Eddie Rosario Turns on the Power Switch

The best inspiration for an article is one in which you find a meaningful leaderboard, sort away, and identify who doesn’t belong. The surprise of the group, if you will. That player is most certainly going to be fun to discuss! That brings me to Eddie Rosario. If you perform a Statcast search and select only “Barrel” for “Quality of Contact” from August through the end of the season, you will be presented with a leaderboard of top sluggers ranked by number of barreled balls they hit during that time period. The top 10 is littered with your standard who’s who of the game’s best power hitters. Then you get down to #14 and who do you find, none other than Eddie Rosario.

Did you even realize that Rosario hit 27 homers this season? If you were never his owner this year, I bet the vast majority of you did not. I certainly didn’t! His HR/FB rate has risen from 9.6% to 11.9% to 16.4% over his first three seasons with the Twins. But with homers flying out of the park this year, you would think there had to be more than 13 guys ahead of him on the barrels list, right? Nope, it was thanks to a torrid final two months in which he hit 16 of his 27 homers that were the result of all those barrels.

His fly ball rate spiked from 32.7% in the first half to 42% in the second half, while his HR/FB rate hovered around the 20% mark over the final two months. If that doesn’t hint at a change in approach, I don’t know what else would. Oh, and his Pull% also surged from 34.1% to 44.1%. Would you look at that, another new member of the “fly balls are good” crowd? It certainly appears as if the light bulb went off sometime during that second half.

Unfortunately, his season long Barrels/Batted Ball Event stood at a mediocre 7.4%, which is just a bit above the league average, though it was offset by a below average rate of balls hit to the pull and opposite fields. So normally one would project severe regression next year. But the way he finished provides optimism that perhaps the regression won’t be as serious and he could hold onto most of his gains.

Aiding his power output was his significantly improved strikeout rate. Always a free swinger, swinging at everything whether over the plate or off it, he made better contact with the pitches he swung at than ever before. And my hitter xK% metric agrees with the improved results. He could still afford to be quite a bit more patient, though all that swinging is helping keep his strikeout rate in respectable territory. He could opt to switch things up and swinging less, as that would boost his walk rate, but likely also his strikeout rate as well.

I came into the offseason thinking Rosario’s breakout was mostly a fluke. However, his age, timing of his power spike, and seeming change in approach makes me more optimistic about his 2018 performance. In fact, I even slightly improved his Pod Projection as I was typing this article.