Okay, Drake Baldwin being back? Kind of easy. He hit well enough to receive the (dubious?) honor of Player of the Week. (Then he went o-fer against a procession of Padres lefties, but shhh.)
What about Austin Riley? We don’t really need to recap his struggles. Instead, we’ll recap:
- In the final series before the All-Star Break, Riley had a .325 wOBA / .313 xwOBA. That’s not good, more like very average… but considering that he’d had like one good series in six weeks leading up to that point, it was something.
- Rangers, Game One: .585 wOBA, .643 xwOBA… even if there was a homer against a position player pitching.
- Rangers, Game Two: .405 wOBA, .437 xwOBA
- Rangers, Game Three: 1.241 wOBA, .753 xwOBA
- Padres, Game One: .233 wOBA, .826 xwOBA
Basically, Riley came into that last pre-All Star Break series with a .277 wOBA / .287 xwOBA (71 wRC+). Since, he has a .504 wOBA / .507 xwOBA (224 wRC+). Riley’s depths were perilous enough that you may not trust a few
good games from him to signal that he’s back… but that’s what the question is about.
One good sign for me is that his decisions are seemingly going in the right direction. The good version of Riley has fairly consistently chased about 29 percent of the time, and swung at about 72 percent of strikes. This year, both were an issue: a chase rate of over 32 percent (his highest since 2020), but a z-swing rate of two-thirds (by far his lowest ever). In these last seven games, the chase rate has fallen to about 23 percent, but it’s been paired with a 70 percent z-swing. It’s not the greatest seven-game pitch recognition turnaround ever, but it’s apparently helped him a lot.
