FanPost

Javi and his terrible whiffs

Watching Javi step into the batter’s box and have an at-bat is at least on par with getting kicked in the nuts… at least so far for the season. The man literally seems to be swinging at every single pitch. "I get that we signed up for this but this seems to be a little much!" "He’s completely lost at the plate". I’m right there with you. Most of his AB’s are borderline unwatchable. Feels like whenever he comes in you know for a fact that he’s going to strike out. However, we’ve all been in a miserable month lately. The Tigers have been on an incredibly unfortunate run with injuries and underperformance. It’s not much of a leap of faith to think that we may be a little biased and negative towards Javi… so, is something really up with Javi or is this yet another shower of negativity that’s unjustified?


Javi’s career started right as statcast was introduced (2015) so I’ve got a goldmine of data to work with here for this search. The first thing I decided to research was his swing rate at waste pitches.

Waste pitches are off the plate or high by a good mile! These are the exact pitches you would expect a blind child to have the discipline to take. Or maybe even a SS by the name of Javier. I looked at waste pitches thrown to batters in 2022 and looked at the Whiff% of each player just so I could see where we stacked up. Javi has faced 59 such pitches this season so I made the minimum 50 pitches so we can have comparable sample sizes. There were 36 such players that met the requirements… here’s the chart sorted by whiff%:

Yikes! Javi you good? A 27.12% whiff rate on waste pitches! That is by almost 10% the worst in the league so far! That is disgusting! Let me pull up some of his worst whiffs so you can see what I mean by waste pitches:

Javi Whiff#1

Javi Whiff#2

That’s if you somehow needed a reminder of how ugly this man’s swings can be…

But alright let’s give him the benefit of the doubt… maybe he’s always been this undisciplined! Let’s check out his whiff% on waste pitches for all his other years:

Well crap. That’s much much more of an outlier. In fact his 2021 season was actually his most disciplined season by this measure… that’s gross. To further expand on this I decided to look at all his monthly splits on fangraphs to see how his may stacks up compared with others throughout his career. Here’s a (spoiler) not so fun chart:

Yes you read that right. By wRC+ this is actually his worst month ever in his entire career. And before you call me out for the sample size, how about this: The average number of plate appearances per month in Javi’s career is about 88. This May he has 81. So it’s not exactly a sample size issue. To be fair his BABIP of .203 for this entire month hasn’t exactly been ideal but there’s plenty of other months in here where he’s done significantly better than a 25 wRC+ with comparable BABIPs. The one thing that this chart does tell me that gives me some hope is that he is in fact streaky. He’s probably overdue to have a 150 wRC+ soon. Or at least that’s what we’ll tell ourselves as Tigers fans for the rest of the season…


This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of the <em>Bless You Boys</em> writing staff.