What happened to Trent Grisham?

A deep dive into why the Padres CF can't seem to get his bat going this season.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about Trent Grisham being the superstar that nobody was talking about on the San Diego Padres. I was shocked that he was as good as he was, as young as he was, and getting as little attention as he was.

Since then, the whole thing has gone to hell. Trent Grisham missed about a month with a leg injury and has never been the same player since returning. His OPS was about .900 before getting injured and hovered around .600 after his return.

The optimistic Padres fan would tell you that he never fully recovered from that injury and he just needed some time to rest and recover before returning back to his pre-injury form in 2022. Right?!?

.144/.264/.231

There’s his slashline for 2022. If you don’t want to do math, that’s an OPS of just under .500. And it hasn’t just been some bad luck, there are some truly concerning signs about what Grisham is going through.

So, as a way to try and figure this out, I’m going to try and remember every theory I’ve heard about Grisham this year and see if any of them stick.

Grisham needs to bat leadoff

This one I can kill quickly. Grish has mostly hit leadoff this season. 70 of his 104 AB have come in the leadoff position (he’s hitting .171/.301/.271 in that spot).

While he is hitting better in the leadoff spot than anywhere else, leaving him there doesn’t seem to be helping yet.

Grisham is being too passive, taking too many pitches

Okay, I’m going to put some stats here and then we’ll take a look and see if this is anything.

2022
4.21 pitches per PA
59.3% of pitches thrown for strikes
37.1% of pitches swung at
75.0% of swings Grisham made contact on

2021
4.11 pitchers per PA
59.6% of pitches throw for strikes
40.4% of pitches swung at
78.3% of swings Grisham made contact on

Two things. One, he is swinging less (and making less contact) but the amount of pitches he’s seeing per plate-appearance hasn’t changed very much. That just sounds like a guy that knows his bat isn’t helping him much right now, and he’s trying to find other ways to get on base.

Looking at this, and know that we’re dealing with pretty small sample sizes for all of this, it would appear that he’s having a hard time laying off pitches that are low.

One of the very helpful members of the Padres Hot Tub Discord server was looking into this took and found some distressing signs around the pitches he’s taken.

Here’s 2020:

And now here’s 2022:

Notice anything? In 2020, he was a normal hitter who would take balls on the edge of the strike zone, thinking it was a ball or hoping to get the call. In 2022, he’s been taking pitches right down the middle AND he has swung the most at pitches in the middle of the strike zone. That should tell you that opposing hitters have no fear of him right now. But why?

Grisham is pulling the ball too much

My Padres Hot Tub co-host Craig Elsten loves to root for Grisham to hit the ball the other way. The theory being that Grisham is his own worst enemy, and would be a much better hitter if he wasn’t trying to hit HRs all the time.

First, it’s important to remember that these are hits. So, while it definitely looks like Grisham isn’t hitting the ball to left field very often (except for that one HR), this could also be a sign that the balls he’s hitting in that direction are just getting caught more. Again, small sample sizes. (Author’s note: While looking through other stuff later, I confirmed that he’s hitting balls to LF that are just being caught.)

Since 2021 was a mixed bag for Trent, I wanted to keep with the theme of comparing 2022 to 2020. It definitely looks like a similar pattern of hits, perhaps with a bit more going to LF. I don’t know that I would find this a concerning trend, but maybe I’m giving too much credit to the one HR.

If anything, I’m more concerned by the lack of HRs to right field. That tells me that he’s not hitting the ball as hard as he used to.

The stats say he’s pulling the ball at a normal level. Any downward slide in hits to the opposite field are just going up the middle now, which is fine.

The two big issues, which we’ll dig into more in the next section, are that he’s not barreling anything and he’s topping the ball a lot more (which means more ground balls). Basically, he’s swapped bodies with Eric Hosmer in some sort of baseball Freaky Friday, which explains why Hos is hitting better this year.

Grisham can’t hit fastballs

I hear this one a lot, and we’ll get there, but let us first see if he’s not hitting the ball as hard as he used to.

Those numbers above should tell you the following things:

• He doesn’t swing at bad pitches

• He’s still fast

• He still walks at a good pace

• He can not hit, and even when he runs into one, it’s not going anywhere.

If you want to see an example of someone who is hitting the ball when they make contact, go look at Alfaro’s advanced stats sometime.

Here are Grisham’s numbers. Average EV still isn’t elite, but pretty much everything else is. In fact, Grisham never really had great EV (even when he hit a ball really hard), so we probably should’ve seen a prolonged slump coming. Still, the drop from 74th percentile barrel rate to 10th percentile is…pretty much everything.

But we’re here to talk about fastballs.

Let’s pay attention to Grisham’s stats against fastballs. Pitchers are throwing him less fastballs, by percentage, than ever before. It is still where he’s getting his best launch angle and best XWOBA, but he’s not getting much in the way of results.

The drop in slugging is the one I really want to focus on here. It went from .571 to .360 to .235 against fastballs over three seasons. That’s a big yikes! No wonder pitchers feel comfortable throwing him pitches in the middle of the zone.

Remember earlier when I said Grisham swapped bodies with Hosmer? This is some of the proof. The graph above is pretty self explanatory, but allow me to elaborate anyway.

Grisham is not getting under the ball and he’s not making solid contact. That means that everything he hits is either a weak fly or a groundball. This is the same against fastballs, offspeed and breaking pitches. It’s not necessarily about what pitchers are throwing to him, Trent Grisham’s swing is just broken right now. And it wasn’t that great to begin with.

I think Grish was something of a mistake hitter that isn’t seeing many mistakes right now because pitchers aren’t afraid of him. I do think the real hitter lies somewhere between his 2022 and 2020 numbers, and that he’ll hit well enough to play in MLB, but I’m giving up on my hopes of him ever being a superstar.

(Don’t ask me how Luis Urías is doing. You don’t want to know.)