Max Kepler and the Twins have a plan to beat BABIP and raise his production, but will it work?
Over the course of a season, a hitting coach has countless discussions with their hitters. They occur multiple times a week during a 162-game schedule and are designed to provide guidance.
Some are serious. Others are light. Perhaps the coach has an observation from the previous night’s game or a bit of advice on an upcoming pitcher. Other times, he may float a potential new strategy to help a struggling hitter escape a slump. Whatever the case, the goal is to keep the conversation going and build rapport.
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But not every conversation makes an impact. Sometimes the phrasing a coach uses may not resonate with the player. Whereas one hitter describes a specific part of a swing one way, another could use an entirely different phrase even though both mean the same thing.
Last week, Max Kepler heard the message of Twins co-hitting coaches Edgar Varela and Rudy Hernandez loud and clear. Though it was a simple discussion, the immediate results produced — Kepler homered twice and doubled in a win over the Chicago Cubs — suggest it could lead to big things. The topic was Kepler’s low batting average on balls in play (BABIP) this season. As minimal as the chat may have seemed, Kepler said it gave him an idea for how he may tackle this offseason.
“They rattled off some numbers, you know, that were very similar to 2018 where I had the lowest batting average on balls in play, so I kind of know what I want to work on this offseason,” Kepler said. “It might have to do with lifting the ball more again and driving the ball and pulling the ball with authority.”
KEPLER DOES IT AGAIN!@Twins | #MNTwins pic.twitter.com/yWabSDQwnL
— Bally Sports North (@BallySportsNOR) September 23, 2021
The Twins previously had this conversation with Kepler near the end of the 2018 season and he was receptive to the concept. The change led Kepler to focus on doing damage through the air to the pull side rather than trying to use the whole field. The following season, Kepler belted a career-high 36 home runs. After Wednesday’s game, Kepler’s 2021 BABIP sits at .227, an even lower figure than when he produced at a .236 clip in 2018.
Despite his poor BABIP numbers, Kepler still is producing right around a league-average OPS this season. But his overall production is significantly down from 2019, and he and the Twins know there’s more in the tank. They also think they know how to get there. Kepler has struck out in just 18 percent of his career plate appearances, well below the leaguewide mark of 22 percent.
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“When you have big, strong guys that have good looking swings that can get to different pitches in the zone, don’t strike out very often and find ways to find the barrel, that’s normally a very good combination that normally equals out to some really good production,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We’ve seen that from Kep.”
Despite his low strikeout percentage, Kepler’s career batting average is just .234, the second-worst mark in Twins history among hitters with at least 2,000 at-bats. Tim Laudner, at .225, is the only Twins hitter below him and even Miguel Sanó, who’s struck out almost twice as often as Kepler, has him beat with a .237 career average.
How is that possible? And why has Kepler hit below .250 in five of his six seasons, including below .230 in three of the last four seasons? As detailed in this space last month, Kepler has the lowest lifetime batting average on balls in play of any MLB hitter since 1990, which is why he always hits in the low .200s despite striking out less often than the leaguewide rate.
This year’s .227 BABIP, while a career-low and third-worst in the league, is within range of his .248 BABIP from 2018 to 2020. This is who Kepler is at this point, in part because Kepler’s inability to use the opposite field allows teams to defend him with extreme, singles-robbing shifts, and in part because so many of his “fly balls” are popups turned into automatic outs that add no more value than whiffing.
“A lot of that equation has stood every year of his career,” Baldelli said. “There are some reasons why he probably hasn’t found the holes that we feel like he should because he does so many things well. Sometimes it’s just a minimal adjustment. Sometimes it’s just staying through the ball a hair longer.”
12th career leadoff home run for Kepler, tied with 1991 World Series Champion Dan Gladden for 4th-most on the #MNTwins all-time list. pic.twitter.com/mZ8cpyHYTJ
— Minnesota Twins (@Twins) August 15, 2021
Hitting the ball harder is conducive to more hits. It’s why there’s so much focus on exit velocity these days. But hitting the ball in air — as Kepler suggests he’ll focus on this offseason — can have the opposite effect. Fly balls are turned into outs at a higher rate than groundballs, and especially line drives. It’s why a fly-ball pitcher can still have great success even though they tend to allow more homers.
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There’s potentially still some logic to what Kepler is saying and the adjustments he has planned. If he’s incapable of unlocking a higher BABIP by using the opposite field more and popping up less, then why not lean even more into tapping into the most power possible via launch angle and hard-hit fly balls. If he can’t hit it around the defense, hit it over the defense. Or put simply: There’s no shift for a home run.
Kepler has a unique ability to hit for significant power without sacrificing contact. However, because his contact is worth less than most hitters’ contact, it’s possible becoming more willing to swing and miss as a tradeoff for more power could be a net positive. If avoiding whiffs isn’t helping much anyway, swinging for the fences at the risk of whiffing more isn’t really much of a worry.
Kepler’s initial power increase came after several years of rising launch angles. As a rookie in 2016, his average launch angle was 8.5 degrees, leading to 48 percent grounders. His launch angle rose in each of the next four seasons, peaking at 21.9 degrees last season, 10th-highest in MLB, with a matching ground-ball rate of just 32 percent.
He’s become one of MLB’s heaviest fly-ball hitters and because of it, he’s averaged 35 homers per 162 games since 2019. That power, along with very good defense in right field and passable defense as a center field fill-in, is where Kepler’s value has come from, canceling out his abysmal BABIP enough to make him a good regular despite a lifetime .234 AVG.
But hitting even more balls in the air is diametrically opposed to increasing BABIP and AVG. If he wants to find more hits, and cease being a BABIP outlier at the low end of the league leaderboard each season, Kepler would likely be better off trying to reach the opposite field on more than the occasional check-swing and lower his launch angle slightly so that his balls in the air are line drives rather than high, catchable fly balls.
However, that’s just one possible approach to changing Kepler’s overall production and raising his OPS — which has been above-average for a right fielder just twice in six seasons — via more singles. Another approach would be attempting to crush everything and pull everything and put everything in the air. When he’s already at the bottom of the BABIP pile as is, there isn’t as much risk in falling further.
“I don’t know if I’m even gonna sit down and look at the stats because the stats don’t always tell someone exactly what type of year a player is going through,” Kepler said. “This year, you know, I feel like I’ve been playing a little more to the pitcher’s flute. And, yeah, there’s gonna come a time when I’m not gonna do that anymore, and I’m going to figure out what works for me. I am slowly doing that with great support of my hitting coaches.”
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For Varela, it was a garden-variety discussion between him, Kepler and Hernandez in the cage at Wrigley Field. They’ve discussed similar philosophies over the course of the season. But this one clicked and Varela knew it. Then Kepler belted two homers that night and missed another by a few feet.
Having found common ground in their language, Kepler and his coaches have a better sense for how they want to design a plan for 2022. Now, Varela said it’s all about getting Kepler to “sell out” for whatever strategy they determine is the best for him and stay committed.
“What’s the best way it’s going to register for him in that specific moment?” Varela said. “If it’s one simple thing that’s going to make sense for him in the moment, he’s a human being. If it’s one specific phrase, it just happened to register for him in that moment and he was able to sell out to it in the game and good things happened. Again, we could have went through all that conversation and it doesn’t happen. I think as we finish the season and going into the offseason, again it’s going into his processes and believing in those processes that we’ve got to continue to move forward.”
(Photo: Adam Bettcher / Getty Images)
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