Yuli Gurriel Has Declined And Should Be Moved to the Bench

Gurriel is chasing more pitches, hitting with less power, and fielding fewer balls at first base. His across the board decline shows why the Astros are targeting a first baseman for a trade.

As we approach the trade deadline, the rumor mill is working overtime to connect the Houston Astros to Josh Bell of the Washington Nationals. Bell has slashed .302/.388/492 this season, so you can see why he is a sought after addition this trade season.

But Bell plays first base, and if he is added to the starting lineup, someone has to be subtracted—and the most likely candidate to loose out playing time is the current starting first baseman Yuli Gurriel.

Gurriel is a long-time Astro mainstay, who has manned first base since the beginning of the 2017 season. He’s been a key contributor for all five runs to the American League Championship Series, racking up 73 games played and 305 plate appearances in the postseason. He’s become a beloved figure in Houston, known for his gravity defying hairstyle who pineapple like appearance has inspired his nickname La Pina.

But Gurriel has not played well this season, sporting a slash line of .234/.287/.384 for an OPS of .671, which is well below the major league average of .708. Could the reason for Gurriel’s poor offensive numbers could be a brief slump or the effects of a small sample size over the first part of the season? If so, one should expect him to turn it around in the second half of the season.

To address that question, I took a deep dive into Gurriel’s performance this season, examining a wide variety of statistics and Statcast metrics. My conclusion is unfortunately pessimistic—I don’t think that Gurriel is going to turn it around this season to be a positive as an everyday first baseman.

There was reason earlier this season to think that Gurriel’s woes were just a slump that he would come out of with more at bats. In April, Gurriel had an OPS of .605 and he followed that up with a .621 OPS in May. But in June, Gurriel improved. His OPS rose to .749, 23% better than league average. But then his OPS sunk back down to .707 this month.

That’s better than what Gurriel hit in the season’s first two months, but it is right near league average. And that’s a problem when Gurriel plays first base, where the defensive demands are modest and the offensive expectations are high.

Gurriel is 38, and it seems to me that the reason for his decline is the same as it is for so many athletes—Father Time remains a huge villain. That bastard.

In this post, I’ll explore the numbers from Gurriel’s season this year and why I think it means he will not return to being a productive player.

Gurriel is Chasing More Pitches in 2022

The figure below shows Gurriel’s Statcast metrics, measured in percentile rankings among major league hitters. The results show that Gurriel has a unique swing profile for a modern day hitter.

Gurriel rarely strikes out in large part because he rarely misses the ball when he swings—see his low whiff%. When Gurriel swings, he makes contact at a much higher rate than other major league players. This is not new this season; Gurriel has had a 90th percentile or better ranking in K% every year of his career; and a 90th percentile or better since 2018. But despite so much contact, Gurriel is not that choosy about which pitches he swings at. Gurriel’s chase rate—the rate at which he swings at pitches outside of the strike zone—is at the 15th percentile.

But unlike Gurriel’s strikeout rate, Gurriel’s has not always been so willing to chase pitches outside of the strike zone. In 2021, Gurriel chased fewer pitches. He swung at only 26.1% of the pitches that were outside of the strike zone, less than his career rate of 32.0%. The figure below shows Gurriel’s O-Swing rate across time (Fangraph’s term for chase rate; it’s Swings Outside of the strike zone). You can see that for most of the last four seasons, Gurriel has had a high rate of swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone.

But one of these is not like the other. Gurriel’s O-Swing% declined noticably in 2021 and stayed down throughout the season. And then, it started rising in the 2022 season. And after steadying in June, has risen even more in the last month.

And what happens when hitters chase the ball outside of the strike zone less? They walk more. And you can see that in the chart below, which shows Gurriel’s walk percentage over time. It was among the highest of his career in 2021. It then quickly regressed in 2022 as Gurriel slumped in the first two months of the season. It rose in June along with his offensive production, but then it went down in July, along with his OPS.

Gurriel continues to to have elite skills at making contact with pitches. When he swings, Gurriel makes contact 90.4% of the time when the ball is in the strike zone, above the major league average of 82.0%. And when he swings at a pitch outside of the strike zone, Gurriel makes contact 73.0% of the time this season; again, that’s much higher than the MLB average of 58.4%.

Gurriel’s Is Not Hitting the Ball as Hard in 2022

Gurriel’s ability to put the bat on the ball has not declined this season, even if his strike zone judgment has. But Gurriel’s ability to make that contact pay off for him this season has declined. The chart below shows Gurriel’s percentile ranks in four Statcast measures of power hitting—expected isolated power, barrel percentage, max exit velocity, and hard hit percentage. You can see that while there are some up and down in these numbers between 2020 and 2021, in 2022, Gurriel has recorded lower numbers in each category.

Gurriel may be making a lot of contact this season, but when he hits it, it’s not going as far or getting through the infield as quickly. Obviously, some of this is related to Gurriel chasing more pitches out of the strike zone. It is harder to hit the ball hard when you have to reach for a ball. But it also reflects the passage of time. An aging Gurriel is not as capable of driving the ball as well as he did as a younger player.

Gurriel’s Defense Has Regressed

There is another area where one can see the clear decline in Gurriel’s skill level is in his defense. Gurriel cannot move as quickly laterally and, as a result, he gets to fewer grounders and liners hit toward first base than he once did.

This is borne out across a number of defensive metrics. Defensive metrics often disagree with each other. So it’s notable that four major defensive metrics all show a sharp decline in Gurriel’s defensive numbers this season as compared to 2021 and 2019.¹

These defensive numbers don’t capture everything. For example, Gurriel is by reputation excellent at “scooping” short hop throws from other infielders, and these numbers do not account for that. But even accounting for some error in these numbers than should break in the positive direction for Gurriel, they tell a story of player in decline. Gurriel can no longer get to the balls he used to.

The Plan for Gurriel This Season

What should the Astros do with Gurriel? Well, as noted in the introduction, a great deal of trade speculation has focused on the potential the Astros to acquire a first baseman, such as Josh Bell. The first base market appears to be robust this year, so even if they Astros cannot get Bell, they have other options to make an upgrade at first base. Assuming that the Astros acquire a first baseman, what role should Gurriel play for the Astros?

First of all, there is reason to believe that despite his decline, Gurriel can still be a contributing player to the Astros. Fangraphs includes five different rest of the season projections for Gurriel, and they project a wRC+ of between 100 to 112 for Gurriel. A 100 in wRC+ is league average and numbers above that is the percentile above average from that player’s offensive production. These are not the numbers of a star player (especially at first base), but they are an improvement on Gurriel’s offensive production so far this season, and the numbers of a contributor to a winning team.

And Gurriel has good numbers this season against left handed pitchers; he has a slash line of .264/.301/.453 for a .754 OPS. That’s 8% better than league average. So even if Gurriel ends up on the bench, he could be penciled into the lineup when the team faces a lefty pitcher, and that would allow a rest day for one of the left handed hitting corner outfielders (Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez, and Michael Brantley). That keeps Gurriel with a regular role on the team. In addition, Gurriel could spell Alex Bregman occasionally at third base. Further, having Gurriel on the bench would allow him to pinch hit for the catcher’s spot late in games when the Astros trail.

Of course, right now, the Astros have an opening in their every day lineup because Michael Brantley is on the injured list with a shoulder injury. The Astros could split first base and designated hitter between Gurriel and a player the acquire by trade this week, and let Yordan Alvarez play more in left field.

Both of these strategies reduce at bats for more traditional outfielders like Chas McCormick and Jake Meyers. But with an 11 game lead in the division and only 62 games left to play, the Astros will undoubtedly focus on resting their players so they can stay healthy and focus their energies on October.

What Will the Clubhouse Think?

I have shown a wide variety of evidence in this post that Yuli Gurriel has declined as a baseball player this season. He is chasing more pitches out of the strike zone, making weaker contact with the ball, and gloving fewer balls hit his way in the field. Age, unfortunately, comes for every player, and the broad decline of Gurriel’s skills indicate that it has come for him.

These conclusions may be clear from the data, but they also may cause issues within the Astros clubhouse. No player likes to believe that he is diminished, and it is unlikely that Gurriel would agree with my conclusions. Nor should he; all major league players have beaten the odds and naysayers to get to the big leagues. And that is even more true for a player who comes from a country frozen out of the majors due to political conflicts. Gurriel undoubtedly doesn’t want his role reduced.

And it is unlikely that Gurriel’s teammates want to see his role reduced. Gurriel is popular with his teammates and one of the longest tenured members of the club. This leads to questions of how to get the clubhouse to buy in to a reduced role for Gurriel. And this is where as an outside analyst, I cannot offer many suggestions. I’m an outsider and have only the vaguest understanding of the dynamics of the Astros clubhouse.

What I do know is that players want to win baseball games, and Astros management needs to figure out ways to present the case for a reduced role for Gurriel (and an big role for a trade deadline acquisition) in ways that make players understand how it helps the team in October. The good news is that in Dusty Baker, the Astros have a veteran manager who has the trust of his players. This will be a difficult job for Baker, but it’s one he has done before.

What is clear is that Gurriel has declined as a player this season. If the Astros acquire a new first baseman at the deadline, they would benefit on the field from reducing Gurriel’s role for the rest of this season.

1. I chose to exclude 2020 because the pandemic forced a shortened season and therefore its numbers are not easily comparable to 162 game seasons.