Hensley Meulens dreaming about Giants future 3-4-5 hitters

As much as I would love to agree with Bam-Bam on this, I'm not sure I totally agree. The early returns on Belt are good. Posey shows no signs of succumbing to a sophomore jinx. But if Sandoval doesn't show less of an appetite for swinging at sliders in the dirt and fastballs above the neck, then all of his conditioning gains will be for naught.

The graph above and the commentary below from a Beyond the Box Score article compare Sandoval versus noted plate-disciplinarian Nick Johnson and the results speak for themselves. Granted the comparison was from 2009, but there doesn't seem to be much change in Sandoval's choice of pitches that he continually chooses to swing at.

A Yogi Berra or a Manny Sanguillen he is not. I don't think Sandoval can continue tossing away AB's in this manner and be anything more than a .260 or less hitter. And it may be fine to note the exceptions like Berra and Sanguillen who did have great major league careers with a similar approach, however that argument ignores the thousands of guys who took that approach and never advanced farther than AA. It's a losing approach long-term.

I hope I'm wrong on this, but I'm afraid I'm not. Sandoval needs a much more disciplined approach at the plate or he has little or no future with the Giants.



San Francisco Giants - Team Report - MLB - Yahoo! Sports:

"'We might have a chance to see those guys hitting 3-4-5 in the future, and they're all 24 or younger. They're a rare breed, and it's great to see. Possibly the cornerstone for the organization for a long time to come,'

—Hitting coach Hensley Meulens, on 1B Brandon Belt, C Buster Posey and 3B Pablo Sandoval."

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Graph of the Day: Plate Discipline (or not) - Beyond the Box Score:

"Of players who had at least 140 PA in 2008, Nick Johnson ranked lowest in swinging at pitches out of the zone at 10.0%. Pablo Sandoval ranked highest at 53.8%. These are their pitch charts on pitches out of the zone, red being pitches they swung at, blue pitches they took. For kicks, their contact rates on these pitches were 71% and 79.4% for Johnson and Sandoval respectively.

The 'strike zone' top and bottom is an average of the sz_top and sz_bot of all the player's PA per pitch fx. This is why it may look like some of the out of zone pitches are in the strike zone."

POSEY - BELT - SANDOVAL