Texas Rangers: Discipline issues for Adolis Garcia starting to show

Adolis Garcia had the best season of his career and it fell well under the radar with Texas Rangers like Nathaniel Lowe and Corey Seager taking the spotlight instead.

Garcia was traded for my favorite player in the MLB, Cash Considerations, after being Designated for Assignment by the St. Louis Cardinals. He has well-exceeded the performance of Considerations and has made himself a staple in the Texas Rangers outfield.

Adolis Garcia for the Texas Rangers in 2022: 27 HR, 101 RBI, 25 SB, .250 AVG, .756 OPS

Garcia provides a rare mix of power and speed in the outfield which is very uncommon in today’s game. The production we’ve received from him is well beyond our expectations. Garcia broke out in 2021 and his power surge has never left him. Unfortunately, his plate discipline has become a glaring issue that has been boiling under the surface and might be ready to rear its ugly head.

In 2022, Adolis Garcia was bottom 21 or worse in all plate discipline percentiles on stat cast. That includes K% (12th), BB% (21st), Whiff% (8th), and Chase% (9th). This means that despite his numbers when putting the ball in play, he was spending most of his at-bats swinging and missing at junk. Fortunately, this never returned to haunt Garcia as his offensive output remained throughout the season.

This is despite being 13th in the league in CSW% and having the 10th-highest O-Swing% in the 2nd half (40.8%). CSW% is simply the percent of pitches called strikes that Garcia either swung and missed at or was just called for a strike.

RosterResource has Garcia slotted at the four-spot in the Texas Rangers lineup, which profiles well for his swing-and-miss tendencies, but if he could work on getting that number down a few percentage points that could make him the best hitter in the lineup.

He has struggled with this for the last two years of his career so it might be a staple of his makeup as a player. K% is one of the most stable metrics in baseball in terms of year-to-year correlation so this may just be wishful thinking.

Garcia has made himself useful despite these numbers with an OPS+ of 113 last year and a career-high in WAR in 2022 and I expect his numbers to remain solid but would not be surprised at a slight dip in a lot of his on-base related numbers.

https://twitter.com/MLBONFOX/status/1540506466691551236?s=20&t=CQmBvFFrfKrbGwIz604Eig

Adolis Garcia Projection: 153 G, 625 PA, 33 HR, 106 RBI, 28 SB, 185 K, .243 AVG, .292 OBP

I’m expecting an increase in RBI, HR, and SB despite a drop in his OBP because of the pop he has in his bat and league-wide I am expecting a steals increase due to the increased size of the bases. Projections have Garcia at around a .233 AVG but I have it higher simply because I see his BABIP hovering around his career average of .307.

A player like Adolis Garcia can be pretty boom or bust as long as he continues swinging it the way he has, his plate discipline issues shouldn’t crop up quite yet. I see Garcia benefitting from the rule changes having another year of 3+ WAR.