Avisail Garcia, Tampa Bay Rays
The 2017 season was a breakout performance many were waiting for from Avisail Garcia. However, it was worth noting that not much changed within his actual plate approach, which made him a prime candidate to experience negative regression.
That’s exactly what happened in 2018. He did set a single-season career high with 19 dingers despite accruing just 385 plate appearances, but the rest wasn’t pretty. Garcia’s .719 OPS, 92 wRC+, and 0.0 fWAR from this past season looked a lot more like the earlier parts of his career, not the 2017 version of himself (.885, 137, and 4.2, respectively).
He went from being an intriguing piece on a rebuilding club like the Chicago White Sox to a non-tendered player hoping to regain his form in Tampa Bay. One of the many things that’ll need to change is his plate discipline — after finally seeing his chase rate dip below 40.0% in 2016 and 2017, it went back up to 43.9% in ’18, along with a career-worst 18.9% swinging-strike rate.
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