A Walk? Right Now, Tyler Naquin Would Rather Drive

Tyler Naquin’s career arc features enough ups and downs to make Cedar Point jealous. But what is causing this latest upward trend? Is it sustainable? Or are there more twists and turns ahead?

Entering Friday, Tyler Naquin had walked just once this season.

It came in his seventh game of the campaign, a 6-1 win over the Pirates on Aug. 19. Pittsburgh reliever Tyler Bashlor handed out the free pass in the eighth. Naquin would score from first base just one batter later.

You'd think a walk shortage would severely cut into a hitter's production. If you looked at Naquin's .300 on-base percentage, you'd be right, if just for a moment. But then you'd travel just one column to the right along Naquin's slash line and note the .582 slugging percentage.

Well, that's one way to explain how the left-handed hitter, despite just one walk in 2020, could serve as one of the Indians' top bats this year. Extra-base pop.

But just one walk? What the ...

Taking up residence again in the properly maligned Indians outfield following his season-ending ACL injury in 2019, Naquin has slashed .284/.300/.582. He's somehow overcome just one walk in 70 plate appearances by slashing six doubles, a triple and slugging four homers in 19 games. 

His .299 ISO (focuses just on extra-base hits), is well above his .180 career mark.

His two-homer game on Wednesday in Kansas City also provided the five runs Cleveland would need to win the series and head into the weekend as the top team in the AL Central.

Naquin's 126 wRC+ in 2020 (100 is league average) would look good anywhere. It shines bright enough to give you sunburn when compared to the rest of the Tribe outfield's production.

What does that mean in a sample size that would, in a normal year, be nearing 1/8 of the season? Probably not enough to make any proclamations, especially for a player who re-emerged as very useful in 2019 but hasn't been well above average offensively since his rookie year of 2016. 

But this isn’t a normal season. It’s small sample sizes that will determine more fates than ever before in the pandemic-shortened campaign.

To avoid a "is this real?" discussion transforming into some "what is reality?" rabbit hole better kept for your 3 a.m. Youtube browsing, let's just peek under the hood to see how the 29-year-old has been producing. From there, it doesn't take much to see some notable items in the profile.

His hits would need to be meaningful to overcome a 1.4 percent walk rate. That's low even by his own standards. 

It's the fourth-lowest rate by anyone's standards this season.

Normally that'd be reason cynicism. Full stop.

But Naquin isn't just swinging wildly like a frantic gardener who just uncovered a beehive. His chase rate (32.9) -- the percentage of swings on pitches outsize the zone -- is actually below his career rate (34.6). 

At the same time, while also seeing fewer pitches in the zone, he's swinging at strikes more frequently, and he's missing fewer of them.

Simply, it's better to swing at strikes.  The league is slugging .504 on pitches inside the zone this year. That drops to .206 on those outside.

Meanwhile, his overall swing rate of 51.9 percent is right in line with his career. 

In other words, it's not a matter of more swings. He's just been a bit more judicious with them.

And by putting those balls in play earlier in the count, he hasn't been given many opportunities to walk. He's only reached a three-ball count in eight of his 70 plate appearances. That's 11.4 percent, compared to the league rate, nearly 22 percent.

Even when he has expanded his zone, the majority of those swings have come on pitches below the zone, the sort of pitches that Naquin can still handle. 

For example, let's focus on the highlighted portion of the zones below.

Only a small portion of the offerings in those boxes would end up strikes, but Naquin has managed to slug .560 on the 51 pitches tossed there.

Yet, pitchers keep putting them there, particularly offspeed and breaking balls. Here, you can see where the majority of those types of offerings have been to Naquin.

When you combine an ability to handle lower pitches with the fact that Naquin is slugging .625 against breaking balls and .933 against offspeed pitches (compared to a .417 slugging against "fastballs"), we can see the league trend of throwing fewer fastballs might play in his favor.

Now, we're talking such limited samples that we'd be pumping the brakes pretty hard in a typical year. But even a full 60-game season might not be enough to determine anything of substance.

Regardless, Naquin is hitting the ball with the same sort of authority we saw in his encouraging rookie year and through stretches last year.

While his overall average exit velocity is hanging around his typical career norm, more important, the percentage of balls he hits 95 mph or harder -- Statcast defines that contact as a hard-hit ball -- is up to 46.2, which would put him tied for 50th-best in baseball with Mookie Betts.

That rate is also higher than his 2016 season (45.1 percent).

But hitting the ball harder at a higher rate wouldn't mean as much if the contact found its way into the ground. To Naquin's credit, a shift toward raising his average launch angle slightly, which seemed to begin last year (12.4 degrees), has continued to climb a bit, sitting at 14.1 degrees.

That hasn't necessarily resulted in more fly balls, but his line drive rate is up four percent from his career mark. That means more of his hard contact is being driven over the head of infielders.

And it's a lot harder to get an extra-base hit on a grounder.

Some of this is also reflected in his barrels.

His barrel rate per plate appearance -- a barrel is Statcast's ideal combination of launch angle and exit velocity -- also sits at 11.5 percent, which would position him as the 12th best in baseball if he qualified.

Naquin would sit between Luis Robert and Matt Chapman.

Are these all signs that Naquin has emerged as a legitimate threat in the Tribe's production-desperate outfield? Or, are these just numbers that have been inflated by a good two weeks at the plate?

To that, I throw up my arms and point to the calendar.

It's 2020. I have no idea.

Can Naquin continue to succeed with a microscopic walk rate? Probably not. And the sample size is so small, he's yet to even contribute a hit against a left-hander in nine at-bats.

This isn't a lot to go on here.

But some of this is proof that if Naquin focuses his attention to the right pitches in the right locations and limits his desire to chase, driving the ball when making contact, his ability to help a run-starved unit won't be a mirage.