The Great Wil Hype
What actually changed for Wil Myers in 2020, and is it repeatable in 2021?
For the uninitiated, let’s take a look at everything Wil Myers has been as a baseball player. It’s a wild ride.
Who is Wil Myers?
In a normal setting amongst other normal humans, this is the type of question that might lead to someone describing Wil’s best or worse qualities as a person.
In a baseball setting amongst other baseball die-hards, this is the type of question that could elicit emotions from laughter to confusion to frustration.
Wil Myers is potential. That’s a weird thing to say about someone who just turned 30 years old, but it’s 100% true.
Wil Myers might have one of the sweetest swings in all of baseball, which is why most of the league fell in love with him during his Rookie of the Year-winning 2013 season, as a RF with the Tampa Bay Rays. (He missed out on being a Devil Ray by 6 years, unfortunately.) However, baseball is more than having a sweet swing, and it’s everything else that Wil has fought with during his career.
The rollercoaster
In the absolute simplest terms imaginable, this is what Wil’s MLB career has looked like:
2013: GREAT (ROY winner, 2.3 WAR in 88 games)
2014: Mediocre & full of injuries
This is the point where Wil was traded by Tampa Bay to the Padres for what amounted to Joe Ross and Trea Turner.
2015: OK
2016: Really good! (Played almost every game, up from career high of 88, and finished with a 3.5 WAR. Moved from OF to 1B)
This is the point where the Padres signed Wil Myers to the largest contract in team history, making him the face of the franchise and the 1B of the future.
2017: Pretty bad (Disaster defensive at 1B, hitting not much better)
This is the point where the team signs Eric Hosmer to the new largest contract in team history, making him the new face of the franchise and the 1B of the future.
2018: Bad (Misses have the season with an injury, splits time between LF and 3B)
2019: Worse (Plays LF/CF/RF and seemingly loses the ability to hit with any consistency, publicly caught blasting Andy Green)
So, let’s stop there. For anyone who says that Myers’ turnaround in 2020 is because he enjoyed being the 4th or 5th most important guy in the lineup, he was that guy in 2019 as well. Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado were already in San Diego. If anything, that team was ready to do bigger things and got dragged down a bit by Myers.
Enter 2020 Myers
Just how much better Wil Myers was in the 2020 season is difficult to overstate.
His .288/.353/.606 slashline was far and away the best of his career (he batted .293 in his 88-game rookie season and never came close to that number again before 2020, the other two are career highs).
We had seen Myers have great weeks, even the occasional great month, but 60 games of this type of offensive dominance while being a pretty good RF was exactly what the team was hoping for when they traded for him and then signed him to that big contract.
But now we open ourselves up to two big, important questions.
Can Wil Myers have two good seasons in a row?
The added caveat here being that last year hardly counts as a season (looking at you, Dodgers). 55 games is the least amount Wil had ever played in a single season since making the leap from the minor leagues. Was it just that he got hot at the right time and never had time to cool off (or get injured)?
The evidence would point to….probably not. Myers did two things in 2020 that drastically improved his offensive production.
He struck out less, posting his lowest K rate since 2016. He also dropped his K rate by about 10 percentage points from the year before, all while his walk rate went down a couple of points too. That’s curious! It means that Wil wasn’t simply being more patient, but that he was being more aggressive swinging at certain kinds of pitches.
This is a pretty clear two-year trend! In his career-worst 2019 season, Myers could hit fastballs almost exclusively. In 2020, he apparently learned how to hit a curveball and became nearly impossible to pitch to. He was so insanely good at hitting breaking balls in 2020 that throwing him a fastball, which was always a big no-no, was now a pitcher’s best option.
Looking back a few years and this trend carries through. Wil Myers has never been a fan of curveballs or sliders, and he only occasionally has success against change-ups. In 2020…
Still hitting fastballs well, hitting sliders like it’s going out of style, and making hard contact against curveballs. This is what changed in Wil Myers. How he got there is up for debate, but it was the ability to hit breaking stuff that potentially turned his career around in San Diego.
Is Wil Myers the key to the Padres’ championship aspirations?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
I could say it a few more times but you get the point.
A team with championship aspirations, especially in the NL West, has to be good at everything. It can not have anything more than minor weaknesses.
This is why, despite having a pretty damn good team last year, A.J. Preller went out and bolstered the starting rotation with Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, and Joe Musgrove. It’s also why he signed Mark Melancon and Keona Kela to add to a bullpen filled with former closers and potential closers.
But Preller didn’t do much to improve the offense, because that was the Padres’ strength last year. In 2020, the Padres finished 3rd in runs scored, 4th in home runs, and 4th in OPS. And that’s with the catcher position being an offensive hole for much of the season.
The key to the Padres offense was depth. The good hitters just never seemed to stop coming. There were seven players in the Padres lineup that had to be feared when standing in the batter’s box:
Trent Grisham
Fernando Tatis Jr.
Manny Machado
Wil Myers
Jake Cronenworth
Jurickson Profar
Eric Hosmer
That’s in no specific order. While it was Tatis and Machado getting MVP votes, it was Myers that led the team in SLG and OPS.
Now, with the NL reinstating the hitting pitcher, avoiding “dead spots” in your lineup will become even more crucial. If your 6-7-8 hitters aren’t very good, opposing pitchers will pitch to them to get around the 3-4-5 hitters that are good.
While there’s questions about if Profar or Hosmer can keep up their offensive performance from last year, it would be even more jarring for San Diego if they lost their biggest power threat and potentially most dangerous hitter to regression or injury.
If Myers turns back in 2019 Myers, and loses his ability to hit breaking pitches again, that would be devastating for the Padres’ hopes of toppling the Dodgers. The good news is that there is reason to believe Myers may have actually figured out how to hit breaking balls and got rid of one of his own weaknesses, which I personally like as a story a lot more than “the pressure is off him.”