Nolan Arenado’s Slump Adds to Cardinals’ Woes

Nolan Arenado could have won the National League Most Valuable Player award last year, though he lost out to teammate Paul Goldschmidt, who gave chase to the Triple Crown and finished with the more eye-catching traditional stats (but slightly lower fWAR and bWAR). But while Goldschmidt has been similarly productive this year amid the Cardinals’ dreadful start — indeed, his three homers on Sunday helped end the team’s eight-game losing streak — the same can’t be said for Arenado, who’s off to an uncharacteristically bad start.

Between compiling their worst record through 35 games in half a century and making the puzzling decision to move marquee free agent Willson Contreras off of catcher, the Cardinals are such a mess that I mentioned Arenado only in passing on Monday. He’s nowhere near the team’s biggest problem, yet at the same time, the 32-year-old third baseman is hitting just .232/.282/.326 for a 69 wRC+ thus far. His 82-point drop from last year’s 151 wRC+ is the majors’ second-largest among players with at least 400 plate appearances last year and 100 this year:

Arenado, whose 207-point drop in slugging is also the majors’ largest at these cutoffs, isn’t the only MVP-caliber player struggling. Judge, the reigning AL MVP, hasn’t come close to replicating last year’s astronomical numbers, though he’s still an above-average hitter. Machado, who finished between Goldschmidt and Arenado in the NL MVP voting (and edged both in WAR), is scuffling nearly as badly as his fellow third baseman. Several recent All-Stars besides those players (Benintendi, Giménez, Marte, Rodríguez, and Springer) are represented above as well. That’s baseball, Suzyn.

To look at Arenado’s stats is to play “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” because a whole lot of his numbers are out of whack relative to last year and his longer track record. The overarching theme that emerges upon closer inspection is that he’s losing the battle to control the strike zone, and his contact is the poorer for it. Swing rates start stabilize to at 50 PA, so it’s noteworthy that he’s offering at 51.9% of all pitches, his highest rate since his 2013 rookie season, and up from 48.4% last year. Likewise when it comes to his 40.2% chase rate, up from 36.1% last year. His 11.4% swinging-strike rate is his highest ever, up nearly three points from last year’s 8.6%, and two points above his norm.

All of that fits into the pattern of a player who’s pressing. That wouldn’t be surprising under the circumstances, which in this case include a reigning division champion that even amid a two-game winning streak — the second of which Arenado sat out on Monday night — owns the NL’s worst record at 12–24.

Pitch-wise, Arenado’s whiff rates are particularly elevated against four-seam fastballs (20.7%, up from last year’s 13.3%), changeups (34.6%, up from 23.2%), sliders (33.8%, up from 25.6%), and curves (26.3%, up rom 20.6%), which together account for about 72% of the pitches he’s seen. Overall, his 20.8% strikeout rate is the highest of his career, six percentage points above his career rate and nearly double last year’s 11.6% rate. Meanwhile, his 6.7% walk rate is his lowest mark since 2015, and down 1.7 points from last year.

So, he’s making contact less, and when he does, it’s not great. Arenado is hitting the ball on the ground more than ever, and his average exit velocity, barrel rate and hard-hit rates are the lowest of his career:

I’ve only gone back as far as 2019, but the data covers some peaks and valleys, starting with that 41-homer season, then a rough and unhappy 2020 that was marred by his playing though an AC joint injury. His 2021 was a partial rebound, with 34 homers but just a .312 on-base percentage and 113 wRC+, down 18 points from his 2017–19 run. Then came last year’s stellar campaign, in which he hit .293/.358/.533 and set career bests with a 150 wRC+ and 7.3 WAR.

The only other time besides this season in which Arenado has ever had a groundball rate above 40% was in his 2013 rookie season; playing half his games in Coors Field, he quickly learned the advantage to getting the ball off the ground and into the thin air. He’s had only one other season with a groundball-flyball ratio above 1.0, and that was in 2018 (1.03, with a 39.9% groundball rate).

Through the years, Arenado’s Statcast numbers have generally been pretty middling. Aside from last year’s barrel rate, which placed in the 53rd percentile, he hasn’t had an exit velo, barrel rate, or hard-hit rate in the 50th percentile or above since 2019. Even in the best of times, he makes a lot of bad contact — balls that Statcast classifies as weak, topped, or under but that are somewhat elusive in their exact parameters. Via the Baseball Savant Pitch Highlighter link (under Visuals from the main Baseball Savant menu — I share this because I can’t find it without breadcrumbs), you can get a feel for them via those fancy interactive radial graphs, where rollovers illustrate each type of contact and how the hitter has performed within that category. For example, here are screenshots for his topped balls — those with low exit velocity and mostly negative launch angles — for 2022 and ’23:

If you squint at the stat lines near the bottom, you can see that he’s hitting more of those as a percentage of his batted balls, and that his batting average on them has fallen by nearly half. Indeed, balls in the weak, topped, and under buckets rarely go for hits. Last year, those accounted for 60.4% of Arenado’s batted ball events, on which he hit .103 and slugged .155; for 2015–22, they make up 60.8% of his batted balls, with a .136 AVG and .194 SLG. This year, they make up 64.8%, his highest rate save for his dismal 2020 (71.1%), and on those, he’s hitting and slugging just .087; he’s actually a bit unlucky on those, given his .124 xBA and .155 xSLG. That’s contributing to him falling short of his overall expected numbers for the first time in the Statcast era:

I’ve only shown the the past four seasons plus this one here, but the trend goes back to 2015. I don’t know if that’s a Coors Field thing or if Arenado has lived a charmed life, but every single year, he outdid his xBA, xSLG, and xwOBA, a trend that continued to St. Louis. Five times in eight seasons, his slugging percentage was at least 81 points higher than expected. This year, for the first time, he’s lagging behind his expected stats, and so his 91-point year-to-year drop in xSLG becomes the aforementioned 207-point drop in actual slugging percentage.

Even with that in mind, Arenado is struggling as badly as he ever has in terms of power. Here’s his rolling xSLG over 75 PA:

Arenado has taken some of the blame for the team’s slow start and vaguely acknowledged issues with his swing. Via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Lynn Worthy:

Arenado’s timing has been out of whack at the plate, and he has been trying to sort through issues with his swing and described himself as “a little disconnected” mechanically.

“It’s unfortunate,” Arenado said. “I think if we were winning, I probably wouldn’t be worried about it so much. But the fact that we’re losing, it feels a lot worse because I’m not playing my part. That comes with the territory, I guess. I expect to fix it. I’m working hard on it, and hopefully today is a good day.”

On the timing note, the slugger’s performance against four-seam fastballs particularly stands out and also points back to the SLG-xSLG gap:

Arenado’s slugging percentage against all four-seamers has fallen off by 201 points relative to last year, yet his xSLG against them is down only 31 points. His general performances against the pitch have varied, often out of step with the rest of his lines (note the strong 2020 in an otherwise weak year, followed by a drop-off in what was otherwise a much stronger campaign). A peek at his performances against heaters 95 mph or higher shows more consistent work from 2019 to ’22, with a drop this season that may just owe to sample size. He’s actually whiffing less against those pitches, and his xSLG on them is actually higher, all of which brings to mind Ben Clemens’ Abreu-flavored investigation into year-to-year correlations (or the lack of them) when we get this granular. Short version: whiff rates on four-seamers of 95 mph or more correlate reasonably well from year to year, but run values — which summarize the quality of contact as well as the swings-and-misses — don’t.

All of which is to say that I don’t think this is the beginning of the end for Arenado. He’s in a bad slump that may owe something to the self-induced pressure of not producing as his team hits the skids, but that’s not to suggest he won’t get out of it. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that fixing his swing is still probably easier to do than remaking a lackluster rotation that’s scapegoating the new catcher.