Donovan Solano was among Farhan Zaidi’s first Dumpster Finds™. He hit .330/.360/.456 in 228 plate appearances in 2019, and followed that up by hitting .326/.365/.463 in 203 plate apperances in 2020, earning a Silver Slugger for his troubles. Things were going great, with absolutely no extremely steep dropoff in sight.
And then, there was an extremely steep dropoff. Who could have guessed?
In 134 PAs so far this year, Solano is hitting .267/.313/.375 and, two doubles last night notwithstanding, he sure looks like it. We’re used to seeing him spray line drives all over the field; this year, he’s hitting weak grounders all over the infield. We’re used to feeling confident when he’s at the plate; now it’s more of a weary resignation. We’re used to him being good; now, he’s not good
So what happened to Donovan Solano? With half the infield on the Injured List, he’s been getting plenty of consistent playing time to get his bat in shape, but it’s still been slow going. Why? What’s different?
The first thing to ask is whether some of Solano’s success the last couple years was due to good luck, and the answer is yes.
I really should have teased that out a little more, huh? Well, the dude had BABIPs of .396 and .409 the last two years, so there was always going to be regression. If 40% of the balls you put into play are falling for hits, especially in the age of Big Data determining defensive shifts, then luck is just going to be a factor.
With the caveat in place that no matter how good Solano was, he was never that good, let’s look at what’s different in 2021. First, the good: so far, he has the best walk rate (6.7 %) of his career, and his lowest strikeout rate (17.9%) as a Giant. He’s making good swing decisions, swinging at more pitches in the zone and chasing fewer out of the zone than in years past. And he is crushing fastballs this year, hitting .404 against them with a .561 slugging percentage. Solano is having by far his best year against fastballs since 2015, when Statcast started keeping track.
However.
Since Solano hasn’t been a good hitter this year, there has to be a lot of bad coming. He’s hitting more balls softly and a lot fewer balls hard than he did over the last couple years, which is why his ISO — isolated power — has dropped 30 points compared to last year, from .137 to .108. And because we know that he’s doing well against fastballs, by process of elimination we can arrive at the issue: not-fastballs.
Against offspeed pitches (mostly changeups and splitters) Solano is hitting .263 with a .368 slugging percentage (these are numbers from before last night’s game). These aren’t good numbers — they’re basically right on what he’s doing for the whole year, which has been bad enough that I’m writing a whole “What’s wrong with Donovan Solano” article — but they’re not disastrous.
Against breaking pitches (mostly curveballs and sliders), Donovan Solano has been an unmitigated disaster this year. He is hitting .051 with no extra base hits against breaking stuff. He’s also hitting the ball remarkably softly, averaging an exit velocity of 80 MPH, an absolutely miserable number (by comparison, against fastballs he’s averaging 90.5 MPH and against offspeed stuff he’s around 82 MPH).
Those bad numbers, by the way? Totally deserved. This isn’t some reverse-BABIP situation, where Tom Selleck goes on TV and tries to sell senior citizens on Donovan Solano’s poor luck this year. Baseball Savant has Solano’s xwOBA under .200 for both offspeed and breaking stuff, meaning that the way he’s hitting the ball is terrible, and he’s earned the poor results he’s seen.
“So,” you might be saying, “Donovan Solano is bad against offspeed stuff. Is the league only now figuring this out?” Well, no. Last year, he was great against offspeed and especially breaking pitches, and only so-so against fastballs. This is a new flaw that sprung up this year.
The league, by the way? Not even taking full advantage of it. Solano has seen more fastballs this year (61.9%, compared to 56.6% and 61.1% in 2020 and 2019, respectively) than his previous two years in a Giants uniform. So nobody is pounding him with sliders and daring him to hit them; other teams are pitching him the same way they always have and he’s suddenly so bad against curves and sliders that they’re getting way more outs with those pitches than they used to.
So what happened to Donovan Solano? This is the second time I asked this rhetorically, but now I’m gonna give answering it a shot. If you look at his swing decisions, Solano has started to conform to the kind of player the Giants want: swinging less outside of the zone, and more inside of it. Since Solano is getting beaten on pitches he used to crush, and beaten badly on the breaking stuff, it’s possible that he’s tamped down some of his instincts, forcing himself to sit fastball, and hitting offspeed stuff weakly when it comes in.
Or maybe it’s a fluke! 134 plate appearances, with a big gap due to injury in the middle, really isn’t that many. If he wallops a couple hanging curves, the numbers start to look a whole lot better.
But he’ll have to hit them first for that to happen. The team needs the Donnie Barrels of old to show up again, because the struggling offense is holding the team back. But that Donnie can’t answer the phone right now and can I take a message? For two years, Donovan Solano has been a legitimately excellent hitter with results that surpassed the process. If he could get back to that, boy, wouldn’t that be nice?