On Starling Marte’s struggles when pulling the ball

It’s no secret how much trouble the Mets have had hitting here early in the 2024 season. We hope that the team can turn it around sooner rather than later. But while waiting for positive regression to occur, we can think in more abstract thoughts about hitting in general. Ted Williams, thought of as one of the best hitters ever, described the concept of hitting when he said, “The hardest thing to do in baseball is to hit a round baseball with a round bat, squarely.”

Hitting takes a lot of moving parts. You have to identify which pitches are worth swinging at, have the hand-eye coordination to hit pitches at high velocity and/or with movement designed to keep the bat from making good contact and you’ve got to do that while avoiding hitting the ball where fielders are stationed.

One of the key things for hitters is to have the necessary bat speed to hit those good pitches squarely. Perhaps the worst things you can hear about a player is that he’s lost bat speed, that he can no longer get the bat thru the zone quick enough to catch up to velocity. And once that happens, the batter has to either quit swinging at fastballs or he has to start his swing earlier, making him vulnerable to all off-speed pitches. Neither option works in the long run.

Which brings us to Starling Marte.

Throughout his career, Marte has had great bat speed. And then in 2023, while fighting thru injuries, Marte struggled in just about every way. He made terrible swing decisions, had the second-worst Swinging Strike% of his career and when he did hit the ball, Marte tied for the worst Pull% of his career.

Why does that last one matter? The overwhelming majority of hitters do the most damage when they pull the ball. Typically, the question is if the hitter does a little better or a lot better when he pulls the ball. Here in 2024, Baseball-Reference shows that righty batters have a 1.185 OPS when they pull the ball, compared to OPS marks in the .700s when they hit the ball up the middle or to the opposite field. And this isn’t a small-sample issue. Righties had a 1.168 OPS when they pulled the ball in the 2023 season.

In general terms, in order to pull the ball, you’ve recognized a good pitch to hit and you had the bat speed necessary to make good contact with the pitch.

From his debut season in 2012 thru the 2022 campaign, Marte had four-digit OPS totals every year when he pulled the ball, with a BABIP of at least .382 each season. Last year, his OPS fell to .847 and his BABIP dropped to .286 on those pulled balls. The results weren’t great and as noted earlier, he didn’t pull as many balls, either. That’s a bad combo.

Here in 2024, Marte has 34 PA and 30 ABs. And his Pull numbers are not good. Statcast shows him 1-7 on pulled balls but their overall numbers only go thru 4/4. If we manually add in the results from Friday and Saturday, we see that he pulled two more balls. Marte grounded out to third base in the fourth inning on Friday and he grounded out to short in the ninth on Saturday. Both of his hits Saturday went to right field, while he was hitless on Friday.

That means he’s 1-9 when he pulls the ball, which is a .111 AVG. The only good news is that the one hit was a homer, which came on Opening Day. So, in this limited sample, Marte has a .111/.111/.444 slash line, for a .555 OPS when he pulls the ball.

FanGraphs has up-to-date splits numbers and we see that Marte is doing well this year versus fastballs. He’s seen 45 four-seamers and has a slash line of .364/.417/.636 against those pitches. That’s really good. The problem is that overall, he has a .233/.303/.367 line. Which means that when pitchers give him something else to hit, Marte is, well, terrible.

So, is he making poor swing decisions on those non-fastball pitches? Or is he cheating, starting his swing earlier to catch up with the fastball? It’s hard to say. If forced to choose, my guess would be poor swing decisions. It doesn’t appear to be quite as bad as some of the swing decisions he made last year, when it seemed he made up his mind to swing before the pitcher threw the ball. But that choice of mine isn’t stated with much conviction. It wouldn’t be hard to believe that both sides were contributing somewhat equally.

But whatever is going on, it’s not good. Of course, everything right now is a small sample and a few good games would change everything. But Marte’s overall numbers are not much better than they were a year ago. He’s 45 points of OPS away from last year’s terrible numbers, compared to 117 points of OPS away from his lifetime rate.

Marte deserves more time to turn things around. And it’s easy to give him that time, as there’s no one else demanding playing time. But it’s not unusual for a player in his mid-30s never to recover from injury woes. Just because we want Marte to be the force in the lineup he was in 2022 doesn’t mean he’s physically capable of performing that way again.

So, watch how Marte does against non-fastball pitches. And see if he has any better results when pulling the ball. It will be next to impossible for Marte to turn in a good season if he doesn’t improve substantially in both of those areas.