Jack Morris: Joe Mauer should consider changing his hitting approach
Former Twins pitcher and St. Paul native Jack Morris was on the radio with Dan Barreiro on Tuesday, and the subject inevitably turned to current Twins first baseman and St. Paul native Joe Mauer.
Lest you think it was a hot take-fest, it really wasn’t. For the most part, it was a nuanced discussion of Mauer, who turns 34 next week and who started Tuesday on the bench in the midst of a 3 for 18 beginning to his season at the plate.
That said, Morris also wasn’t shy with some criticism when asked by Barreiro about what the Twins have planned for Mauer this year.
“I don’t think there’s any question that Paul (Molitor) wants to give him every opportunity in the world to succeed. He’ll put him in situations now early in the year where he might not face left-handers as much. … If you look at his first week, he made good contact in several of his at-bats. He drove the ball sharply right at people. … When you put that together with a couple of bad at-bats and all of the sudden you’re hitting under .200 and you’re the highest-paid player on the team and you’re the franchise player, people are going to talk. That’s human nature,” Morris said. ” But I know one thing: Paul Molitor believes in him and the organization really believes in him because of his on-base percentage . It drives me absolutely insane when he’ll have guys on first and second and he’s the number 4 hitter who is supposed to drive in runs and he’s happy with taking a walk. That drives me nuts… But you can’t argue with the fact that he’s on base. He got his walk. He just didn’t drive in the run that we needed.”
This is a common lament from Twins fans when it comes to Mauer, though I think most would agree that he is miscast as a No. 4 hitter even if that’s where he started the season in a Twins lineup devoid of a lot of obvious roles.
After Morris made the point about Mauer being content to take a walk, Barreiro dug in a little on Mauer’s pinch-hitting appearance Tuesday — which ended with a soft single that moved the tying run into scoring position in a rally that ultimately fizzled. Barreiro’s critique was that Mauer let some fatter pitches go that could have possibly be driven harder, perhaps into the gap to score the tying run. It was a sincere version of the sarcastic “not a dinger” crowd on Twitter that picks on Mauer for every hit that isn’t a home run. But before we pile on Barreiro for piling on a guy who got a hit, let’s check in on the larger point in play, which Morris expanded on:
“It’s just hard to argue with the way Joe has approached his at-bats. He’s always been a guy to go deep in a count. He’s not worried about hitting early in the count,” Morris started. But then he added: “I can testify as a pitcher your worst pitch sometimes is strike one. … I don’t know how many pitches I threw right down the middle to Wade Boggs early in his career where he wouldn’t even make a pass at it. But later on he realized too many guys are getting strike one to me, and those are the best pitches I’m going to get in my at-bat. I’m going to start swinging at those and he started crushing them. I don’t know when Joe will figure that one out or will be willing to try that, but that’s what frustrates a lot of baseball fans watching him.”
Statistics help back up what Morris said, at least to a degree. For his career, Mauer has only put the first pitch in play in 5 percent of his plate appearances. In 2016, that number was even lower: 4 percent. Brian Dozier, by contrast, put 8.6 percent of first pitches in play last season (including eight of them for home runs).
Career numbers aren’t available for Boggs since Baseball Reference didn’t start tracking that data until 1988, but in that season he put the first pitch in play a Mauer-like 5.1 percent of the time. In 1996, at the tail end of his career, he was hardly a free swinger but his rate had gone up to 6.8 percent that season.
Boggs walked a little less as his career wore on — from once every seven plate appearances through 1991 to once every 8.4 for the rest of his career — but cumulatively he remained a .300 hitter from the season in which he turned 34 to the end of his career.
It’s not a simple as flipping a switch when it comes to changing one’s approach at the plate, but Boggs and Mauer are somewhat similar hitters. Mauer still has value when he gets on base regardless if it’s via a hit or a walk, but Morris might also be onto something when it comes to evolving his approach at this stage of his career.