Willy Adames has Made a Change. He Needs to Make Another.

On the afternoon of my sister’s 19th birthday, May 21st, 2021, the Milwaukee Brewers sent Drew Rasmussen and J.P. Feyereisen down to the Tampa Bay Rays for Trevor Richards and Willy Adames. Initially, I was upset about this trade. The Crew were sending two serviceable, young arms (one of whom was a Wisconsin kid) for what I deemed a lesser arm and a falling star.

Instead, all Brewer fans were treated to a birthday gift, where Richards was useful before being turned into Rowdy Tellez in another trade, and Adames finished 16th in MVP voting due to his excellence after the trade.

In 2022, Adames has not reached the gaudy expectations set from his phenomenal partial first season, where it was thought the Milwaukee Brewers had added a young, perpetual MVP candidate at a premium position with many more years of team control. It is hard to say that he has been a disappointment, ranking first among Milwaukee’s position players in WAR and second behind reigning Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes across all players. Adames has earned 2.9 WAR, good enough to be within the top 65 position players in the entire MLB, but only barely making the top 50% of all shortstops.

Willy Adames’ stat line shows a hitter who has been focusing on power. Through the Dodgers series, he has hit 25 home runs on the year, which makes him the leader for most among shortstops. He has a slugging of 0.460, which is quite a bit better than the league average of 0.395 and the league average of shortstops of 0.383. He has 73 RBIs and has scored 62 runs. 

But the overall stat-line shows a hitter who is primarily swinging for the fences. Adames’ batting average is 0.226, and his OBP is 0.291. He has struck out 118 times while only drawing 37 walks in his 101 games played. That strikeout total is tied for third highest among shortstops and 28th across the entire league. His OPS is 0.751 for an OPS+ of 109.

Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA suggests Adames has changed something as his expectations do not fit in with his previous statistical trends. PECOTA projects a player’s future performance using sabermetric analysis. It is commonly thought of as one of the best systems to forecast a player’s performance.

So, using this resource, I was able to create the following table. An important note for my analysis is that I normalized the number of games played in order to determine the predicted values with the same number of games played as this year. In addition to this, I assumed a linear approach to the percentile correlation to the projected statistics. This is not how it actually is done, but without access to formulae, this allows for a reasonably close answer, with an error of less than 2% in almost all cases. The percentile stated is a comparison against all projections of Willy Adames, with 50% signifying some sort of average expected performance.

It is apparent there is a variation in his play this year to what was expected from this data. Obviously, one must expect some disparity between what was expected, but with percentiles less than 1% or greater than 99%, something is seriously different. 

Adames’ home run total is fantastic, exceeding the 99th percentile of what was expected, but other outputs are, suffice to say, not great. He is not getting on base, and striking out at a disproportionate rate, even with elevated career rates. His OBP is the lowest seasonal total in his career. 

Willy Adames has struck out a lot, but with the overarching sentiment amongst baseball executives in the era of sabermetrics that striking out a ton isn’t always bad; three true outcome players hold great value. The thing with Adames is that he is basically a two true outcomes player, as he rarely walks. He’s striking out 26.6% of the time against 8.3% walk rate. This strikeout rate is actually slightly below his career average of 28.2%, but higher than league average of 22.8%. His career walk rate is 9.1% and league average is 8.5%.

As a result of this, Adames’ overall offensive production is down and his OPS is not only lower than last year's, it's lower than PECOTA (and certainly Brewer faithful) expected. So what is going on?

It looks like he has made a distinct change in the approach. His launch angle is higher than any other year, at 19.7 degrees on average, over 5 degrees higher than his career average of 14.1 degrees, and over 7 degrees higher than MLB average of 12.1 degrees. As a result, Adames is hitting a fly ball most often, at a rate of 37.5%, up from his career average of 28.7%. This comes at the chagrin of ground balls, down to a rate of 34.0% from the 41.7% career average. 

Clearly, there is a need for change with Willy Adames, but it is hard to explicitly prescribe a cure. Christian Yelich was seemingly “fixed” with a change in the batting order and some mechanical tweaks. Would moving Willy from the two hole, where he has batted in 98 of his 101 games, help him? And if so, where to? It is obvious that he needs to try to get over the ball, but would something else expedite this? Let me know what you think in the comment section!