By now, the Jose Bautista story is old hat. So a journeyman infielder with a .729 career OPS decided to up and hit a league-leading 54 home runs in one season. Whatever. Didn't we already cover this a year ago? There's no need to talk about what we've already talked about.
Jose Bautista And The Great League Adjustment
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But while the trajectory of Bautista’s unusual career should be familiar to baseball fans the world over, there’s another interesting aspect at play, here. Bautista caught fire last May and, since then, hasn’t slowed down, beating the snot out of the ball pretty much whenever he wants to. His isolated slugging percentage of .345 since the beginning of last season has been the best in the bigs by 49 points. While the first few Bautista dingers might’ve been written off as luck, all he’s done is proven that he’s now a threat to go deep on any pitch.
And when you have a guy take a sudden shift in the middle of his career, what you expect to see is a corresponding shift in the way that he’s pitched. After all, not all batters are approached in the same way. Weak hitters are approached differently than strong hitters. Undisciplined hitters are approached differently than disciplined hitters. At the beginning of the 2010 season, Jose Bautista was viewed as a light-hitting journeyman. Now, Jose Bautista is viewed as one of the premier sluggers in baseball. It stands to reason that pitchers are probably going at him in a different way than they were a year ago, right?
Absolutely. What I’m going to show you now is a table of Jose Bautista’s Zone% data, which measures the percentage of pitches he sees in the strike zone. The data comes courtesy of Fangraphs. Note that a league average Zone% is in the high 40s.
| Date | Zone% |
| Sep-09 | 53% |
| Apr-10 | 50% |
| May-10 | 48% |
| Jun-10 | 49% |
| Jul-10 | 44% |
| Aug-10 | 45% |
| Sep-10 | 38% |
| Apr-11 | 36% |
And there’s your clear trend. At the end of the 2009 season, and at the beginning of 2010, Bautista was pitched like an average guy. As he started to show that his sudden power output wasn’t a fluke, though, pitchers became more and more cautious. By the end of 2010, they were pitching around him, and that’s only carried over into 2011, where Bautista’s current Zone% is the third-lowest in baseball.
Jose Bautista can hit the ball a mile. On Opening Day he blasted a 456-foot dinger off Carl Pavano. There's no longer any doubting his ability, so pitchers are up there nibbling, trying to avoid the middle of the zone and preferring to take their chances with Adam Lind instead. And you can't really blame them. Bautista has a disciplined eye and enough power to keep Canada lit for a week and a half. Why be aggressive against someone that dangerous?
Of course, the consequence of Bautista seeing fewer pitches to hit is that he’ll end up hitting fewer home runs. As of this writing, he has only three. He’s never going to hit 54 dingers again in his life, even with the same skillset, just because he won’t get enough opportunities. But at the same time, Bautista’s drawn 12 walks in 13 games. He’s disciplined enough to let the pitchers put him on base, and at some point his teammates are going to start driving him in. He’ll remain highly productive - just in a different way from before.
Jose Bautista made a dramatic shift, and opposing pitchers followed with a shift of their own. While it’s disappointing that the end result of this is that we get to see fewer dingers, it’s fascinating at the same time. The game is always changing.
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