Did the Yankees unearth Prime DJ lemahieu?
While the actual lemahieu checks the box during rehabilitation assignment, the Yankees received the same type of production. Line drive hits all the fields, with few strikeouts and baseball’s second singles into play.
Paul Goldschmidt, who led the National League with home runs in 2013 and crushed 35 home runs in 2022, could be reinventing himself.
The sample size is small enough to qualify as a blip over a long career, so perhaps the trend will start to change.
But throughout the course of about a month of play, the numbers themselves – using the highest line drive percentage in baseball and the opposite field he used as he has ever been – painted the picture of “professional batters”, coach James Rouson called him in and adjusted the 37 seasons.
“He’s a guy who evolves as a batsman,” Lawson said Friday before having a rare off-night (0-or-5) with the Yankees’ 4-2 series opening loss to the Blue Jays in the Bronx. “He’s the guy who takes in what the game gives him. And I think what he’s looking at is the quality of his bat. He wants to have a good pitch and a good swing.”
According to Goldschmidt himself, the approach has not changed.
“I’m just trying to hit the ball and make him do what it’s trying to do,” Goldschmidt said. “But yeah, that was a little different, in terms of the outcome, I’m not really trying to do anything different.”
Upon entering Play, Goldschmidt owned an .383 batting average that only followed Judge Aaron in MLB. He was first in the majors of multi-hit games (12). He received an eight-game hit consisting of 12 singles, two doubles, a zero triple or home runs before Friday’s 0-FER dropped his average to a still impressive .364.
This is not the usual stat line of slow, single-base moves that entered the season with 362 homers but entered Saturday with just 363.
But yes, the Yankees will absolutely accept this elite average power trade-off.
“If he can continue that during this year, I don’t think we really don’t know what it is. [in terms of end-of-year numbers]. It could be something special. “Rowson said.
Goldschmidt’s most specific changes include his aggression. Battors with a well-earned reputation for pitchers at work have seen a low 3.73 pitch career per plate appearance, falling from the 4.16 career mark.
He’s got less pitch as he tallied a first pitch swing percentage of 24.7% in his first 14 seasons, then swinging on the first pitch at 34.3% of his at-bats and attacking earlier on the count.
What Goldschmidt theorized by shrugging on change was that it reflected the way the pitcher attacked him, not the way the pitcher attacked the pitcher.
He didn’t see a different speed in the sense of his own strike, but he’s seen more pitches of mistakes than usual. His 9.4 “meatball” percentage – it sounds like pitching in the middle of the plate, but it was the best of his career.
The first baseman hit a squeezed cleanup between Ben Rice and Cody Bellinger on Friday, but he was hit behind the regular judge. Perhaps having a runner on the base before him often forced the pitcher into more mistakes.
“I’m definitely a pitcher, they want to move ahead of me,” Goldschmidt said. “But I’m not really thinking about it. I try to get ready every time I step into the box.”
He produced as many attacks as the Yankees could have imagined, but the production itself is far from what the bombers imagined.
Rowson said he’s been asking for many years about the professional approach Goldschmidt takes on plates.
“Slug, all those things – I wonder where he is [he knows] They don’t hit a home run. The pitchers throw home runs,” Rouson said. But I think he’s in a great place where he doesn’t really try to do it. ”
