This feature is primarily supposed to be about pitchers, but since Pedro Alvarez is struggling and a hot topic of discussion right now, I thought it might be a good idea to turn the focus to him for a day. The question we’re going to start with is, “What does Pedro Alvarez do when he’s hitting that he doesn’t do when he’s slumping?” First, I broke his career down into five parts; his ugly skid to open his Pirate career, the hot streak that immediately followed it, the second funk he dropped into as the summer wore on, his hot September finish to 2010, and his bad April in 2011. Then, I used Joe Lefkowitz’s PitchFX tool to generate strike zone maps for Pedro for each split. Here’s Pedro against right-handed pitching when he’s slumping, first from June 16 through July 2 of last year, then from August 8th through September 4th, and finally for this April. 
Quick diagnosis: when Pedro’s in a slump, he doesn’t hit much of anything that’s offspeed, up in the zone, or in on his hands. Here are the maps from Pedro’s two hot streaks in 2010, from July 3rd through August 7th and September 4th through the end of the year. 
Most of these sample sizes are extremely small (you can right click the maps to enlarge them) and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think about pitching nearly as much as I think about hitting and so I’m more hesitant to draw a strong conclusion here, but what I think Pedro may be doing this early in the year is sitting on breaking pitches on the outside part of the strike zone. Even though Pedro doesn’t really hit all that well on pitches over the inside part of the plate, righties love to pound him away and when he’s hot, he’s getting the bat through the zone and destroying both fastballs and offspeed stuff on that part of the plate.
When he slumped in 2010, he barely hit any breaking balls at all. He was most likely not used to pitchers unafraid to throw breaking balls in any situation and sitting on fastballs and getting caught off balance by just about any offspeed pitch. This year, he seems to be having equal trouble with fastballs and breaking balls (again: small sample sizes abound here and there’s some straw-grasping going on). My hypothesis is this: Pedro remembers the way he struggled with breaking balls at various times last year and is sitting on that low-and-away offspeed pitch that righties seem to love to feed him. Unfortunatley, this has him tied in nots when pitchers throw fastballs, which gets him behind in the count, which is just bad news for Pedro.
I know that lots of people are wigging out about Alvarez to various degrees right now, but I’m still not all that worried about him. He went from awful to awesome in pretty short order before both of his hot streaks last year and I still think that this is all just a matter of getting him to take a step outside his head and stop worrying so much. Honestly, I think once he gets one or two into the gap or over the fence, he’ll be fine.
According to Lefkowitz’s charts, he’s getting a first pitch fastball about half of the time. Sit on that pitch, Pedro, stop worrying about curveballs, and let everything else take care of itself.
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