Aaron Hicks Can Rise Up Again

The transformation at the plate for Aaron Hicks during the 2017 season was a pleasant sight to see, as he shifted the narrative of his career from maybe a first-round bust to a well-above-average player. Things got even better the next season, as Hicks broke out even further in 2018 and looked to have cemented himself as one of the top center fielders in all of baseball. In the two seasons since, however, Hicks hasn’t quite matched that high level of play.

Make no mistake, Hicks has still been a productive player for the Yankees in the two-season span, but he either hasn’t been on the field long enough to show it, as was the case in 2019, or he was a weaker version of himself, as we saw in 2020. The health issues are a big one for Hicks, as he has only played greater than 100 games in a season twice in his career. Last season, he did play in all but six of the team’s 60 games, which was encouraging to see, but still, the decline in his power-related metrics could be considered significant enough to cause some hesitation about his future, as he set his lowest slugging and isolated power marks since 2016, his first season as a Yankee and pre-breakout.

Hicks still does have an excellent foundation as a hitter though, as he does display some of the best plate discipline in all of baseball, which was on full display last season. His outstanding discipline will definitely keep him relevant, and he has the chance to show it off by hitting in a primary spot in one of the game’s best-projected lineups. However, one would think that a hitter in Hicks’ position—at the top of one of the game’s best lineups—that he would be a bigger part of the conversation, but yet, Hicks continues to fly under the radar. He will be an important part of the Yankees’ lineup this season, and if he can get back to his 2017 or 2018 ways at the plate, he could end up being one of the team’s better hitters. The foundation is there, now he just needs to build upon it. It is easier said than done though, and he’ll have to change some things in his batted-ball profile, but he can make it work and remind us all of the hitter that he can be.

 

A Good Foundation: Plate Discipline

 

Let’s first start by evaluating what gives Hicks such a high floor and what ultimately should help keep him at the top of the lineup, that being his elite plate discipline. It’s not a new thing for Hicks to be so good in his department, as he has a 15.1% walk rate from 2017 through 2020, which is one of the 15 best in the same span, but Hicks really took it to another level last season.

Hicks’ swing rate last season was 39.4%, which is very low relative to the league, but it is consistent with his rate since 2017. However, Hicks actually swung more at pitches in the zone last year, and his highest rate since 2016, whereas his chase rate decreased to a career-low 15.4%, the third-lowest rate among qualified hitters last season. So, while Hicks was swinging at more pitches in the zone, he countered that with even fewer chases, which helped him earn a whopping 19.4% walk rate, a mark only bested by Bryce Harper for tops in the league, and Hicks was also one of just seven players last season to have more walks than strikeouts.

We can quantify this even further though using Statcast’s swing-take leaderboards. Hicks was well above-average in terms of total swing-take runs last year, which is encouraging, but a lot of that surplus comes from his run values in the chase and waste departments, as defined by Statcast. Looking just at those run values by chase and waste zone, Hicks stands out as one of the league’s best:

 

This pretty much confirms what we know about Hicks: He’s really good at laying off bad pitches. Muncy may have pretty much in his own class last year, but Hicks was no slouch in his own right, as he ended up tied for third-best in this area.

Again, this isn’t a new phenomenon for Hicks, as in his last full season back in 2018, he was also at the top of the leaderboard, and doing the same exercise as in the above table for the 2018 season would show him tied for second (along with several plate discipline gurus such as Harper, Mookie Betts, and Joey Votto) in total chase and waste runs.

There shouldn’t be any doubt over Hicks’ plate discipline. It’s excellent, and maybe even getting better. Keeping him towards the top of the lineup seems like a good idea as that will allow the team to benefit the most from his superb on-base skills, which would theoretically lead to more runners being on base for the big-boppers expected to hit behind him and drive more runs in. However, that doesn’t mean that Hicks should be expected to be a push-over when it comes to his own batted-ball results. If Hicks can get back to his 2017 or 2018 ways in terms of batted-ball, that would make an already scary lineup even scarier. It didn’t happen fully for Hicks and the Yankees in 2020 though, and while 2020 was, of course, a small sample, there were still some things that seemed a bit off in his batted-ball profile.

 

Batted-Ball: Something Went Wrong

 

While Hicks has an advantage over pretty much every hitter in the game when it comes to his ability to get on base and avoid bad pitches, he still wasn’t as complete a hitter as he could have been last season. To be a more complete hitter, and thus a more attractive option, Hicks would probably need to hit for a better batting average or for more power. Obviously, in an ideal world, we would want to see both, but we probably shouldn’t expect both.

It seems like of those two options, power is the one that should be expected to come from Hicks. After all, he did 27 home runs in just 137 games not too long ago in 2018. It also seems like Hicks has been okay to trend that direction towards a power hitter the last few seasons, as evidenced by his increasing pull rate throughout his career and peaking in 2020:

 

There’s nothing inherently wrong about being a primary-pull hitter, especially when considering the circumstances here with Hicks. While he is a switch-hitter, Hicks still sees most of his plate appearances as a left-handed hitter. It then needs to be pointed out that going to the pull-side as a left-handed hitter in a ballpark such as Yankee Stadium is a good way to increase some power metrics. For Hicks specifically, he’s done just that. Since 2017, the pull-side has been where he gets his results:

 

From this, we see especially in the last two seasons, that Hicks has been a much different hitter when he goes to the pull side as compared to the other areas of the field. It is notable though, that in Hicks’ best season to date in 2018, he had his best results on non-pulled balls, which likely helped make his overall numbers look as good as they were. The results are even more drastic when we look just at his results as a left-handed hitter, as Hicks appears to have made an effort to try and tap into that, as his pull-rate as a left-handed hitter has been trending up pretty much every season, and even more so in the last two years:

 

Compared to his 2018 breakout where Hicks was more of an all-fields hitter, his pull-rate as a lefty in 2020 was nearly 16 percentage points higher, which seems to signal that Hicks has been inherently trying to do this. It’s maybe easier to see what this looks like when looking at his offensive spray charts. Here is what they looked like for Hicks from 2017 through 2018, compared to 2019 through 2020:

 

We see that while the majority of Hicks’ home runs were still to the pull side in 2017 and 2018, there are still a good amount of extra-base hits to the other sides of the field, whereas those are few and far between in the spray chart from 2019 and 2020.

Again, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with following this approach. However, the obvious downside of this approach is that fielders will start to shift more, which is exactly what happened to Hicks last year. He saw a higher rate of infield shifts last season as a lefty than in any other season:

 

This trend started for Hicks back in 2019 as well, but with more data points about Hicks’ batted-ball tendencies, fielders did it even more last year, which was a 20% increase from where it was only two years ago.

Those extra shifts, as shifts tend to do, really caused his BABIP to tank, as it dropped all the way down to .256 for the year, the single-season low for him since 2016. It would be less of an issue though if Hicks kept the ball off the ground, which is something he’s been pretty good at doing for most of his career. Last season though, Hicks saw his groundball rate spike to a career-high at 47.3%, which in combination with more shifts, leads to a good explanation for why Hicks’ power numbers dropped off. If Hicks can manage to get his groundball rate back to somewhere in the same neighborhood it was in 2018 (around 40%), the shifts would theoretically be less of an issue.

While it shouldn’t be viewed as a certainty for Hicks to do it, it should perhaps be expected to rebound some, just due to the fact that 2020 was Hicks’ first action since undergoing Tommy John surgery. While he didn’t miss any regular-season action, it is doubtful that he was actually at 100% strength for the entire season.  Hicks himself admitted in the offseason that the surgically repaired elbow wasn’t feeling as well as it could be, so perhaps as more distance is put between himself and the injury, he’ll really be able to remedy his ground ball issues and start to tap more into his pull side power. It is perhaps a good indicator that his groundball rate seemed to trend in the right direction as the season went on before a late-season spike (although to not as high a level as earlier in the year):

 

Where to Look for a Rebound

 

So, we know that keeping balls off the ground would likely lead to more success from Hicks, but that’s not the only thing that needs to get better. When going back to the swing-take profile from Hicks last season where he was so excellent in the chase and waste zones, we see something pretty concerning in another zone-the heart zone:

 

Hicks was tied for the fourth-worst overall runs in the heart of the zone, which is supposed to be the area of the zone where a hitter does most of their damage. It’s not due to his passivity, as Hicks actually did swing more than the league average rate at pitches in the heart of the zone, he just wasn’t getting good results when he did, evidenced further by him being again at the top of the leaderboard when looking just at swing runs in the heart of the zone, this time at -10. It’s maybe easier to show this using some more familiar stats, such as wOBACON or slugging, as Hicks was among the league’s worst in both categories on pitches in the heart of the zone:

 

With this, we confirm what we swing runs already told us-that Hicks just didn’t do much damage on the pitches that he was supposed to. The reason looks to again come back to groundballs. Hicks had 84 batted-balls total in the heart of the zone, and of those, he put 41 of them on the ground (49%). His spray chart shows that not only were a lot of them groundballs but also a good amount of weakly hit balls, and ones into spots where fielders would be shifting towards:

 

That is a lot of missed opportunity to do damage on prime pitches, and it is definitely not an ideal place to be. Although, there should be hope that Hicks can rebound in this area this season. Hicks hasn’t had much of an issue in this department previously in his career. Going back to 2017, Hicks has been a positive in swing runs in the heart of the zone, and even during his truncated 2019 season, so this isn’t exactly a recurring theme for him. He’s gotten good results on batted-ball in this zone previously:

 

While the law of averages suggests that Hicks should return to his previous form here, especially again as the impact of Tommy John surgery wears off, it still isn’t a certainty. Rather, this should be an area to track throughout the season to see if Hicks is improving, as if Hicks is going well overall at the plate, it could be due to improvements in this area of his game.

 

Conclusion

 

So what do we ultimately make of Hicks for the 2021 season? While there were some things that weren’t all that great about his batted-ball profile during the shortened 2020 season, it is important to keep in mind first of all that 2020 was a weird season, and to go with that weirdness, Hicks was coming off Tommy John surgery, and even though he was healthy enough to play, he most likely wasn’t at full strength for the majority of it, and that likely had an impact on his batted-balls and overall power output.

Hicks still showed off his elite plate discipline last season, which gives him an excellent foundation, and that skill will definitely keep him relevant in the Yankees lineup. Those outstanding plate discipline skills aren’t likely to erode any time soon, and for Hicks, it’s probably more likely that a return to form in his batted-balls happens. Not a lot went right for Hicks in that area last year, but if he looks more like the version of himself we saw in 2107 or 2018, he could end up being one of the better outfielders in all of baseball. It remains to be seen if that will happen, but Hicks certainly has it in him to do so, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to see it happen.

Photos by Patrick Gorski/Frank Jansky/Icon Sportswire | Adapted by Doug Carlin (@Bdougals on Twitter)