop at the major league level ...
This is tough medicine to swallow. But your reasoning is sound.
Goddamn it!