Maikel Garcia’s Fortune has been Blessed by the BABIP Gods

The Kansas City Royals have a great starting rotation, a bullpen that’s come together nicely over the past few weeks, and a lot of team speed. The offense? Eh, it’s not great. Let’s not underestimate the impact of Bobby Witt Jr., who was the best normal-sized player in the American League this year, and should count as two All-Stars. They’ve got a couple big dudes to drive in Witt, but Salvador Perez is 34 going on 50, and Vinnie Pasquantino is working with a barely healed right thumb. That’s no small issue — the thumb is what separates us from the apes.

I was going to break out the old cliché about bringing a knife to a gunfight, but there have been times when manager Matt Quatraro was probably looking around and thinking, “You know what, I would settle for some cutlery right about now.”

Nevertheless, the Royals cooked the Orioles in the Wild Card round, and split the first leg of the ALDS at Yankee Stadium, coming very close to winning both games. That’s because, in his search for a barely survivable amount of offense, Quatraro is pushing all the right buttons.

In Game 2, against the Yankees, the Royals faced their first left-handed starting pitcher of the postseason. Quatraro shuffled his lineup accordingly, elevating Garrett Hampson to the starting lineup and moving Maikel Garcia, who’d hit ninth in the previous three games, back to the leadoff spot, where he’d spent the bulk of the season.

Hampson and Garcia are both very, very fast runners and versatile defenders, but with all the best will in the world, they’re both pretty bad hitters. Hampson is a career .240/.301/.362 hitter despite playing most of his career in Colorado. Garcia hit .231/.281/.332 (69 wRC+) in 157 games this season; he stole 37 bases in 39 regular-season attempts, which is impressive mostly because I didn’t realize he’d gotten on base 39 times all year.

And yet! Hampson went 2-for-2 on Monday night, and is now 3-for-3 with a walk and three RBI across the postseason. Garcia, who reached twice and scored the only run off Corbin Burnes in the Royals’ first playoff game, went 4-for-5 against Carlos Rodón and the relievers who followed him. Not only is Garcia hitting, he’s feelin’ it enough to talk a little trash.

Don’t celebrate too early? https://t.co/T4GyFapOFO

— Maikel Garcia (@maikeljose06) October 8, 2024

Hampson’s a situational player, but I want to focus on Garcia, whose glove and legs make him a must-start for Quatraro. And he’s been one of the Royals’ prime offensive contributors in two of their three postseason wins thus far.

What does Garcia do well offensively? Not a lot. In 2023, he actually hit a ton of line drives (he was seventh among qualified hitters in line drive rate, at 24.6%) and was in the 93rd percentile for HardHit%, but that didn’t get him very far. Garcia hit just four home runs and 20 doubles in 123 games, and his wRC+ was just 83.

This year, he seems to have taken a more contact-oriented approach, cutting his whiff rate by a quarter and his strikeout rate by a third. But his BABIP dropped by 76 points, and his batting average went from .272 to .231. If you’re hitting an empty .270 with good defense and a bunch of stolen bases, that’s not great but it’s workable. Less so is an empty .230.

It’s not just that Garcia is a groundball hitter, though he is. It’s that generally, you want to hit your fly balls to the pull side, where they can turn into home runs. And you want to hit your grounders and line drives all over, but especially to the opposite field, because it makes you harder to shift against. That is, suffice it to say, not what Garcia has done this year.

Is it completely out of the question that a player like Garcia would end up turning in such an impressive performance in the playoffs? It’s certainly evocative, with George Brett looking on. But random dudes come up with big hits every October. And if he had remade himself into a new man between the end of the regular season and the Wild Card round, four playoff games is too small a sample to know anyway.

Nevertheless, Garcia has been a huge driver of offense for a Kansas City team that doesn’t have very many scary hitters. So let’s look at what he’s done just from a descriptive standpoint, whether it’s going to continue or not.

There’s one thing Garcia actually does very well: You might not notice it because he doesn’t walk very much, but he has very good command of the strike zone. This season, his O-Swing% was 14th-lowest out of 129 qualified hitters. His chase rate is less than a point higher than those of Kyle Schwarber and Mookie Betts, and two and a half points lower than that of Brandon Nimmo.

Garcia doesn’t walk much because 54.9% of the pitches he saw this regular season were in the strike zone, which indicates that pitchers don’t fear his ability to do damage on balls in the zone. Nor should they; Garcia’s career ISO is .093, and he was 12 runs below average against four-seamers this year, according to Baseball Savant. This is a guy who makes contact, but he’s also prone to getting the bat knocked out of his hands.

But in the postseason, everyone is a danger. His in-zone rate in the playoffs is just 39.6%, and while Garcia is technically expanding the zone a little, with six swings on 19 pitches out of the zone, he’s remained quite disciplined.

He’s put wood on four of those six balls for three fouls and a single. Three of the six pitches out of the zone were only barely out of the zone; another was a desperation swing on what looked like a blown hit-and-run.

Garcia has drawn only one walk, but when he does make contact with the ball, usually in the zone, he’s been hitting it hard. Five of the 11 balls he’s put in play this postseason have come off the bat at 100 mph or more; in the regular season, it was 120 out of 481, or 24.9%. What he’s not doing, unfortunately, is hitting the ball in the air. Garcia has hit just one fly ball in four games, which is why he’s hitting .400 for the postseason but slugging, well, also .400.

You won’t hit many home runs smashing the ball on the ground, but you will rack up a fair few singles. Years ago, we’d look at four games and Garcia’s postseason BABIP of .545, hit the FLUKE alarm, and break for coffee. But Garcia’s xBA on those 11 balls in play is .493.

And I don’t hate it as a strategy, especially not against the Yankees. In Game 2, the Bronx Bombers rolled out the following infield alignment. At third base, Jazz Chisholm Jr., who made his first professional appearance at that position on July 29. At first, Jon Berti, who had literally never played first before in the majors. At second, Gleyber Torres, who has the fourth-worst defensive WAR at the position over the past five years.

Anthony Volpe’s good, though. With that said, Volpe couldn’t corral the one ball that Garcia’s hit to him so far this series. So maybe the Kansas City third baseman is actually favored by the BABIP gods.

The postseason is a time for superstars to prove their worth, to level up and carry their team in moments of great pressure. Witt ought to be doing that. Shohei Ohtani, Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, and so on.

For everyone else, just take what the pitcher gives you — no more, no less. Don’t be a hero, just be on base when the hero comes up. That’s what Garcia has done so well for the Royals through the first round and a half. He’s already won one game by poking a single through the infield and running like hell, and if the Royals are going to upset the Yankees, they’ll need more of the same.