Your Annual Adolis García Check-in

I’ve been working at FanGraphs long enough — more than two full years now — that I’ve started to build a track record. By that I mean that when I get something right, I can go back and gloat about it.

In February 2023, I wrote about Rangers outfielder Adolis García: A power-over-hit player who struggled to get on base and did not play a premium position. Some years ago, I was at a Starbucks a couple blocks from my house when I saw someone who looked like an ex-girlfriend of mine a few tables away. On further reflection, I don’t think it was really her, but I packed up my computer, downed my macchiato, went home, and never came back. You can never be too careful.

I would ordinarily avoid players like García with even greater alacrity. Nevertheless, I reasoned that the Rangers, having invested much more heavily in pitching than hitting, needed their right fielder to be at his best if they hoped to achieve anything in 2023. And García had made very good contact the previous season, but had not been rewarded accordingly. So despite my trepidation regarding his overall skill set, I predicted that García would take a step forward.

This much he did, and more. García not only packed on 50 points of slugging percentage, going from 27 home runs to 39, he nearly doubled his walk rate and took his OBP from an even .300 to .328, which is… legitimately good! Sure enough, the Rangers profited from this development. García made the All-Star team — on merit this time, not as a pity selection from a last-place team that needed to send a warm body, as was the case for him in 2021 — and was one of the Rangers’ postseason standouts.

In 15 postseason games, the man with the iron midsection hit eight home runs and put up a batting line of .323/.382/.726. García homered in each of the final four games — and drove in at least one run in each of the final six games — of a seven-game ALCS win over the archrival Astros. This effort, culminating in a 4-for-5, two-homer, five-RBI Game 7, won García ALCS MVP honors.

García didn’t make it to the end of the World Series; in Game 3, he strained an oblique muscle and missed the final two games of the postseason. Even though García had hit one — I believe the technical term is “piss missile” — after another throughout October, his injury wasn’t cause for panic. Instead, it felt like García had exerted himself so ferociously in pursuit of victory that his body literally fell apart from the strain just as his team crossed the finish line. Like the titular battlestar Galactica or Herbie the Love Bug. A heroic, if painful, end.

And that’s probably the last time most of you thought about Adolis García. The Rangers, riddled once again by injuries, put up a pretty limp defense of their World Series title: 78-84, closer to the A’s than first place.

As for the breakout star-turned-playoff hero, here’s a bit of trivia that’ll make your mouth itchy: This past season, seven position players played enough to qualify for the batting title but also played poorly enough to end up below replacement level. Four of them changed teams midseason — i.e. their performance was rewarded with a one-way ticket to Anywhere But Here. Two others played for the White Sox, and were therefore probably the best players on that accursed roster. The seventh player was Adolis García.

García played 154 games and contributed 25 home runs, but he hit a meager .224/.284/.400. That’s a 92 wRC+, -0.2 WAR, and the first sub-.200 ISO of his career.

So what happened to you, man?

I know I’ve been talking about García as a hitter, but the biggest part of his bizarre 2024 slump has been defensive. García was one of the best defensive right fielders in baseball in 2023, with plus range and one of the strongest and most valuable outfield arms in the sport. It’s tough to put up a positive defensive WAR value in right field — so odious is the positional adjustment — but in 2023, García was one of only six players to do that.

He finished second in defensive WAR among right fielders with at least 500 innings at the position, behind only Fernando Tatis Jr. and just ahead of Jason Heyward and Ramón Laureano, two players known for their defense above all else. This season, García’s defense tanked, from 2.9 runs above average to 17.0 runs below average. That accounts for almost 40% of his journey from All-Star to sub-replacement level.

Let’s put it another way; since 2021, only one other player has seen a bigger decline in defensive value in consecutive full seasons: J.T. Realmuto from 2022 to 2023 . García went from three outs above average to 12 outs below average, that’s a dropoff from the 82nd percentile to the first percentile for range.

García is quite a durable player; in four seasons as a major league regular, he’s never played fewer than 148 games nor batted fewer than 622 times. But this is a musclebound 31-year-old who ended his previous season with a core muscle injury and has had a chronic knee issue that’s bothered him in the past two seasons. That might explain a dropoff in range and sprint speed, though Rangers GM Chris Young denied that his struggles were injury-related.

Young certainly watched García play more than I did this past year, and he likely knows more about his starting right fielder’s health than anyone apart from the man himself. And with the season having been over literally for seven weeks — and figuratively for much longer than that — there’s no immediately obvious reason to suspect that Young is lying or obfuscating here.

But if García wasn’t carrying an injury, there’s reason to suspect that he’s lost a step not just in terms of foot speed, but at the plate as well. And that could be a real problem.

In 2023, García hit the absolute bejeezus out of the ball. When he made contact in 2024, he could still make good contact, but significantly more bejeezus remained within the ball.

We don’t have swing speed data for 2023, so it’s tough to make a comparison with certainty, but it looks to me like he’s lost a tick. You wouldn’t think this just looking at him, but García has never hit fastballs — particularly four-seamers — especially well. In 2023, he hit .197 against four-seamers, making it the only pitch he saw at least 100 of and ended up with a negative run value on. His whiff rate of 34.4% was higher than his whiff rate on curveballs, for instance, and within a point and a half of his highest whiff rate against any kind of pitch.

Nevertheless, when he could get bat on ball he did damage, with a SLG of .490 and an xSLG of .482 against four-seam fastballs. This past year, the contact issues remained, but the power also evaporated: .310 SLG and .385 xSLG against four-seamers, leaving him 15 runs below average against the sport’s default pitch, according to Baseball Savant. That minus-15 is tied for the worst performance by any hitter against any particular pitch type in the majors in 2024, out of more than 3,500 hitter-pitch type combinations.

Is there something about the shape of a four-seamer that gets García’s goat? Theoretically, a hitter with fly ball tendencies would have a swing shape better suited to sinkers and the like, right? Maybe, but it looks to me like the problem is with high velo, and it’s getting worse.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom about a player who was so impactful just a short time ago. And to be fair, García came out of the gate on fire in 2024 before enduring a three-month slump that lasted to the end of the first half. And some of the contact quality issues probably have to do with the fact that as García struggled, he reverted to pre-2023 type and started chasing more out of the zone and swinging at the first pitch more often. His walk rate dropped from 10.3% to 7.1% as his chase rate rose from 29.3% to 33.6%. (Though his strikeout rate has remained hilariously consistent since 2022, varying only two tenths of a percentage point across three wildly different offensive seasons.)

But suffice it to say, I’m a little worried about García going forward, because when the bat speed goes for a player like this, there’s not a whole lot else for him to contribute. Which is why I’m so antsy about this profile in the first place. I was right about García once; I’d prefer not to be right about him again.

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