Written by David Schoenfield at ESPN.com
It’s not that Manny Machado has been terrible. I mean, he has 10 home runs, takes his walks and plays good defense. It’s hard to complain about a player on pace for 36 home runs and 90 RBIs. But let’s complain! He’s 44 games into his season and hitting .218 with a below-average .308 OBP. Machado is supposed to be one of the game’s elite stars, yet he ranks 106th out of 108 qualified regulars in wOBA. His recent skid — he has hit .183 with four RBIs in his past 14 games — coincides with the Baltimore Orioles’ own skid. Wednesday’s 4-3 loss to the Minnesota Twins dropped them to 3-10 in their past 13 games.
Machado is clearly in a funk, one of those stretches when you’re not seeing the ball, guessing wrong or flailing at pitches off the plate. He had a terrible at-bat in the ninth inning of Tuesday’s loss to Ervin Santana, swinging at three pitches out of the zone, going down on a pitch that bounced a foot in front of home plate. Now, we’re still early in the season, and a weeklong hot stretch could pull his numbers back up to the triple-slash line we’re used to seeing from him, but I noticed even Orioles fans are a bit frustrated. Some tweeted about Machado, 24, not running out a grounder.
Allow me a “get off my lawn” moment here and a theory about Machado.
We all know the direction of the game in recent years: more strikeouts, more home runs, fewer singles. As Joe Sheehan just wrote in his newsletter, back in 1995 we saw strikeouts outnumber singles for the first time, with a difference of 313. Last season the difference was 11,443. This year, the projected pace is more than 13,000 more strikeouts than singles. Does that sound insane? It’s a little insane. I’m with Joe: I don’t think it’s good for the game, if only because it’s a less interesting game with less variety in the types of action that occur. That’s another column.
Back to Machado. Everyone wants to hit home runs. Machado, I think, is trying to hit home runs every time up. Remember his first full season in 2013? He began that season at 20 years old and was spraying doubles all over the place. At the All-Star break, he was hitting .310 with 39 doubles. The league caught up to him in the second half, but given his age and ability to make hard contact, I saw a guy who could develop into another Edgar Martinez. Maybe not with Martinez’s plate discipline, but he had the same hand-eye coordination and ability to go foul pole to foul pole, and to hit .300 with a ton of doubles and 25-plus home runs as he matured.
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