Analyzing Phillies Outfielder Odubel Herrera and His Two-Face Season

Phiillies outfielder Odubel Herrera is apparently a split personality; he’s two different hitters. However, it’s not a potion like Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde that brings about the change. It’s an All Star invite that turns this disciplined hitter into a wild, free swinging maniac who roams the batters box uncontrollably swinging his bat at nearly any pitch thrown his way.

So far this season Odubel Herrera has put together both the best half season’s you’ll see and one of the worst half seasons ever.

For what’s officially labeled the “First Half,” Odubel was on fire. He hit a robust .294 but that’s not what was impressive. What really stood out was his ability to reach base, to the tune of a .378 percentage. And even that number was dragged down by a slow June and a worse start of July. In the first two months of the season El Turito was getting on base at an amazing .425 rate.

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But then around the break he started to cool off and things got really bad, well, not really bad but not really good either. He had a stretch of 63 games where he hit .243/.308/.372. Everything he had going from the first half of the season just evaporated.

So what happened?

Well, for one, he started swinging a whole lot more – and not at pitches in the zone either. He only swung at pitches out of the zone 33% of the time before the break, but that dramatically increased to 38% afterward.

And something strange happens on those swings – when he was only swinging at the 33% rate he was making contact on those out of the zone pitches at a 68.5% rate then, when he started swinging more he started making less contact, 66.4%. Where swinging more should result in more contact it was translating to less and his swinging strike rate went up.

For pitches actually in the strike zone, he swung at a 68.7% rate prior to the break and 66.8% after. And while he was making the same contact with those pitches his overall contact percentage had slipped due to the out of zone swings.

There’s also a very telling stat in the percent of pitches he saw in the zone before and after the break. In the first half 43.5% of the pitches he saw were actually in the strike zone but after the break pitchers became a bit more careful and were only throwing him strikes 5.5% less often at 38% of the time.

The biggest difference is that he was swinging at more of those pitches when he should have been taking them. It’s telling to see the difference in his two different approaches: take more pitches that aren’t strikes and he gets on base more, either via hit or walk but when he doesn’t he simply just makes more outs.

So what was actually happening when he put the ball in play?

In the first half he was hitting a lot of line drives to the opposite field and it was working for him. He was hitting line drives at a 23.3% rate and hitting to the opposite field 37.6% of the time, almost 13% more than he was pulling it. But after the break the line drive rate dropped by 4% to 19.1% and he began to pull the ball more, by almost the exact rate his opposite field batted balls dropped. His opposite field batted balls went from the 37.6% rate down to 31.3% and his pulled rate jumped from 24.7% to 30.6%.

Sep 20, 2016; Philadelphia, PA, USA; Philadelphia Phillies center fielder Odubel Herrera (37) hits a single against the Chicago White Sox third inning at Citizens Bank Park. Mandatory Credit: Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports /

To make it even worse, he started to lose some of that good contact he was making. There’s an approximate 6% drop in his “medium contact rate” from the first to second half and there’s about a 5% jump in “soft contact.”

One last thing here on the batted balls, as a speedy runner Odubel can generate a lot of infield ground ball hits, indeed its one of the many weapons at his disposal. While his line drive rate dropped in the second half his ground ball rate increased rather dramatically by 7.5%. But what’s really telling from half to half is how his infield hit percentage dropped by 2.3%. Again there’s a strange anomaly here where despite having more chances, by almost a 10% margin, he was reaching base less.

So, you know what’s really awesome? Odubel has been on fire over the last seven days. Over that time he’s hitting .545/.545/.955. Why is that awesome, besides, you know, just being awesome? Because it gives us a chance to look and see what he’s changed and to pinpoint even further how he can be successful.

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Over that time span he’s gone back to not swinging at balls out of the zone. He’s been swinging at only 32.6% of those pitches and he’s staying in the zone 64.5%. And his contact rate is unbelievable at an overall 82.9% but when he swings at pitches in the zone it’s an astronomical 90%. He’s making good solid contact and hitting line drives over 26% of the time. He hasn’t walked but it’s mainly because he hasn’t needed to. Pitchers will see what we’re seeing and the walks will start to come if he can manage to not repeat his mistakes and swing at balls.

Odubel is a young guy, and while that’s not an excuse it can be a reason for his mid-season troubles. Perhaps he wanted to change his approach and try it a different way or maybe he just didn’t realize what was making him successful and what earned him that All Star invite in the first place.

As a Phillies fan, one can only hope that he makes the connection between what works for him and what doesn’t. If he does, he could be a massive piece of this teams next competitive stretch.

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Analyzing Phillies Outfielder Odubel Herrera and His Two-Faced Season

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