What's Wrong With Geo?

On May 15 against the Pirates at Wrigley Field, Geovany Soto singled in the third inning off Paul Maholm.

Two days ago, on May 26, Geo hit a line drive to left field for a pinch hit single in the bottom of the eighth.

In between these two events, Geo went 27 plate appearances without a hit, drawing six walks.

What has happened to the Cubs' catcher over the last two weeks? Should we be worried? Soto is still sporting an excellent .811 OPS and .374 wOBA, but those are numbers that have plummeted in recent times. There are lot of Cub fans who are terrified that after his unreal April, Soto is reverting back to his awful 2009 self.

Let's take a look at some of the numbers to try and determine if this is just a dry spell or something to really fear. I'm going to break down the relevant stats into three groups: April, May, and the last two weeks. All the numbers come from Fangraphs.

Batting (April/May/2 Weeks)

OBP: .500 / .329 / .250

wOBA: .458 / .293 / .193

BABIP: .385 / .238 / .158

LD%: 33.3 / 16.3 / 21.1

IFFB%: 8.3 / 17.6 / 50.0

While Soto's May has been pretty bad overall, he's been pretty unlucky as of late. I wouldn't expect a line drive rate of 21% to continue delivering a .158 BABIP. What is concerning though is his rapidly inflating infield fly ball numbers. The last two weeks, half of Soto's fly balls haven't reached the outfield. It makes that extremely low BABIP a little more understandable.

What's the root cause of that plummeting OBP? Let's take a look at some of Soto's plate discipline numbers.

Plate Discipline

BB%: 24.3 / 17.8 / 16.7

K%: 20.8 / 28.3 / 36.7
Swing%: 29.3 / 40.0 / 39.7

Contact%: 77.9 / 78.5 / 76.8

Zone%: 42.9 / 50.0 / 46.8

His walk rate has dropped by a third while his strikeout rate has exploded. Also of note is Soto's zone percentage; in April Soto was only getting pitches in the strike zone 43% of the time. He responded by only swinging at 29% of pitches, one of the lowest rates in all of baseball. Now he sees strikes closer to 50% of the time and in turn is swinging the bat more.

So Soto has been making overall contact at pretty much the same rate all season, but has been swinging at more pitches in the last month. It's possible that pitchers have been instructed to pound the zone on Soto since he started the year as one of the least aggressive hitters in the game. Let's take a closer look and see exactly what Soto swings at inside (z) and outside (o) the zone:

Expanded Plate Discipline

O-Swing%: 11.9 / 14.5 / 17.3

Z-Swing%: 52.4 / 65.5 / 65.2

O-Contact%: 35.0 / 52.4 / 53.9

Z-Contact%: 90.9 / 84.2 / 83.7

The glaring number here is Soto's O-Contact%, which has risen a substantial amount since his red-hot April. Soto is both swinging at and hitting more pitches outside of the strike zone. I don't have the numbers for this in front of me, but I would imagine he is fouling off a lot of pitches that he used to be taking for balls. Perhaps more glaring, though, is the fact that Soto is swinging at 13% more pitches in the strike zone yet making less contact with them. All of these numbers display how Soto has become a much less disciplined hitter, specifically over his slump the last two weeks. He's swinging much more than he used to and getting an extremely high amount of strikeouts and infield flies as a result.

We've seen pitchers are throwing Soto more strikes. Why is he not hitting pitches in the strike zone at the same rate?

Pitch Types
FB%: 59.1 / 43.0 / 36.1

SL%: 16.0 / 25.6 / 27.8

CT%: 5.3 / 8.5 / 8.3

CB%: 9.0 / 10.9 / 16.0

CH%: 10.6 / 10.9 / 11.8

Soto has seen a fewer percentage of fastballs than any other player on the team the last two weeks. He's also seeing the most sliders.

What has Soto been doing with the pitches thrown to him in terms of run value? The numbers here represent the number of runs above or below average for pitches of that type.

Pitch Value

FB: 5.3 / 1.1 / -0.9

SL: 1.1 / -3.1 / -2.5

CT: 1.1 / 0.1 / -0.8

CB: 1.2 / 1.5 / 1.5

CH: -1.1 / -1.2 / -1.2

Soto murdered the fastballs he actually swung at in April; he's done very little with the limited amount he's seeing now. And it makes sense that he's seeing more and more sliders, because he hasn't been good at hitting them. Soto didn't do much with sliders in 2009 either, as he was 3.39 runs below average/100 sliders when he was seeing them about 23% of the time. I'm actually kind of surprised it took so long for pitchers to revert back to the off speed stuff.

So what is wrong with Soto?

In my estimation, Soto received a large amount of fastballs to start the season for a hitter of his caliber, and responded with a near perfect approach at the plate. He was extremely patient and almost never expanded the strike zone. On the rare occasions when he did swing, he was mashing. I don't think anyone expected Soto to continue to rake at his April 33.3% line drive rate, but the fact that he was also walking nearly 1/4th of the time showed how well Geo was seeing the ball.

Since his torrid start, he's been seeing a LOT more off-speed pitches and the results haven't been pretty. Over the last two weeks only Ryan Howard has seen a lesser percentage of fastballs than Soto (31.6%, minimum 30 PA). He's now swinging more at bad pitches, swinging and missing at more pitches in the zone, and either striking out or making too much weak contact (infield fly balls).

If pitchers are going to refuse to throw Soto fastballs, then he has to refuse to swing at pitches outside of the strike zone. Otherwise, it's a recipe for disaster. As I pointed out before, he's been a bit unlucky lately with balls in play. He's still hitting a decent amount of line drives. But if he doesn't reclaim some of the patience at the plate that made him one of baseball's top hitters in April, it won't really matter. I don't care how unlucky you are, if you're striking out over 1/3 of the time your approach simply has to change.