D-backs Want McCarthy to Work On Swing in Reno
The Diamondbacks optioned struggling outfielder Jake McCarthy to Triple-A Reno yesterday. The young outfielder missed a week of Spring Training with an illness, which put him behind to start the season. Unfortunately he has not been able to catch up, starting the year in a .143/.229/.238 slump in his first 70 plate appearances.
Yesterday Jack Sommers went into detail about McCarthy's slump, including the location of pitches that he's seen this season. The thre main takeaways are that he's seeing more in the shadow areas of the strike zone, as swinging at too many of them too early, and that he's not doing damage on pitches he's getting to hit. When it comes down to getting more pitches in the shadow zone, that's out of his control since that comes down to how well the opposing pitcher is executing his pitches. However his inability to do damage on hittable strikes became an issue.
The biggest issue the D-backs identified for McCarthy was he was not getting off his "A-swing" and was taking more of a "chippy, B-swing" you see with hitters in a two-strike count. By entering protect mode early in the at-bat, not only was he being less selective, he was also not doing damage on contact. For players who have at least 50 PA his 3.14 pitches per plate appearances is the lowest and expected weight on-base average on contact of .334 ranks 134th out of 174 hitters.
With the D-backs looking to take the next step towards contention, the team is now prioritizing performance at the plate rather than development. Initially the team believed McCarthy could fix it at the big league level, but it came to a point where they couldn't wait. With the young outfielder behind as a result of missing a critical week of Spring Training then struggling for four weeks, the team decided the best route forward is for him to get right in Reno then come back and be the impact player he was last season.
"He was struggling. We kind of felt fundamentally with the swing that we were having trouble making anything connect" said general manager Mike Hazen. "We let it go for a while. We were, obviously, because we value what he does for our team and who he is and all the other stuff, we tried to continue to make it work. We felt like we weren’t seeing a ton of progress."
When they made the decision, manager Torey Lovullo told his young outfielder "Look, you can stay here and have a .640 OPS, hit 8 home runs, and have 32 RBI. That's not helping anybody. I think very highly of you, highly enough that you can go down and exceed those numbers and jump beyond them". Lovullo also recalled McCarthy's reaction to being sent down was much different than last year. At that time McCarthy told his manager he thought they were sending down the wrong guy. This time no such argument could be made, and McCarthy accepted the demotion with determination and a "hard hat" mentality to get to work on fixing his swing and approach.
Both Hazen and Lovullo gave their vote of confidence that McCarthy will go down to Reno and make the adjustments necessary to get back to his 2022 form. He will have the chance to get in as many reps as possible to work on the approach and swing without worrying too much about bottom line performance.
