Josh Rojas’s Altered Approach Helped Finish His Transformation

Josh Rojas was all the rage in Spring Training. His .988 OPS in the Cactus League ranked among the top-10 of all NL bats, and it came with an improved swing that allowed him to use his lower-half better to gain exit velocity and power. Then came April. His wRC+ of 88 (12% below league average) was a significant improvement from prior seasons, but it still limited him to a versatile bench bat role at best. While finding those types of players is important, his performance didn’t live up to the hype. Since then, however, Rojas has taken off, racking up more fWAR over the entire season than any other Diamondback. 

The most important change after the first month was an increased aggressiveness at fastballs early in the count. Like most hitters, Rojas does the most damage to heaters. But early in the season, he was swinging at them only 35.5% of the time—less often than he was swinging against breaking or offspeed pitches. Of course, many of these swings came when he was defending the zone with two strikes; with zero or one strike, he only offered at one in four heaters thrown his way. 

The goal of this approach was to wait for a crushable pitch early in the count. For Rojas, that means searching for a hittable pitch on the inner third of the plate while spitting on pitches down and away. On a team-wide scale, this is a strategy that worked in April before a disappointing drop-off in the following months. 

However, strategies like this exist on a pendulum. The trick is to not to be more passive or more aggressive but to find the “just right” balance in between the two. For Rojas, his passivity was putting him in two-strike situations in almost 65% of his plate appearances. Considering the league hits only .169 with two strikes, his approach was limiting his offensive potential. He needed to get more aggressive at early fastballs to give him a better shot at doing damage. He had the swing figured out, but now he needed a better strategy. And he found it:

Josh Rojas’s Swing Percentage against Hard, Breaking, and Offspeed pitches by month of the season

The graph above shows Josh Rojas’s swing rate on hard, breaking, and offspeed pitches. Notably, (as the black line shows), he swung 10% more often at hard pitches in May compared to April. While he’s cut down slightly since then, he’s still remained more aggressive against heaters than he was in the early parts of the season. The results speak for themselves. He has cut the percentage of two-strike plate appearances by almost 10%. Instead, he’s attacking hittable fastballs early in the count. 

Rojas hasn’t allowed his aggressiveness against fastballs to leak over when he sees other pitches. While he swung a bit more against breaking pitches in May, he’s generally avoided becoming more aggressive against non-fastballs. In fact, he’s swung less often at non-fastballs this month than any other month of his career while still being more aggressive against fastballs than he was early in the season. He also hasn’t started hacking at his kryptonite—pitches down and away—more than he was early in the season. Often, a more swing-happy approach to one pitch will lead to naturally more swing-happy approaches at every other type of pitch as well, but Rojas has been able to isolate the adjustment to hittable fastballs.

Rojas and the Diamondbacks certainly hope these results can continue moving forward, but a modest amount of regression is reasonable. His BABIP is sitting at .346, a mark usually reserved for star players like Ketel Marte. It’s fair to predict that number to slide a touch moving forward. Deserved Runs Created Plus (DRC+), a stat which can help filter out the luck element of BABIP to assess a player’s true talent level, sees Rojas more as a league-average hitter this year than one that’s well above-average. That’s still quite valuable if he can maintain it, but it gives him less margin for error in the future.

His versatility does help cushion him in case of some offensive slippage. He’s played games in LF, RF, 2B, 3B, and SS this year. While he’s not stellar at every position, having a player who can cover an injury or a day-off at almost every position on the diamond makes roster construction a lot easier. It can give you the freedom to carry a platoon bat or a defensively limited player like Andrew Young. When someone goes down, the team can call up the best position player in the minors rather than the best position player who plays a certain position. As many teams have noticed, that is incredibly useful even though analysts haven’t found a way to quantify that (yet). 

Rojas’s swing change was the first step to a breakout campaign, but it wasn’t the last. His April passivity against fastballs early in the count held him back. He not only couldn’t do damage on the pitches he’s best against, but he was also forced into two-strike counts. Following the disappointing first month, he attacked heaters more often while remaining disciplined against other pitches. That has led to a breakout campaign that has been a rare bright spot amidst a struggling Diamondback squad, despite his recent injury (broken finger). While he’s probably more of a league average hitter at present, his bat combined with his versatility make him a valuable piece that the D-backs can hold onto for quite some time.

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