Update 1 (7/6/2022) on Jarred Kelenic’s AAA Pitch Data

Here is my first update on how Jarred’s swing decisions are trending down in AAA and boy howdy, let me remind you that development isn’t linear. Jarred had a really tough week at the plate against the Salt Lake Bees. He saw a diet of almost exclusively change ups for a couple games and really struggled handling it.

My writeup on Jarred’s first 30 games in AAA is available

A bit on my process from the first article: I made an Excel spreadsheet and filled a few notebook pages with tallies going through every pitch he has seen in a Rainiers uniform. I am just a human tallying pitches up and though I was being careful, it is totally possible I made some mistakes. Basically, build some error bars into these numbers and don’t take them as exact, but we are here to do trend analysis anyway. Additionally, I put splitters in the fastball bucket, whereas I believe a lot of sources count the split finger fastball as an offspeed pitch, so probably a systemic error on my part (he didn’t see too many splitters anyway). For the sake of total clarity, my buckets are:

Fastballs – four seam, cutter, sinker, and splitter

Breaking – Curve, knuckle curve, slider

Offspeed – Breaking and changeups

The numbers in the tables below are up to date through the 5th of July. He has played a grand total of 36 games in AAA, with 167 plate appearances, and 648 total pitches. Of those pitches 48% were offspeed (312 total).

This time, I broke the results in to two chunks to try and increase the sample size. With 36 games down in AAA, I did the first 18 games as ‘first half’ and the next 18 games as ‘second half’. I also included his most recent 10 games, which is just to show you what he has done lately with a very small sample size. I would recommend focusing mostly on the second half numbers to get an idea of how he is doing!

Plate Discipline (%)

CSW (%) + Whiffs

And here is a 10-game rolling CSW% graph, for the visual learners:

I believe the graph shows clearly his struggles last week. Even then, his overall plate discipline numbers above still seem to be trending in the right direction. He took a lot more called strikes this week, shown in the difference between CSW% and Whiff%. Again, we are living in the world of small samples here, but his second half numbers still look pretty good. With his improved plate discipline still intact, despite having a rough few games, I expect that CSW% will turn around fairly quickly. Additionally, a down week for him now is still better than when he was first sent down results wise.

I will update this again on the next Rainiers off day! Let me know what you think. If there are other pieces of data you would like to see or a better way I can meaningfully present this data, let me know!