Hector Rodriguez’s Aggressive Approach Keeps Working
Image credit: Hector Rodriguez (Mike Janes/Four Seam Images)
We wrote a breakout prospects piece at Baseball America this week, in which we highlighted a couple players per organization who didn’t rank in their team’s top 10 prospect rankings.
I didn’t include outfielder Hector Rodriguez among the Reds’ potential breakouts.
We posted a sleeper prospect for each organization today as well, and Rodriguez didn’t appear there either.
But I want to make it clear, I could be entirely wrong by not putting him on either list.
The Reds acquired Rodriguez from the Mets in July 2022 as one of the prospects they received back in the Tyler Naquin trade. He hit .333/.372/.536 between four stops in the Florida Complex Leagues and Florida State League.
Rodriguez hit .293/.343/.495 as one of the best hitters in the Florida State League in 2023 before a late-season promotion to High-A Dayton.
This winter, he has hit .309/.344/.487 for Escogido while playing center field every day. He was named the Dominican Professional Baseball League’s rookie of the year. In the postseason round-robin tournament, Rodriguez has batted third for Escogido pretty much every day, which is an impressive vote of confidence in a 19-year-old. He’s been one of the best players in winter ball.
Rodriguez has hit .304/.355/.501 overall as a pro. Wherever he’s played so far, both as a Met and as a Reds prospect, he’s been one of the better players in the league.
His resume is excellent. Maybe my skepticism (and that of some evaluators) is unfair.
So why is there still skepticism?
Rodriguez’s speed was once thought to be his calling card, but he’s slowed down to be more of a plus runner than a true speedster. He’s moved from the infield to the outfield and he’s junked switch-hitting to hit only lefthanded. He’s a different player than he once appeared to be, but if he hits like this, that’s not an issue.
But it’s how Rodriguez hits that is the actual reason for the concerns. Rodriguez’s approach is at the utter extreme of aggressive. The average hitter in the majors swings at 47% of the pitches he sees. The most aggressive players swing at 55%. Pretty much no one swings 60% of the time.
Rodriguez swung at 63% of pitches he saw in 2023 during the MiLB season. In the Dominican winter league, he’s swung at 62% of pitches according to Synergy. His plot of pitches he’s swung at from winter ball shows how he doesn’t really chase too far out of the zone in or away, but he is very aggressive on balls below the zone.
In the majors, Royals catcher Salvador Perez was the most aggressive hitter in the major leagues in 2023. He swung at 60% of all pitches he saw.
In the 21st century, only five qualified hitters have swung at 61% of pitches in any season. No hitter has ever done so twice in their career. None of those five (Randall Simon, Delmon Young, Hanser Alberto, Vinny Castilla and Jeff Francoeur) posted better than a .320 on-base percentage in the season where they truly swung at almost everything. Swinging this much is playing into a pitcher’s hands.
Logically, this shouldn’t work as a long-term strategy. At some point, Rodriguez should reach a level where pitchers will force him to either be more selective or they’ll retire him on pitches out of the strike zone over and over until he gets the hint.
But so far, that has not happened. And as long as it hasn’t, we have to allow the possibility that maybe Rodriguez is the outlier who can make this work. His 18.9% strikeout rate ranked among the top 10 best among qualifiers in the Florida State League last year. His 14.3% strikeout rate in the Dominican winter league is excellent.
We also have to allow for the possibility that Rodriguez will learn a hard lesson, start to take more pitches and let his elite bat-to-ball skills play even better.
So, yes, there are reasons to be skeptical, but there’s also a reason to keep an eye on how Rodriguez progresses.
