It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again For Jeff McNeil

On the surface, it looks like Jeff McNeil is as reliable and as consistent as it gets when it comes to his season-long offensive production. After all, the second baseman’s wRC+ progression over his first three years in the big leagues back up that claim: 136, 143, 130. And while his current 95 wRC+ through 26 games isn’t quite there yet, I’m willing to bet he’ll find a way to make it happen by the time September rolls around.

What’s really interesting, though, is how things have changed for him on a month-by-month basis when comparing his performance from 2018-19 and 2020-21. Whether it’s a typical 162-game marathon or a shortened season like the 2020 campaign was, a lot can happen under the surface that we’d never know about until we specifically looked for it.

What’s Changed Over The Years

McNeil truly was a picture of consistency for the New York Mets during his rookie and sophomore seasons.

To put it simply, he never had a truly bad month if we use wRC+ as the measuring stick. Here’s how his month-by-month performance looked from the time he made his MLB debut in July of 2018, all the way through the end of the 2019 season.

There is a handful of peaks and valleys going on here, but mostly, it’s every manager’s dream. McNeil played consistently each month and produced at a rate that was well above average on most occasions.

Now, if we shift focus to 2020 and 2021, it’s interesting to see that both campaigns got off to slow starts — something we hadn’t been used to seeing from the Mets’ resident hit machine. The good thing about his slow 2020 start, though, was that he turned on the turbo jets in September, allowing his season-long stats to look similar to what he produced from 2018-19.

After a similar start to the current season, McNeil has seemingly started to do the same thing after struggling through the initial two weeks of the year.

If there was one thing McNeil wanted to avoid this season, it was probably a slow start. And although we should always take spring training stats with a grain of salt, it’s not as if the .105/.255/.239 line he posted 46 Grapefruit League at-bats instilled confidence that this year’s start to the regular season was going to be much better than 2020. Obviously, that wasn’t the case, and it wasn’t overly shocking to see him start slow out of the gate in the batter’s box.

An Interesting Wrinkle In His Plate Discipline

With regard to his plate discipline, we generally know two things about McNeil — his bat-to-ball skills are elite and he’ll never be a huge strikeout guy, but he’s likely too aggressive to have a Brandon Nimmo-esque walk rate. Things have been going in the right direction with this patience, though, and he hasn’t had to sacrifice his aggressiveness one bit.

Since debuting in 2018, McNeil’s walk rate has continually risen: 5.6%, 6.2%, and 9.6%, with his current walk rate sitting at 11.3% through Friday’s action. After seeing it rise between 2018 and 2019, McNeil’s strikeout rate has also been consistently improving: 9.7%, 13.2%, 11.5%, with his current strikeout rate sitting at 8.2% entering Saturday’s games. As we can see from the above tables, this trend of drawing walks more often than striking out began once he caught fire last September. And even while he struggled through the first two weeks of this season, that trend continued.

He’s accomplished this by being aggressive in situations that make sense. His chase rate has consistently decreased, and his current 34.4% rate would be a new career-best mark if it can be sustained. Meanwhile, his swing rate on strikes has essentially remained the same since his debut (84.2% in ’18, 85.0% in ’19, 84.0% in ’20, 85.0% in ’21). That’s the kind of plate approach that will enable any hitter to experience some level of success by the end of every season.

Where Some Improvements Can Happen

Despite having a huge September to finish 2020, McNeil still struggled mightily against breaking pitches. He’s experienced some improvements in the early going of this season against sliders (-7 wRC+ in ’20 and 28 in ’21) and curveballs (69 wRC+ in ’20 and 208 in ’21), but now the focus shifts to other pitches (in addition to continue trying to improve against sliders, of course). It’s been the two pitches he’s seen more than any other so far in 2021: four-seam fastballs and changeups.

These are two offerings McNeil has historically crushed. His yearly wRC+ progression for changeups looks like this: 159, 132, 226, 52. Similarly, here’s the same progression for his performance against four-seamers: 100, 144, 135, 92. One of the keys for him will be to get his line-drive rate for each offering back up to the levels they were at in 2020. In each instance, his current line-drive rate is about eight percentage points below what is ended up at the year prior.

One interesting note is the zone rate for changeups McNeil has seen thus far. After seeing changeups land in the strike zone at a 41.4% clip, that number is currently sitting at 29.0%.

Even if slow starts become a trend for McNeil, we can take solace in the fact that they’re abbreviated (for the most part), and he’s found a way to not only climb out of them but to also get white-hot once he’s feeling like himself again.

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