On Friday night, July 26th, 2024, the San Francisco Giants hosted the Colorado Rockies at Oracle Park. They won 11-4 over the lowly Rockies, part of an eventual 4-game weekend sweep. Tyler Fitzgerald was batting second that night and started at shortstop. He went 3-5 with two home runs and four RBIs. The two homers were the sixth and seventh he had hit over a nine-game span. It was the first time someone wearing a Giants uniform had done that in 20 years when Barry Bonds, he who owns the title of “Greatest Home Run Hitter To Have Ever Lived,” had done during the 2004 season. It felt like a big deal.
“Just one of those weird things that kind of happens,” Fitzgerald said after the game that night. “I'm not really trying to hit homers.”
The game was coming naturally to Fitzgerald. He was seeing the ball like he had never seen it before at the plate. Those seven dingers came during an nine-game stretch where he hit .481 and slugged 1.407. And that was just the beginning of a torrid stretch last year that had the Giants coaches and fans thinking the Orange and Black had discovered a diamond in the rough.
Flash forward 332 days later, and the Tyler Fitzgerald we saw over those eight games has long since vanished. After dropping a pair of bunts, both of which helped bring two runs around to score in the Giants' 9-5 win over the Boston Red Sox on Sunday afternoon, Fitzgerald was sent down to Triple-A Sacramento on Monday. It comes as no shock considering how he has played this year, hitting .230/.289/.320 in 57 games.
And he is trending in the wrong direction, hitting .127/.197/.145 in the month of June while striking out in 29% of his plate appearances.
Which, of course, begs the obvious question: What the heck happened to Tyler Fitzgerald? Where is the guy who once hit seven home runs in nine games, a feat also accomplished not just by Bonds, but by other such like Willie Mays, and Orlando Cepeda among others? And is he ever going to hit at that level again? Or just hit, period?
Answering these questions is not a straightforward process. But we can certainly look at some data and try to come to some sort of answer to this mystery.
Potential Reason #1: He can’t hit a fastball right now
According to Baseball Savant, Fitzgerald was a MONSTER against the fastball last season. He hit .333 against opposing pitchers fastballs last year along with 10 home runs. This year, he is hitting .259 against the fastball. It is the biggest source for his drop in battering average overall from last year to this year. His batting average against offspeed pitches (which includes splitters and changeups) last year was .179. This year it is .174. Against breaking pitches (which includes sliders, curveballs, sweepers, and slurves) last year he hit .217 versus .214. In other words, those pitches are not the reason for his drop in performance this season.
And perhaps this should have been anticipated. While he was hitting .333 against opposing fastballs, his expected batting average against fastballs was .283, which is much closer to that .259 he his hitting against fastballs this year.
Perhaps it is more than that though.
Potential Reason #2: He is not hitting the ball as hard
Fitzgerald did not have the craziest hard hit rates last year, hard hits being defined as hits that have an exit velocity of 95 mph or more. Per Fangraphs, he had a hard-hit rate of 23.7%, good for (checks notes) 268th best in all of baseball among hitters with at least 300 plate appearances (two spots ahead of Connor Joe if you can believe that). That soft contact rate is a big reason why his Expected Batting Average last year (xBA) was .227 while his actual batting average was .280. That .227 xBA from last year is very much in line with the .230 batting average he is sporting this year, while his hard-hit rate had dropped to 19.3% this year.
The logic on hard hit rates is simple: balls that are hit hard are more likely to become hits. And despite a relatively low hard-hit rate last year, Fitzgerald had a lot of success at the plate, suggesting a lot luck being involved in his success.
The decline in hard-hit rate is most notable in these handy charts Baseball Savant provides for you.
Here is his average exit velocity by zone from last year:
And this year:
Across the strikezone, he is not putting the ball in play as hard as he was last year, and thus the decline in balls becoming hits and instead being outs.
Reason #3: What we saw last year was a flash in the pan and this is just who he is
On July 7th of last year, Fitzgerald was hitting .276/.329/.395 in 82 plate appearances on the season. That night, he hit a home run. The next night, he hit another one. And then the next game, he hit ANOTHER home run. And he did this for six straight games. After a two-day break, he hit those two home runs against the Rockies, and that brings us back to the start of this story.
From that night on, Fitzgerald continued to hit well, and his average hovering around the .310-.320 range for three solid weeks. Over the 25-game stretch from July 7th through August 12th, Fitzgerald hit .355/.417/.806 with 11 home runs and 18 RBIs. He had an OPS of 1.000 for the season on August 12th.
And then he started to cool off. From August 13th through the end of the season, Fitzgerald hit .234/.282/.352 with 3 home runs and 10 RBIs, which is, again, very much in line with the numbers he is putting up this year. Which lends credence to the theory that this is just simply who Tyler Fitzgerald is.
Of course, Fitzgerald was never going to hit .355 over a full season. He was never going to maintain a 1.000 OPS for 150+ starts. But you also hoped he would provide more production than he has this year. He did hit .284/.341/.432 in April of this year and looked every bit the dynamic hitter the Giants saw last year, and was becoming a force in the ninth spot in the lineup.
Then he suffered a rib fracture against the Padres that caused him to miss two weeks. He has hit .186 since with 33 strikeouts in 97 at bats. Is the injury to blame for his hitting problems? Only he will know that for sure, and there is little chance Fitzgerald would resort to blaming the injury for his hitting woes.
The good news is, there are reasons to have hope that Fitzgerald can once again jump-start his career. He was sent down to the minors last year, and after hitting .310 in 17 games with the Rivercats, was back in the Giants lineup in late June, and his ridiculous hot streak began a few days later. It is possible a few weeks in the minors is all that Fitzgerald needs, again, to get going at the plate again.
The Giants can only hope. The season began with him as the plan at second base. If he cannot rediscover the hitting stroke he had in April, and if Casey Schmitt’s current hot stretch fades into memory by mid-July, the Giants could have another glaring positional hole to address at the trade deadline.