Written By Brandon Warne (ColdOmaha.com)
Notice anything different about Kennys Vargas? Well for one, he’s more productive than he’s ever been at any point in his big league career. Through 16 games coming into Friday night, Vargas was hitting .315/.415/.648, with 12 of his 17 hits having gone for extra bases (nine doubles, three homers).
So he’s been more productive. Is that just it? Well no, not exactly. Now a fair amount of this has to come with the caveat of being in a small sample size, but Vargas is doing a few things that are drastically different, and it’s made him a better player — at least in the short-term.
On the surface one can see the difference in his batting average and on-base percentage. In the statistical community, that’s called isolated discipline. In short, you can take two players with identical on-base percentages, subtract their batting averages from that figure and get an idea for which player is more adept at taking walks. It’s a quick-and-dirty approach, but for the most part it works. If one guy is hitting .250 with a .350 on-base percentage, and another guy is hitting .300 with a .350 OBP, you know that the first player takes more walks. And since that gap is usually pretty stable year-to-year — again, there are some caveats — you can see what a guy’s numbers might look like if his production were to tail off or spike.
So if that first guy hit .280, you might expect his OBP to jump to .380 or maybe even higher, depending on if he hits for any more power and starts taking some more walks out of respect or any other reason for variance. Similarly, if the second player hits .280, you’d probably expect his OBP to be around .330, or a bit above the AL average mark this year (.321). It’s not rocket science, but it’s a little deeper dive than just staring at the numbers.
Since we have walk percent figures right in front of us on Vargas’ Fangraphs page, we can use those for added context. When Vargas came up in 2014 and provided some thunder as a September call-up, he hit a respectable .274/.316/.456. As you might guess based on the first two numbers of that slash line, it came with a pretty low walk rate. Vargas, who routinely posted walk rates at or around the double digits percentage-wise in the minors, walked just 5.6 percent of the time in that first season. The AL average this year is 8.1 percent, and when coupled with an above-average strikeout rate, that can spell doom in anything more than short bursts.
The Twins have seen it with Eddie Rosario this year, and saw it with Vargas last year. Players who expand the zone become exploitable at the plate, as pitchers have access to reports from advanced scouts as well as video and even statistical databases which create a profile that helps get a batter out. In the case of Vargas last year, the book got out that you could get him to expand the zone and get himself out. Vargas, by his own admission, chased everything with the big club in 58 games last year. He somehow walked even less (4.9 percent) than he had the year before, and the strikeout rate spiked up to 29.3 percent.
Very few batters are successful anywhere near 30 percent, and Vargas was no exception, as he hit just .240/.277/.349 and spent a large portion of the year in the minor leagues, even being sent back down to Double-A for a while. And while he played well at both those levels, it can be hard to shake the branding as a player who expands the zone once it happens to you, and Vargas was aware of it.
“I like to watch my video from the games,” Vargas said “I was just swinging at so many balls (with the Twins last year). This time I just started swinging at strikes. Last year I wasn’t swinging at strikes. I was swinging at everything the pitcher would throw me. I’d just chase it.” The numbers fleshed that out last year, as he chased 32.2 percent of pitches out of the zone. And if one looked back to his 2014 season, that number was even higher at 37.6 percent.
So it’s easy to see why Vargas didn’t abandon that approach right away. It was working for him, at least at first. And when things are working, players tend to stick with them because of the pressure to produce, Vargas said. “I think it comes from the emotion,” he added. “You want to produce numbers. You want to hit at this level. This level is a bit more smart. You have to be patient, and know the situation, and try to hit in the count that you’re in. That’s what I’m doing right now.”
When Vargas went back down to the minors in 2015 — first to Double-A, then back up to Triple-A — he mashed the baseball like he had back in Low-A ball in 2012. Vargas hit .287/.417/.516 in Double-A and .279/.411/.475 at Triple-A, and again, you might notice the gap between batting average and on-base percentage creeping back up.
He walked at a 17.2 percent rate at both levels. With the Twins coming into Friday, he had a mark of 15.4 percent so far this season.
This chart really fleshes out the adjustments that Vargas has made, most of which he tied back to during his time working with Triple-A hitting coach Chad Allen.
These aren’t common statistics that writers or fans throw around, but the information is pretty intuitive and foundation. O-Swing% is pitches out of the zone that are chased, and the chart clearly shows that figure has taken a big-time dive for Vargas. He’s swinging at fewer pitches overall, but by sheer volume that was bound to take a chunk out of the bad pitches he was swinging at, too. Basically speaking, here’s how to read the chart: he’s swinging at less junk (and less overall), making more contact both inside and outside of the zone and it has resulted in a huge spike in walks. Fewer of the swings he’s taking are coming up empty as well, as evidenced by the big dip in swinging-strike rate which is seen in the final column.
For a hitter who is bound to hit for power and strike out, those walks are key added value, especially if he isn’t going to add much defensively. Then again, he’s looked — at least to this untrained observer — to be much better around the bag at first this time around than he was before. Anyway, as far as the strikeouts are concerned, they’re still up there (26.2 percent), but that’s still markedly lower than 2015 and even lower than his 2014 audition as well.
Essentially, he’s closing the gap between the two rates.
The swinging a lot less is a process Vargas said he honed in the minor leagues after struggling with the Twins in 2015. “I can say it’s like the learning process that I had to work on in Triple-A and the minor leagues,” he said. “My time last year here (with the Twins), I wasn’t too productive. This year I made an adjustment during my stay in Triple-A. I’ve been more patient at home plate, and I figured out how to adjust my approach to be consistent.”
Allen played a huge part as far as Vargas was concerned in keeping him on track, as they worked on some mechanical stuff but tried to stay true to what Kennys was good at. “(Allen) helped me with a couple things, like being patient and don’t try to change my stance and my hands,” he said. “Try to stay the same everyday, so you can be consistent. Trust in one stance, because last year sometimes I’d put the bat on my shoulder and sometimes I wouldn’t. I’d change it a lot. This year, I’ve been just sticking with one approach, and I’ve been hitting good.”
Vargas’ comments about tweaking mechanics make sense. When a player struggles, it can feel like common sense that maybe a mechanical tweak may be needed. But at some point those can become superfluous, to downright counterproductive due to the amount of reps needed to make a change permanent, let alone having to think about all that at while at the plate. So Allen simplified things with Vargas, and said stick to the plan, and you’ll be just fine.
“Yes, before there was” Vargas said about the pressures he felt to make changes when he’d go through prolonged slumps. “But now, no, because I’m really trusting what I’m doing right now. Even if I go 0-for-4, I just work on that.”
Ultimately, this could all shake down to small-sample noise, and Vargas’ production could fall off. But to this point, there’s drastic enough changes in the data that Kennys at least deserves the benefit of the doubt. He’s got a red-hot Byung Ho Park breathing fire down his neck for playing time, however. We’ll see how he handles that pressure.