The Dodgers pitched Lucas Duda perfectly

Lucas Duda is certainly not the only Mets player that has struggled at the plate so far this postseason. Travis d’Arnaud has an OPS under .500 and David Wright has a batting average and slugging percentage of .063, for example. Both of these players contributed, however, to the Mets’ Division Series victory against the Dodgers in their own way. Duda, on the other hand, has yet to make any kind of impact with his bat.

He went 2-18 and struck out an alarming 11 times. His OPS of .311 was higher than only Michael Cuddyer, who had only 4 at-bats, and Ruben Tejada, who was possibly on his way to a worse series than Duda before being injured by Chase Utley‘s dirty slide. It was a truly awful performance, though Duda is known to be a very streaky hitter. Now to be fair, as a lefty he had to face Clayton Kershaw twice. This was a concern about all of the Mets’ lefties heading into the series, though, and that argument falls flat when you consider two points.

First, the Mets’ other big lefties Curtis Granderson and Daniel Murphy did just fine against left-handed hurlers during the series. Both actually hit well over .300 against southpaws. Admittedly, it isn’t very fair to compare against the Mets’ two best offensive players during the series, regardless of handedness. Still, it’s interesting that their two best hitters were left-handed.

The second, more damning point is that Duda faced left-handed pitching for exactly half of his at-bats and actually performed better against them than righties. His two hits came against lefthanders, and one of those was off of Kershaw in Game 1. So if it wasn’t simply a matter of platoon advantage then what was it?

First, let’s take a look at the locations in which both righties and lefties pitched Duda throughout the series. The following graphs are from Baseball Savant.

NLDS versus Lefties

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NLDS versus Righties

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Unsurprisingly, he was pitched mostly down and outside no matter from which side the pitcher threw. We can also see that righthanders stayed up on him while lefthanders were more apt to stay down. Specifically, righthanders stayed away from pitching him down and in at all. This is pretty much the exact way he’s been pitched to all year from each side. This isn’t a shocking, as the following graph from Brooks Baseball shows.

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The graph above represents Duda’s zone slugging percentage this past season against both lefties and righties. Beyond mistakes left out over the plate, down and in is his wheelhouse. So, the approach to him in terms of location is pretty much the same as it’s been all season.

How about pitch type? The graphs below from Baseball Savant breakdown the different pitch types that Duda faced both in the regular season and the Division Series.

Pitch Type: Regular Season

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Pitch Type: NLDS

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It’s actually pretty remarkable how close the graphs above line up. The only meaningful difference is the number of curveballs he’s seen in the playoffs, which in itself is probably partly explained by the fact that all three of the Dodgers starters the Mets saw in the series threw a curve as part of their arsenal. That’s pretty interesting.

It’s no surprise that Duda saw more breaking and off-speed pitches than hard stuff during the Division Series. He swung at over 50% of the hard stuff versus about 30% for breaking balls and almost 40% for off-speed pitches. He whiffed on 25% of the off-speed stuff and almost 20% of breaking balls.

If we look across his 2015 season we can spot two interesting things about his two worst months, June and July. The highest percentage of off-speed pitches he saw all season was in June at about 23%. His whiff percentage on those in June was a season-high 22%. In July, he saw the highest percentage of breaking balls he saw all year in a full month at almost 31% (though several months were pretty close to that). Surprise, his highest whiff percentage against breaking balls was in July at 21.5%.

Perhaps we found the culprit here. Zack Greinke and Kershaw, on top of simply being dominating pitchers in general, have excellent breaking and off-speed pitches. They leveraged them perfectly against Duda’s weaknesses throughout the series. They threw him great pitches in the right locations while avoiding his power zone. Poor Duda never really stood a chance.

The good news is that he’s had pretty good success against the Cubs projected rotation in limited tries. The odds are that they won’t pitch him quite as perfectly as the Dodgers, which is good because the Mets are going to need him to step up if they hope to advance to their first World Series appearance in 15 years.