A Rhys Hoskins Breakout Is Underway, Just In Time for Brewers' Playoff Power-Up

Rhys Hoskins has had a down year. He hasn’t been as productive as many hoped, despite lambasting 25 home runs on the year, but it seems important to break the year down into two segments for Hoskins, based on an early season hamstring injury:

• First 6 weeks - .233/.340/.474, 21% K rate, 11% BB rate, Sweet spot rate 30.7%
• June - August - .202/.272/.383, 31% K rate, 8% BB rate, Sweet spot rate 24.6%

We shouldn't forget the damage Hoskins was doing early in the season as exactly the kind of slugger the Brewers dreamed on, but a combination of returning ahead of schedule for a trip to his old stomping ground in Philadelphia and a struggle with his approach at the plate brought some poor results over the ensuing three months. 

He was struggling to identify pitches and separate balls from strikes, while the contact he made dipped alarmingly. In September, however, there has been a large turnaround in the quality of plate appearances and contact Hoskins has produced, and a lot of this boost is coming from his approach on the outer third of the strike zone:

Hoskins has four months in which his expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) has been over .300 on the outer half of the plate. In each of those four months, he has gone to the opposite field over 20% of the time. Ignoring the small sample size in March, there is a clear correlation between Hoskins's quality of contact on outer-half pitches and how comfortable he has been going to right field--a factor that’s even more pronounced on fastballs.

Then you have the pop-up issue. Until Aug. 31, Rhys Hoskins was popping up 14.1% of his batted balls in play, but that has dropped to just 3.1% in September, largely as a result of his change in approach.

A lot of Hoskins's pop-ups came on balls above his hands on the inner third of the plate, but he's laid off those pitches and set his sights lower of late:

Instead, the focus has shifted more into the middle-low section of the strike zone, where Hoskins had his lowest in-zone swing rate of any zone from May through August--despite it being one of his most prolific damage zones, with an expected slugging rate of .691:

The improvement from Hoskins is twofold; he’s able to put better quality of contact on those outer-third pitches, put the ball in play to the opposite field with some hard contact, and lean into those pitches down in the zone that he’s historically destroyed.

The strikeouts are still there. His .736 OPS in September doesn't seem all that impressive. But his underlying metrics are telling a different story, with an expected OPS of over .800 clearing the cloud of some batted-ball misfortune. There's a breakout coming from Hoskins.

As he’s mentioned this year, performance and swing decisions are inextricably linked for him. It seems he may finally have hit on a formula for success, just in time for the playoff stretch.