Detroit Tigers: Nick Castellanos is Slumping but Still Hitting the Ball Hard
By Matt Snyder
Detroit Tigers third baseman Nick Castellanos is hitting just .179/.220/.256 in his last ten games but his batted ball exit velocity remains as high as it’s ever been.
Everyone wanted to write about Nick Castellanos a month ago. The Detroit Tigers‘ third baseman saw his OPS peak at 1.045 on May 10.
Eno Sarris of FanGraphs wrote about Castellanos’ improvement in batted ball launch angle on May 16 and how it has led him toward the sweet spot of line drives and home runs.
Since that post was written Castellanos’ results have dipped. In those 20 games he’s hit for rather modest .256/.284/.462 batting line. That .745 OPS is a tick above his career mark, but his quality of contact has remained solid.
In 51 batted ball events across those 20 games, Castellanos has rocketed the ball at an average of 90.5 mph. That’s up a full mile per hour over the velocity Sarris reported during his early season peak.
He’s not hitting the ball quite at the ideal launch angles as he was, but he’s still been hitting in the line drive band (10-25 degree, 100+ mph) nearly 14% of the time, a rate that’s basically double his 2015 average.
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The worst part of his slump, however has come in the last 10 games. Castellanos has hit only .179/.220/.256 in his last 41 PA and, although his line drive launch rate has dipped to 7.8% in the smaller sample, it’s still at least as high as his 2015 rate and he’s maintained his average exit velocity at 90.6 mph.
Even in the midst of a skid, the contact has been hard when it has come. The current problem for Castellanos, however, is making the contact in the first place. He’s struck out 41% of the time in these last 10 games and 29% of the time in the larger 20-game skid.
That could be a sign of pitchers adjusting and throwing fewer pitches in the zone and Castellanos obliging by swinging, or it could be a small sample size blip (there’s probably a separate post in there).
Strikeout rate will be a problem for Castellanos if they persist, but the good news (for now) is that it doesn’t seem to be adversely affecting how hard (or well) he has been hitting the ball.
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He was probably never going to maintain the velocity and launch angle combination that allowed him to hit in the 1.000 OPS range (that’s a big jump for one season), but a low-to-mid .800s OPS is a reasonable expectation if he can bring the strikeout rate back down to 25% or below.