At long last, the Angels have pulled the plug on the Brandon Wood experiment, or at least put it on hold for a little while. With his pseudo-demotion (via a fake trip to the DL), the Halos are functionally admitting that they will make one last Hail Mary attempt at salvaging Brandon Wood’s season… and possibly his Angel career. But can he really be saved?
Wood is down, but can he get back up?
For the second straight season, the Angels have been forced to use the old “send him back down to the minors and hope for the best” strategy with one of their young, struggling position players. Last year, it was Howie Kendrick who got the last ditch effort demotion and, lo and behold, it produced (mostly) positive results. Will it work the same magic on Woody?
Like Kendrick last season, Wood is suffering from a bad case of “I forgot how to hit” syndrome. He doesn’t know a strike from a ball, a fastball from a curveball or his ass from his elbow when he is standing in the batter’s box now. Frankly, I am surprised he can even find the batter’s box at this point. He’s so lost right now that if you rewind the final scenes of the Lost finale, I’m pretty sure you can see him standing with everyone in the church right before they walk into the white light.
But enough jokes. What is happening to Brandon Wood is far from funny. He has been THE WORST hitting regular in all of professional baseball this season and gave Angel management no other choice but to orchestrate this thinly veiled gambit of giving him a fake injury, placing him on the disabled list and having him spend what will likely be a lengthy stint rehabbing in the minors (he is out of options, so he cannot be demoted without being exposed to waivers). It won’t be his pretend hip injury that he is rehabbing, but rather his mental approach to hitting.
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, strikeouts have been a major problem for Brandon Wood, fanning 36 times in 122 at-bats this season. But the problem isn’t the swinging-and-missing so much as it is the excessive amount of swinging. In case you haven’t noticed, Wood swings at EVERYTHING. There are only a handful of players in the majors who swing at more pitches outside the strike zone (Wood offers at a staggering 41% of those pitches). I’m no expert, but that seems like a bad thing since he isn’t anything close to being a contact savant like Vladimir Guerrero who also swings at everything but is able to drive it all.
What Wood needs to do in the minors is get to the root of why he suddenly became such a free swinger. The real outlier in Wood’s stats this year aren’t the strikeouts, but his glaring lack of walks as he has taken just two free passes all year. Brandon had a pretty decent walk rate in the minors, earning a base on balls in roughly 10% of his plate appearances, not 1.6% like he has this year. Something just doesn’t add up here.
For some reason, Wood has thrown his plate discipline out the window in 2010, but why?
Is it a matter of simply being overmatched by big league pitchers? It could very well be. Wood has often looked foolish at the plate, especially with his penchant for chasing 0-2 breaking balls in the dirt even though everyone in the park knows it was coming. Many a hitter has just not been up to the task of regularly hitting against big league breaking balls and pitchers who know how to set batters up, rather than just throwers. If that is the case, this jaunt to the minors isn’t going to make a lick of difference. He’ll just keep doing what he is doing, only it will actually work against the lesser talent he will be facing but fail miserably again when he is brought back to the majors.
Or perhaps it is really just all in his head? Or at least that is what the Angels are banking on. Like Howie Kendrick before him, the Angels have to be hoping that Wood is simply suffering from a major lack of confidence and it is throwing him totally out of whack at the plate. He wants so badly to prove that he belongs at the major league level that Wood very much appears to be trying to get to (overly) aggressive and eager to put the ball in play and make something happen that he is taking himself out of at-bats in the process. The more he swings and fails, the more pressure he puts on himself to get a hit which only makes him try even harder in his next at-bat, feeding the vicious cycle.
Well, that’s the theory anyway.
With Brandon set to go on “rehab” sometime in the near future, expect all eyes to be on the minor league box scores, especially the walks column. What we see there will tell us quite a bit about whether or not Wood will ever be able to get himself back on track.