Does Andrew McCutchen need a higher spring workload?

Andrew McCutchen has had some difficult early months in recent seasons. Is a light Spring Training workload to blame?

Andrew McCutchen has had some bad starts over the past several years. Invariably, the same debate crops up as he works his way through it.

The argument? That the Pittsburgh Pirates’ perennial MVP candidate should be getting more work in Spring Training. Is that truly the case, or is it much ado about nothing?

First, here are selected April statistics for McCutchen over the past four years. These are set against his total plate appearances during Grapefruit League play.

Though I included 2015 spring statistics, it’s almost tempting to throw those out completely. As we now know, McCutchen was dealing with a lingering knee issue that was still a factor during the worst April of his career. If we do remove those numbers from the equation, then we are left with a completely different profile. The picture that is left is one of typical slow starts, by Andrew McCutchen standards. Each of these seasons shown ended as a top-five NL MVP year, with four straight seasons of top three finishes. In his 2013 MVP campaign, McCutchen had arguably the worst non-injury affected April of his career, yet rode consistent monthly performances afterwards to snag the award.

In 2014, McCutchen ended up leading the National League in both on base percentage (.410) and OPS (.952) after getting off to good starts in both areas despite a sub-.300 average in April. The one consistent factor throughout McCutchen’s “bad” April months is his strikeout rate. In seeing these rates hovering around his career rate of 20.2 percent, one can easily see that any slow starts suffered by the center fielder are not due to timing issues.

As if we needed any further indication that Spring Training performance is somewhat meaningless and random, the above completely vindicates that thinking. Both of those seasons saw similar spring workloads, but radically different April results.

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