Adolis Garcia and his down year
With the 2024 regular season over, it is time for us to go back and take a look at the players who appeared for the Texas Rangers this season.
Today, we look at outfielder Adolis Garcia.
I say look at at outfielder Adolis Garcia, but I can understand if you want to avert your eyes.
One of the heroes of the 2023 World Series team, the man that Astros fans came to love to hate, came crashing down to earth in 2024, leaving a smoldering crater. And while there was much regression and disappointment among Rangers players in 2024, Adolis Garcia is the guy whose fall off was most noticeable, and most dramatic.
Let’s look at the numbers:
After slashing .245/.328/.508 in 2023, good for a 126 wRC+ and 127 OPS+, Garcia slashed .224/.284/.400 in 2024, good (or not so good) for a 92 wRC+ and a 94 OPS+.
After putting up a 4.2 bWAR and 4.6 fWAR in 2023, Garcia put up a 0.3 bWAR and -0.2 fWAR in 2024.
After putting up a +6 DRS and +8 FRV defensively in 2023, Garcia put up a -5 DRS and -11 FRV in 2024.
Garcia’s Statcast page is a sea of blue. His OAA is in the 1st percentile, which is as low as it gets. There were a total of three players who had a worse OAA in 2024 than Garcia’s -12 — CJ Abrams (-17), Chris Morel (-14), and Bryan Reynolds (-13). Ty France and Luis Arraez were tied with Garcia, at -12.
Here’s Garcia’s sprint speed percentile rankings by year:
2021 — 83rd
2022 — 67th
2023 — 50th
2024 — 36th
Adolis Garcia, who was in the top 20% of MLB players in sprint speed in 2021, is now barely staying out of the bottom third in sprint speed. Even his arm strength, which has always been elite, in the upper 90s in percentile, dropped a little, going to 84th percentile in 2024.
Yes, Garcia is 31 years old now, and power hitting righthanded hitters don’t tend to age all that great, and Father Time is undefeated. It is not unreasonable for one to expect Adolis, coming off his best season in 2023, to decline a little bit in 2024.
But going from an All Star caliber player to replacement level? With big drops across the board? That was not expected, and is rather alarming, from the standpoint of a Texas Rangers team that has been counting on Adolis to be a key contributor.
Let’s set aside for a moment the decline in his defense and his speed. It isn’t that those declines aren’t real, or don’t matter, though a graph of his speed percentile rankings are pretty much a straight line, and the drop in defense was probably a bit of an aberration (the man won a Gold Glove a year ago, for crying out loud!).
No, we are setting those aside because, if Garcia had hit like he did last year, we could live with the declines in his defense and speed. The Rangers would just plug Garcia in at DH the majority of the time, let him venture out into right field on occasion, and go on down the road.
But is Adolis is going to hit going forward like he did in 2024, there’s not really a spot for him on a major league roster, barring a dramatic turnaround in his defensive performance. He’s not even really a viable righthanded bench bat or platoon option in that case, as he didn’t hit lefties well last year (.231/.296/.434) and has smaller than usual platoon splits over the course of his career.
In examining Adolis Garcia’s struggles at the plate in 2024, it comes as no surprise that he was especially awful against four seamers. Now, to be clear, he didn’t crush four seamers in 2023, either — he had a .325 wOBA and .329 xwOBA, and his run value against four seamers was -4.
But he was abysmal in 2024 against four seamers, with a -15 run value against them, tied with Davis Schneider for worst in the majors. And it isn’t just because Garcia is seeing a lot of four seamers. There were 323 major leaguers in 2024 who saw at least 1000 pitches. On a rate basis — runs versus average per 100 pitches — Garcia was 308th, at -1.7. Joey Gallo was #309, in case you are curious.
Its also worth noting that, while Garcia sees an above-average percentage of four seam fastballs, it isn’t so large a percentage to be an outlier relative to the rest of the league. Out of those 323 major leaguers, 59 of them saw a four seam fastball more often than Garcia did in 2024. Garcia saw a four seamer 35.2% of the time — less often than in 2023, in fact, when he saw a four seamer 36.1% of the time.
(Fun fact — Nathaniel Lowe was in the top 10 in most four seamers seen in 2024. He was also 39th out of 323 in runs per 100 PA against four seamers. I guess practice makes perfect).
One of the interesting things about this, though, is that he appears to have had some bad luck as well. He had a .249 wOBA against four seamers in 2024, but a .298 xwOBA. That xwOBA is still bad — it is bottom 20% of the league — but it isn’t at the very very bottom.
Here’s the other interesting thing about this, though — Adolis’s performance against four seamers isn’t where he had his biggest drop from 2023.
No, Adolis’s biggest drop in run value from 2023 to 2024 came against sliders. Adolis destroyed sliders in 2023 — .375 xwOBA, .385 wOBA, +14 run value. That plus 14 was 3rd best out of 321 MLB hitters who saw at least 1000 pitches in 2023, behind only Ronald Acuna and Nick Castellanos. Others in double digits included Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, Manny Machado, Juan Soto — some elite level hitters.
This year? This year, Garcia was below average against sliders, going from +14 to -2 — a 16 run delta, compared to an 11 run delta against four seamers. And that raw number undersells how Garcia performed against sliders in 2024, as his .305 wOBA was much higher than his .269 xwOBA against sliders.
In terms of xwOBA, Garcia was elite in 2023, putting up the 16th best xwOBA out of 321 hitters, then dropped to 192 out of 323 in 2024. For all the talk about Garcia’s problem being his inability to hit the fastball, he actually was worse, in terms of xwOBA, against sliders than he was against four seamers last year.
Of course, the bigger issue is that he was bad against both sliders and four seamers in 2024, and those were half of the pitches he saw last year. He was a little below average against sinkers in 2024 (-2 RV/.355 wOBA/.356 xwOBA) after being a little above average in 2023 (+5 RV/.426 wOBA/.435 xwOBA), and dropped a little against changeups as well, which combined for roughly 25% of the pitches he saw. The grab bag of other miscellaneous pitches that made up the remaining 25% he saw he was fine against.
So what does this all tell us? I don’t know. I have no idea if this means his bat is slowing down, or if he was hampered by the patella injury that we learned after the season was bothering him (and has him doing no baseball activity for the beginning of the offseason), or if it was a mechanical issue, or what.
But a precipitous drop like this, for someone with Garcia’s player profile, is worrisome.
I looked at the most similar players to Garcia through age 31 on B-R, and there’s an interesting collection of names there. The most similar is Brandon Moss, who had a breakout year for the A’s at age 28, was really good at age 29 and 30 (including making the All Star team in 2014 as a 30 year old), fell off a cliff in 2015, had a dead cat bounce in 2016, then was bad in 2017 and didn’t player in the majors again after that.
The nine guys after Moss are:
Travis Shaw
Glenallen Hill
Bo Jackson
Adam Duvall
Mitch Haniger
Don Lock
Dan Pasqua
Craig Monroe
Gary Roenicke
The guy who comes to my mind, though, in regards to Adolis is Nelson Cruz. Like Adolis, Cruz was a toolsy guy with speed, big power and a big arm, but who didn’t establish himself until his age 28 season. Cruz then had a good run from age 28 through age 30 before slipping, both offensively and defensively, in his age 31 season.
Cruz rebounded in his age 32 season — his final one in Texas — but the Rangers weren’t interested in giving him a long-term deal. That was a decision that I wholeheartedly agreed with — Cruz was someone who it seemed like didn’t have a lot of years remaining, someone who you figured would be out of baseball in two or three years.
And of course, Nellie proved us wrong, having his best seasons in his mid- to late-30s, and not retiring until after the 2023 season, at the age of 43.
Would I bet on Adolis following the Nelson Cruz career path? I would not.
But if you are an optimist, if you’re looking for the best case scenario for Adolis, that would be it.
Previously: