The rough start to 2023 for Jeff McNeil

It hasn’t been the best start to 2023 for Jeff McNeil. In addition to his .429 OPS in the first five games of the regular season, McNeil went 1-9 in the WBC and was 4-23 in Grapefruit League action. Add all of those up and last year’s batting champion is 9-53, which is a paltry .170 AVG. It’s not an especially large sample size and a three-hit game tonight changes the narrative completely. Still, it’s not exactly what we were hoping to see from McNeil.

Throughout his MLB career to date, the one thing that’s stood out about McNeil is his bat-to-ball skills. And we’re seeing that so far in the regular season, as he’s struck out just twice in 21 PA. Contact isn’t the issue. Rather, it’s been weak contact that has resulted in too many ground ball outs. Baseball-Reference has the following breakdown for the 19 balls he’s put in play:

GB – 10
FB – 6
LD – 2
Bunts – 1

That’s a 52.6 GB%, the bunt does not count as a grounder, compared to the 40.7 GB% McNeil posted a season ago. Lifetime, he has a 42.5 GB%. Hitting 10% more ground balls isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The problem is when they come at the expense of line drives, which is the batted-ball outcome most likely to result in a hit. Last year McNeil had a 30.0 LD%. This year, in a very small sample, he has a 10.5 LD%.

My hope for McNeil this season was for him to drive more balls into the gaps and to pull the ball more. And he has, indeed, pulled the ball more these first five games. The problem is that he’s hit more balls to the opposite field, too. The pulled balls are coming at the expense of balls hit up the middle, not balls flicked the other way. And those pulled balls, for the most part, have been weak grounders, rather than line drives.

As Mets fans, we’re morally obligated to hate the WBC, at least this go-round. It does seem fair to ask if McNeil’s all-around slow start is due to the non-normal Spring Training that he had. If McNeil starts turning things around inside the next few days, we can say that the first 5-10 games were his Spring Training.

But what if he doesn’t?

We all recall the funk that McNeil endured in 2021 and none of us want to see a repeat of that season. The conventional wisdom was to blame the mid-year change in hitting coaches in ‘21, but that ignores the fact that McNeil wasn’t hitting great before the change was made. It may be too easy of an explanation but it’s difficult not to assign some portion of the blame in ’21 to some bad luck from the BABIP gods.

After having a BABIP between .335 and .359 his first three years in the league, McNeil had just a .280 mark in ’21. He rebounded to a .353 mark in the category last year. This season it sits at .211 after our tiny sample of five games.

Yes, it’s somewhat of a chicken-and-egg issue. Are the hits not falling in because of the batted ball profile? My take is, yes. Until McNeil starts hitting more line drives, we’re not going to see any improvement in his AVG.

Throughout the years, we’ve heard countless times from Keith Hernandez that a slumping player needs to concentrate on hitting the ball up the middle to get his timing back. And given that McNeil has lost those up-the-middle hits from his batted-ball profile, this seems to make perhaps more sense than normal.

No doubt some of you will wonder what the fuss is about a slow start thru five games. To me, it’s always a good idea to seek out answers regardless of the sample size. McNeil’s not hitting the way we all expect because he’s trading line drives for grounders. It’s a bad trade, whether that’s thru 100 games or thru five.

We hope that it’s a brief hiccup and that two weeks from now his batted-ball profile reverts to what it was in 2022. But we only have to go back one more season to see what happens when it doesn’t.