What's up with Mitch Garver?

Mitch is a man with a plan...that he isn't quite executing.

Mitch Garver received his 2023 World Series ring on Monday in Arlington. It was well-deserved, especially after an October that saw him hit three Postseason home runs and drive in 14 over 60 plate appearances.

He’s hit one home run and driven in four in his 80 plate appearances in 2024.

It wasn’t surprising then to hear him, in the lead up to receiving a ring the size of a lacrosse ball, describe it as an opportunity to “turn the page,” to get a chance to officially revel in what he did last year and formally move on to 2024.

While it wasn’t surprising, it’s also like…man, I get it, but you are really looking for anything to serve as a turning point, aren’t you bud? Boy have I been there.

He went 0-for-10 with four strikeouts and a walk in the series.

I liked Garver a lot coming into 2024, due in large part to his approach—yeah, he draws a walk, but he is aggressive and punishing on pitches he can do damage on. Now, the thought of having $12 million of another mid payroll going his way in 2025 sounds awful.

So, what’s going on?

A good place to start is with what he’s trying to do. I mentioned the approach above, but here it is in Garver’s own words, as told to reporters following his first home run in the series finale against the Reds.

“Dominating fastballs is kind of my game plan, being able to lay off the spin…There were a few mechanical adjustments—and I was chasing balls way off the plate, which I don't normally do…It's just something that I've built into my swing and my approach. Like, I won't chase off the plate as much as I chase up or down.”

Lay off the breaking stuff, hit the fastballs. Simple enough.

One of my favorite baseball quotes ever comes from one-time Tacoma Rainiers manager Roy Howell, who I spoke to a long time ago for a piece on Ty Kelly. It’s not in the piece, but I remember it clear as day.

“The best way to hit the curveball,” he said in the cramped manager’s office at Cheney, “is to not miss the fastball.”

Uh, der. Baseball is easy.

Dominating fastballs

Let’s start where Howell finishes that quote, with not missing the fastball. That’s Garver’s game, by his own admission. Dominate fastballs, lay off the spin.

Is he dominating fastballs? No. No he is not.

To illustrate the point, we’re not even going to look at all fastballs. We’re going to look at fastballs that are, in technical parlance, right down the dick.

Data comes courtesy of Baseball Savant, looking exclusively at fastballs in the heart of the plate. These are fastballs that are anywhere in off the “shadow” of the strike zone. It’s the purple part below.

Compared to last year, everything is down. Down bad. Well, except for the number of punishable fastballs he’s getting. And whiffs. Those are both up. Eek.

Not shown in these numbers, there’s another interesting figure—swing rate. Part of dominating these types of fastballs, and he knows this, is attempting to dominate them.

Garver’s swing rates on fastballs in the heart of the plate:

• 69.6 percent in 2023

• 58.2 percent in 2024

That’s a really steep drop.

Quick aside here: people often look at the figures like the ones in the bullets and then the table above that and say, for example, “Garver’s whiff rate on fastballs down the middle is up seven percent” and that would be wrong.

When we go back up to that whiff figure in the table—jumping from 12.1 percent to 18.8 percent—Garver’s whiff rate on fastballs down the middle is up about seven percentage points.

Changing the math instead of the language, Garver’s whiff rate on fastballs in the heart of the plate is up 60 percent. That’s real bad.

When he does make contact, the contact is also worse.

In terms of pop-ups and balls pounded directly into the ground, Garver has nearly matched his totals for 2023 already here in 2024.

In terms of improving, this is where Garver must be better. The plate discipline needs work, obviously, but he must attack fastballs and do damage on them.

Right now, the swing rate is down and the quality of contact is, too.

So, how about the other half of the strategy?

Laying off the spin

I hate to tell you, it’s not great. I mean, it shouldn’t be surprising.

This is like when I wrote the Teoscar Hernández piece on chase rate last year—when he’s not going good, he’s probably swinging at bad pitches. And the same is probably true of most players.

Swing decisions are a huge part of hitting and that’s why teams—teams like the Mariners—focus on them when evaluating and coaching players.

Garver would probably be the first one to tell you his swing decisions are a little off.

To mix it up, we’re going to go to the old school Brooks Baseball because I like their charts a little better for this. Or I can’t find the right ones on Baseball Savant. Little of both?

Anyway, we’re going to focus on the really spinny stuff, just pure breaking balls. Garver said he tries to lay off those and hammer the fastballs.

So, is he? As measured by what he does in a good year (last year) and a bad year (this year so far), not quite.

The shift isn’t as dramatic as the one you see on fastball damage, but it’s still noticeable. Also noticeable, though not notable—exactly 62.5 percent swing rate on breaking stuff in the bottom-right corner of the strike zone. Weird!

More seriously, he’s chasing more breaking stuff down and away, but still on the plate. He’s also up on pitches that are both low and off the plate away. The same’s true two patches up, breaking stuff away but thigh-high, though the sample size is so small.

Honestly, the same is true for all of this. There could be a lot of noise in here.

I personally hope it’s all noise.

Or, looking similarly optimistically, that it’s just a timing issue and he’s getting caught in-between.

I wouldn’t fault anyone for worrying a bit, though.

The elephant in the swing

Mitch Garver is 33 years old. I wish I were 33 years old. That’s pretty young, honestly. It’s a rad age to be.

For baseball players, though, at least most of them, the decline is already well underway.

The following graph and some associated ones were recently shared on Twitter by Tom Tango, Senior Data Architect at MLBAM.

via Tom Tango on Twitter

Now, being honest here, the scale of the Y axis obviously dramatizes the drop to an extent. Still, it’s there, and as we know from the pitching side—every single tick counts.

Perhaps this is obvious to most folks, but one of the biggest lessons on ball I picked up from my time at the M’s and a couple trips to document the annual High Performance Camp for prospects, is that there is a relationship or interplay between a player’s swing and their plate discipline.

Plate discipline isn’t only “Hey, quit being a dumbass and swinging at pitches you can’t hit.” Maybe part of it.

But if your swing is slow and/or inefficient—or just a tick slower than it used to be—the time you have to recognize a pitch before you gear up to swing is reduced. Every millisecond earlier you have to swing is a millisecond you didn’t have to evaluate whether or not you even should.

Is this what’s going on with Garver? I have no idea.

The Mariners probably do. Through those Blast Motion bat caps or whatever else, I’m sure they know exactly how hard Garver is swinging.

And it could be that this is just some mechanical stuff he’s working on cleaning up. Or, as mentioned, it could be noise.

Whether the cause is this, that or the other doesn’t ultimately matter that much from the outside looking in.

If this is who Mitch Garver is going forward, that’s a problem. They need him to be a run producer in the middle of the lineup. They need him to be one of their best hitters.

That starts with getting back to accomplishing his plan—dominating fastballs and laying off the spin.