Sometimes baseball players have slow starts to their season. They’ll slog through the early months of April and May and suddenly their bats will come alive as the weather warms up. For the past eight seasons, Yankee fans have watched as Mark Teixeira has struggled during almost every single April he’s been on the team only to recover, when he’s not injured, and play well for the rest of the season. And this year, while Tex was grappling with some issues during the first month of season, another Yankees player was having an even bigger problem at the dish: Chase Headley.
Headley was one of the worst players in baseball during the first month of the season and that is not hyperbole. He batted .150/.268/.150 and was in the bottom 10, and sometimes even the bottom five, in most offensive categories. Since then, Headley has worked himself out of that atrocious start and is currently, and somewhat quietly, batting .251/.321/.344 with three home runs and 14 RBIs. And while he’s not exactly ripping the cover off the baseball, and has never been known to do that, he is being a lot more consistent.
Before we look at how well he’s been doing at the plate now, let’s take a look back at April for a moment because while his triple slash was pretty putrid, he did walk 10 times while striking out 13 and it wasn’t as if he was going up to the plate and striking out every time he stepped into the box.
Here’s his April spray chart:
Notice how many black dots there are for outs? This probably should have been a sign to all of us that Headley would eventually break out of his doldrums even if it seemed impossible to do at the time. There is a big difference between a guy making contact with the ball, and being somewhat unlucky, and a guy who goes up to the plate and flails away at pitches at bat after at bat.
Here’s his May spray chart:
While there are still a bunch of black dots peppered around the right side of the infield, there are a lot more green dots in the outfield with some blues and reds peppered in there. Headley was making much better contact and finally hitting for a bit of power in May.
Another thing I looked at from both of those months were his swings. Here’s April:
Notice how he’s swinging mostly in the zone, especially in the middle. That trend continued in May but some of the percentages increased a lot.
In his last 30 games, Headley is hitting .304/.357/.451 (31 hits in 102 AB) with two home runs and eight RBI. Broken down even further, he’s hitting .360/.407/.560 with nine hits in his last 25 at bats—the last seven games—and he’s batting .412 off hard pitches (eight of his last nine hits):
When breaking down how Headley performs according to which spot of the lineup he’s slotted into, he excels in the fifth spot. In five games in the fifth spot, he’s batting .300/.333/.450. His worst spot is the ninth spot. He’s batted .211/.250/.263 in 19 at bats (seven games). He’s hit his three home runs while hitting in the fifth, seventh, and eighth slots, and he’s batting .275/.348/.392 in 120 at bats against righty pitchers compared to .213/.277/.267 in 75 at bats against lefties.
So after looking at all of data, I think we can safely assume that Chase Headley is back and will probably not fall back into the way he was performing in April. As a lot of the broadcasters we listen to day in and day out would probably say that “Headley’s not trying to do too much at the plate” and that may actually work in his favor going forward. Can we expect him to hit over .300 for the rest of the season? Probably not, but he has been hovering around and just below that number for well over a month so it’s not totally out of the realm of possibilities. Maybe we can check back in with Headley at the beginning of August to see how he’s doing.
Photo: Tommy Gilligan / USA Today Sports