What can we expect from Tyler Fitzgerald?

Other than speed. Probably should have mentioned how fast he his in the actual newsletter. Oh well!

So far, during Spring Training, Tyler Fitzgerald is batting !!WARNING!! BASEBALL WRITER MAY BE ATTEMPTING TO EXTRAPOLATE FUTURE REGULAR SEASON PERFORMANCE FROM 20 SPRING TRAINING PLATE APPEARANCES PLEASE CHECK ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BOXES TO CONTINUE

☐ I have no idea how to write about baseball

☑ I am only using these Spring Training stats as a rhetorical device to introduce my topic, and not as any kind of player evaluation tool

Whew! Forgot about that security feature. Let’s try again.

So far, during Spring Training, Tyler Fitzgerald is batting .211/.250/.263 in 20 plate appearances, and the computer wants me to remind you that that means nothing. Doesn’t matter. As fun and easy as it is to say, like, “Justin Verlander just had a great 5 inning start so he’s gonna pitch like it’s 2019 again” or “Wilmer Flores is having a great spring, so we know he’s back,” neither of those things is necessarily true and we all know it.

The same is true for Fitzgerald. Sure, he’s started off poorly, but that doesn’t mean anything about his true talent level. He is who he is, and we shouldn’t let 20 plate appearances while he’s still getting into game shape, many of which were against pitchers who were more advanced than him in the early going because pitchers are always ahead of hitters in February, affect that. No, he hasn’t done well so far, but that doesn’t mean his year is going to be a letdown.

That said, Tyler Fitzgerald’s year is probably going to be a letdown.

When the calendar turned to July last year, Tyler Fitzgerald decided that maybe he should try to be the best baseball player who had ever lived. He’d been in the majors for the first month and a half of the season, but then a combination of poor baserunning (including getting picked off as a pinch runner representing the potential tying run in the ninth inning of a game), mediocre hitting, and mediocre defense convinced the Giants that he needed more time in Sacramento. He got called back up a couple weeks after his demotion, played sporadically, got sent back down, got called back up a couple weeks after that, and a few days later, July started.

Starting with the Giants’ game against Toronto on July 9, Fitzgerald became the hottest hitter on the planet. He homered that game, and then, in his next game 11 days later (time off which included the All-Star Break), homered again. He then homered in each of his next three games after that, had an extra base hit in each of his next two games, homered twice against the Rockies on July 26, only got a single in game 1 of a doubleheader on July 27, and finally wrapped up his streak by homering in the second game on July 27. Over those 10 games, Fitzgerald hit .429/.512/.1.229 with 2 doubles, a triple, and 8 homers. It was an absurd run.

After that, though, he came down to Earth. Fitzgerald wasn’t bad by any means over the last couple months of the season, but he also wasn’t…that. In August, he hit .279/.325/.468 with 5 homers while playing shortstop, so he was certainly a good player, and there wasn’t anything to complain about, but it was a step down from his incendiary July. September wasn’t quite so successful a month, with Fitzgerald slipping to a .250/.302/.375 line, with just one homer in 86 plate appearances.

So the question is, what’s the true talent level of Tyler Fitzgerald? And the answer is that it’s probably not too far from September Fitz. Looking at his Statcast page, last year he was good at avoiding chasing bad balls, average at barreling balls, fantastic at hitting balls at the optimal launch angle, and somewhere between bad and terrible at everything else offensively. None of his underlying numbers — how hard he hit the ball or how often he made contact most notably — told the story of a guy who had a great process and great results. Instead, it seems like he was beatable when he was at the plate, but for a little while, nobody could figure out how.

They did figure it out, though. Major league pitchers will find and exploit your weakness, no matter what it is. In Fitzgerald’s case, the weakness is that he swings through an awful lot of pitches. His whiff rate is extremely high, which causes his strikeout rate to also be extremely high, which means that he’s always in danger of striking out too often to be a useful player. He can mitigate that somewhat by having enough power, like he did in July and August, but without a high exit velocity, which Fitzgerald does not have, that power isn’t going to be very consistent.

None of this means that Tyler Fitzgerald is going to be an actively bad baseball player this season. If he can play competent defense at second base while hitting his way to a .700 or so OPS, then that’ll be a big improvement over what the Giants had at second last year, and is at least good enough to not be a major problem. But when you glance at a player’s stat line and you see a .380 BABIP, a 6% walk rate, and a 32% strikeout rate, those are awfully clear red flags. When you then go to Statcast and see that almost nothing he did last year supports the results he had, it’s like the red flag met a lady red flag and had red flag babies, just to ensure that everyone in the world could have a red flag here.

In all, it’s phenomenally unlikely for Tyler Fitzgerald to have the kind of season that he did last year. This doesn’t mean that he’ll necessarily be bad — though that’s not off the table — but that Tyler Fitzgerald isn’t coming back. That Tyler Fitzgerald might have only been a mirage. And good for him that he was able to parlay that performance into a starting job this season. But now Fitzgerald is going to have to prove that he belongs, and he’s going to have to prove it every day. Can he stop striking out so much to do it? Can he summon the power he had last summer? We’ll see, but not a lot of signs point to yes.