Tim Anderson Has Developed Into A Stud And I Love Him
I have watched this clip no less than 100x in the last day or so and I fucking love everything about it. Hitting a baseball is such a cerebral act and a lot of casual fans don't realize it. A lot of people just think, "see ball, hit ball" to put it in extreme layman's terms. Just think about it; you're trying to take a round object and hit another round object moving at you 90+ MPH... unless the pitcher decides he wants to throw a breaking pitch instead, then he has to adjust to a 15ish MPH difference in speed all in about a quarter of a second.
All of what I just said is so cliche, but hitting a baseball is really, really fucking hard. I am obligated to reiterate that because we as fans have a tendency to get frustrated when hitters go into slumps or just stink all together.
But back to the clip above: watching TA not-so-subtly take that little half step towards the front of the box gets my "baseball guy" juices flowing to the absolute fucking max. To those who have no idea what I am talking about, it's actually kinda simple to explain:
TA is so cerebral a hitter and in this instance so confident in his ability to anticipate that a breaking pitch was coming that he took a step towards to front of the box, as you can see in the video at the top of the blog. What this effectively does is take away a solid 4-6" of vertical break off Skubal's breaking pitch because the baseball doesn't have as much distance to travel. This flattens the breaking pitch and makes it that much easier to square up, which TA did to a tune of a 106MPH missile to left, and going back to the original paragraph... he did this in spite of exposing himself to a fastball, but he's so goddamn confident right now that he took a calculated gamble and won that gamble running away.
In the at bat above, a casual fan probably sees a hard hit single to left. Just know that it was MUCH MUCH MUCH more than that. It was a hitter who was a mid-1st round draft pick out of an obscure JUCO in Mississippi that has become one of the premier hitting short stops in baseball by out thinking a pitcher because he is officially that freaking smart a hitter.
A lot of people said there was going to be regression from TA this year. Hand up, I was one of those people. I saw his 2019 BABIP of ~.400 last year and would have guessed that TA would hit more around .270 in 2020 than be at or near the league lead in hitting. But what he's done so far is not only improve as a hitter, but become a fucking stud and it's almost all due to his big brain.
His batted ball profile is scary for someone who's developed into as good a thinker at the dish as he has too:
Exit velocities, hard hit rates, and xBAs like that are almost always going to equate to high BABIPs and high BABIPs usually equate to high batting averages, slugging percentages, and OBPs. That's what we have right now with TA, a HIGH batting average, slugging numbers and OBPs :
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Sure, it's only 61 plate appearances, but in a shortened season, if you're zoned in for 35-40 games (if that), you're gonna have an awesome year. That's what TA7 is gunning for. Extrapolate his 1.0 fWAR through 14 games played over the course of a full season, he's on a 9.0+ fWAR pace. No, he wouldn't have that in a typical year and no, he won't end the season hitting .379, but if he can consistently put up 4.0+ fWAR seasons at SS while being the fuel and fire that he is in the clubhouse and off the field, we as Sox fans have absolutely nothing to bad we can say about him as a SS (other than to make the routine play more consistently).
Talk all ya want about Tatis, Jr., but the White Sox are lucky to have not only a stud on the field playing a premier position, but an emotional leader off it. I love this kid as the face of the White Sox.