Jake Lamb, Arizona Diamondbacks
Shoulder issues prevented Jake Lamb an opportunity to notch a third consecutive season of 25-plus homers. It was an awfully frustrating campaign for Arizona’s newest first baseman, as his strikeout rate spiked to 27.3% and his wRC+ plummeted to 78 in 238 plate appearances.
The good news is that Lamb’s 42.5% hard-hit rate was on track to be a career high. The bad news is that his 18.5% soft-hit rate was also on track to be a career worst. If we add on to that, his ground-ball rate (51.4%) and fly-ball rate (30.0%) went in the opposite direction of the year before, where those numbers were each hovering around 40.0%.
While Lamb’s performance against four-seamers has gone down each year since 2016 (181 wRC+ to 162 to 101), he’ll also need to find a way to adjust to changeups again. After posting lackluster numbers in 2015 (68 wRC+) and 2016 (54 wRC+), he mashed that offering in 2017 to the tune of a 143 wRC+ and .342 ISO. He was obviously hampered by injuries, but it was back to the old story in 2018 (38 wRC+ and .028 ISO).
About Matt Musico
Matt Musico currently manages Chin Music Baseball and contributes to The Sports Daily. His past work has been featured at numberFire, Yahoo! Sports and Bleacher Report. He’s also written a book and created an online class about how to get started as a sports blogger. You can sign up for his email newsletter here.
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