Jade Carter
The reason Josh Naylor is hitting .000 so far for Mariners originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
In the early parts of the MLB season, the numbers on the scoreboard can be jarring. Some players can be hitting .500, while others might be hitting in the .100s.
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Or, if you’re Seattle Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor, you look up and see .000 in the batting average column.
Heading into Sunday, Naylor has yet to get a hit through three games.
He’s 0-for-11 with a pair of walks (including one intentional).
Naylor has struck out just twice, so that’s not necessarily the problem.
But if we dig into his admittedly super small sample size of batted ball data, the problem is readily apparent: grounders.
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Naylor is hitting the ball on the ground too much.
Of his nine batted balls, he has hit eight on the ground, along with one classified as a line drive. He has also pulled six of his nine batted balls.
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In his career, he has a 47.4% groundball rate and a 42.0% pull rate.
His career average launch angle is 10.3 degrees, and right now he’s at negative-14.7 degrees with all those grounders.
This isn’t yet a sign of anything long-lasting in a bad way. This is just an indication that Naylor’s timing is all a bit out of whack in the early going.
He should turn it around sooner rather than later, but Naylor certainly would like to get that big batting average on the scoreboard to say anything other than .000.
