Bucco Breakfast: Could Adam Frazier Pull a Freddy Sanchez?

The Pittsburgh Pirates might see history repeat itself.

Full disclosure: I had a little trouble figuring out a good, quick-hitter type topic for today’s breakfast. Luckily, BD has the best followers in the business, and they gave us a great topic for today:

To be honest, it’s not that far fetched to think that Adam Frazier could find his way into winning a batting title at some point in his career.

Frazier’s plate discipline is already on solid footing. His overall whiff percentage of 14.7 for his career to date is already a full ten percentage points ahead of the MLB rate for last season (24 percent). His chase rate (24.2 percent) last season was four points better than all of baseball.

Consistent quality of contact may be the biggest hindrance to Frazier taking a batting crown. Frazier carried just an 88.4 mph average exit velocity on fastballs last season, and 87.5 avg EV overall. Some of this can easily be attributed to Frazier’s early season struggles before he was sent down to Triple-A. The months of April and May saw hard hit rates of 21.1 percent and 19.2 percent, respectively, while June saw an immediate increase to 30.8 percent. From there, Frazier never had a rate less than 38 percent the rest of the way.

Frazier saw the second highest volume of fastballs on the 2018 Pittsburgh Pirates by percentage — 62.7 percent of all pitches seen — so it stands to reason that if he can turn around on these consistently, he might be able to push that batting average well into the .300s.

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