Joc Pederson’s Going Through Struggles We Knew Were Inevitable
- Updated: August 17, 2015
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Here’s a thing I wrote about Joc Pederson six months ago,at t he very start of Spring Training. You should read it. Not because I’m right (I’m always right), but because we all knew that what’s happening right now with Joc Pederson — the struggle bus — was inevitable.
In case you missed it, Pederson is hitting .179/.337/.295 since the All Star Break — and it’s even worse than that, so don’t blame the Home Run Derby for his problems, because in the 30 days before the All Star Break, Pederson was slashing just .192/.339/.343.
In other words, Pederson has been really bad for two months. And according to the guys smarter than me, it’s not that he’s striking out more in the past two months than he did in the first two months. The numbers simply don’t point to strikeouts as the issue, but rather, quality of contact.
Regardless of the cause, there’s a big idea here: Pederson, like virtually every rookie that’s ever been in the big leagues, was just a weakness waiting to be exploited by Major League pitchers.
Whether its exit velocity on his swings and the quality of contact Pederson gets, like Petriello notes in the link above this, or my contention at the top of the post here about favorable hitters’ parks in the minor leagues that made Pederson a star, or his strikeout rates, or just something as simple as struggling against the best pitchers in the world (or a combination of all of that and more), one thing is for certain: Pederson has played his way back to AAA.
The problem is… there are about two weeks left in the AAA season, and it’d likely do Pederson (and his roster status) more harm than good to send him down right now. What can you do, send him down for two weeks and then bring him back up when rosters expand? Will that fix him?
All the Dodgers can do now is lean hard on Andre Ethier (thank goodness they didn’t trade him when everybody thought they would this spring, right?!), hope for the best with Enrique Hernandez, keep working with Yasiel Puig to come around, keep being maybe pleasantly surprised by Carl Crawford, and hold Scott Van Slyke in their back pocket to try to hide Pederson wherever they can for as long as he struggles.
Pederson’s long slump shouldn’t be a surprise; with the strikeouts he took in the minors, there was never any doubt he was going to struggle to hit for average in the Major Leagues. And with the difficulty every rookie faces adjusting to big league pitching, well, it was only a matter of time.
There’s no sense in giving up on Pederson, because he’s going to be a great player very soon. (Is anyone even arguing the Dodgers should dump him?). But there’s sense in the Dodgers figuring out a patchwork outfield platoon in the playoffs, because they are going to need more consistency than what Pederson’s been giving them since early June.
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