Should the Angels fire Don Baylor?

Having only read the title, I know that many of you have already responded with an emphatic, “YES” to the question the title posed. Such is the stance of most Angels fans when it comes to whichever portion of the roster is struggling. If the rotation stinks, fire the pitching coach. If the bullpen struggles, fire the pitching coach. If the lineup isn’t hitting, fire the hitting coach. You see where I am coming from. However, I actually want to get to the truth about whether or not the Angels should fire Don Baylor.

Generally speaking, the suggestion to fire a coach is a misguided one. Or at least an underinformed one. We fans have almost zero insight into what a hitting or pitching coach actually is doing with the team on a day-to-day basis. We just see that Player X isn’t as good as he used to be, therefore the guy responsible for coaching him either broke him or is failing to fix him or both. In our eyes, that is fireable offense, even if there are other perfectly reasonable explanations (like injury) that explain the struggles that we simply aren’t aware of or are willfully ignorant of.

As such, the easy thing to do would be to look at the lineup on a player-by-player basis to essentially get a plus-minus on the number of hitters who are hitting better versus those who are hitting worse. If the “worse” outnumbers the “better,” FIRE HIM! Or at least that is what the typical process would be, but as I said, there are usually a lot of other factors in play that we aren’t aware.

What we can do is evaluate what we are aware of. For Baylor, that is his much vocalized philosophy of “selective aggression.” That’s basically some PR guy’s way of saying that Baylor wants hitters attacking earlier in counts. That doesn’t mean being more free-swinging, per se, so much as being more proactive on pulling the trigger on balls in the zone. This is a philosophy he never really got to implement much last season due to him breaking his leg early on. It is also a philosophy that has come under fire as the Angels have struggled to get on base this year. So, is it the cause of the Angels’ offensive woes?

So far, the stats don’t indicate that it is. Team OBP is down a full 18 points from 2014 (.322) to 2015 (.304), but a lot of that comes from the team hitting for a worse average. In fact, the team’s walk rate is currently 7.6% when it was 7.8% the year before. That’s a marginal decrease that could easily be explained away by the change in roster personnel. However, this decrease has been at least partially offset by the team cutting their strikeouts down from 20.1% in 2014 to 19.5% this year.

The fact of the matter is that the Angels don’t even appear to be all that more aggressive. They are only seeing .04 fewer pitches per plate appearance and have the exact same overall swing rate as the season before. They are, however, being a bit more selective as their out of zone swing percentage has dropped from 32.1% to 30.4%. With that in mind, I suppose you could say that Baylor’s approach is working.

Only it isn’t working… at all. The Angels offense has cratered in an impressive way despite a better season from Mike Trout (yes, it is possible) and Albert Pujols stumbling into the fountain of youth. Part of the struggles have simply been Matt Joyce being a disaster, Chris Iannetta forgetting how to hit and David Freese. The real difference in the 110 wRC+ the Halos posted in 2014 and the current 96 wRC+ this year is a massive 27 point drop off in BABIP, leaving them with a .278 BABIP, the second-lowest in baseball this year.

It would be easy to chalk that massive BABIP dip up to luck, and honestly, it probably is a lot of bad luck, but we at least have to ask if there isn’t a little bit of that bad luck being created by the “selective aggression.” Perhaps the slightly more aggressive approach earlier in counts is leading to less quality contact. The Halos have seen their hard contact rate drop from 31.0% to 27.9% this year, though the soft contact has remained pretty steady, so the difference could just be noise in differentiating hard contact from medium contact.

Even if you judge Baylor harshly for the BABIP drop, it certainly doesn’t seem like there is just cause to fire Don Baylor. That only makes sense as Baylor is widely regarded as one of the best hitting coaches in baseball for a reason. You can hang the declines of Iannetta, Joyce, Aybar and Cowgill on him if you want, but if you do that you have to credit him for the improvements of Trout and Pujols and the ascension of Johnny Giavotella as well. That’s why that whole line of logic is so dumb in the first place, just like the premise that the Angels should fire Don Baylor. Sorry, folks, I knew Mickey Hatcher and Don Baylor, good sirs, is no Mickey Hatcher.