Atlanta’s best player this year, and the guy who has saved their season with Ronald Acuña Jr. on the injured list, came into 2021 with a career WAR of -0.7.
It wasn’t even clear that Austin Riley would be good enough to be the everyday third baseman on a contending club, let alone someone who should get some down-ballot MVP votes. Through his first two seasons in the majors, he had a .232/.288/.448 slash line, and the book on how to get him out was pretty clear — velocity up, sliders down and away. When Riley started the year in an 8-for-44 funk with no extra-base hits, it looked like we might be in for more of the same. But in April, Riley made one of the biggest adjustments I’ve ever seen a hitter make to his approach, teaching himself to lay off the very pitches opposing teams were using to get him out so easily.
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When Riley was a rookie, it became apparent that pitchers could beat him at or above the top of the zone — the areas Statcast labels as zones 11 and 12, which cover what you would call up and away or up and in, all out of the strike zone. In 2019, he saw 99 pitches in zone 12, up and away from him, and swung at 40 percent of them. In 2021, through Monday, he had cut that rate by more than half, to 19 percent. The effect on pitches up and in was similar, going from a 42 percent swing rate on those pitches in 2019 to a 30 percent swing rate this year. These were mostly fastballs, as you’d expect in that area of the strike zone, and the results backed up scouting reports on Riley going back to high school that questioned his bat speed. For all hitters, pitches in zones 11 and 12 are more than four times as likely to result in a swing and miss than they are to result in a hit, which is why so many pitchers try to “climb the ladder” or otherwise get hitters to chase pitches in those zones.
“I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned, earlier in my career, was that I either had to pick one pitch, a fastball or an off-speed pitch, and sit on that, and hopefully I got it where I could do damage,” Riley says now, talking about his transformation. “Now I’m able to process an at-bat, understand what a pitcher is trying to do and be able to recognize spin. I know where a ball needs to start for it to be a strike. I see it in this tunnel, and I have to check off on it.”
“When I started struggling in 2019, it was fastballs up, and I was just swinging at that strike-to-ball pitch away — a pitch that starts a strike, ends up a ball. I knew I had to fix that to hang around.” Riley says he began working on this adjustment even before the truncated 2020 season, although in such a small sample that he didn’t get the results he wanted. “Last year, it got better, but I still swung at some pitches out of the zone.” He did swing far less at pitches up top but became vulnerable to off-speed pitches down and away, especially sliders. He’s swinging less often at those pitches this year. More important, he’s whiffing less often when he does.
“Mike Brumley (Atlanta’s minor-league hitting coordinator) introduced to me that tunnel spot,” Riley says. “I do a lot of study on video to where pitches have to start to be borderline pitches on the edge (of the strike zone). If I see it’s just a hair away I know it’s going to be a ball.” Indeed, Riley’s ability to lay off pitches just off the plate has improved markedly since 2019; on pitches that were less than 3.5 inches off the plate (so, between 8.5 and 12 inches away from the center of the plate), Riley went from swinging at half of them in 2019 to 38 percent in 2020.
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Brumley worked with Riley on the mental side of hitting more than the mechanical side. “When I came over in 2018 (to Atlanta), he was a priority guy, so he was the first guy they asked me to work with,” Brumley recalls. “I said to Austin, when other teams see a guy like him at the plate, what are they gonna do? How are we gonna get Riley out? Sliders away, fastballs in, and elevate! It’s no real secret.”
Brumley found some shared interests with Riley that he could use to work on refining his mental approach at the plate. “We both grew up similarly, around hunting, fishing, horses, shooting a bow and arrow, and so on. So I could tell him that with two strikes, he’d get ‘buck fever,’ and he would say that when you get buck fever you just try to breathe a little bit.”
He worked with Riley on changing his mindset away from hunting specific pitches or locations to a more holistic view of each pitch and each at-bat. “I told him not to focus on one area, but to try to treat everything in your peripheral vision. Let your body react to what it sees after you’ve put parameters in your mind about trap areas, where the pitcher is trying to embarrass you a bit.” He’d work on reducing Riley’s focus on areas where he was worried pitchers would pitch him — fastballs up and in, for example — so Riley could have more time to try to adjust to other pitches against which he was struggling, like sliders down and away. Riley’s 2021 season is the result of the synthesis of all of these approaches, as well as the specific exercises he did with Brumley on recognizing distinct pitch tunnels as pitchers released the ball.
In addition to making Riley a tougher out — his on-base percentage this year is .376, as he’s cut his strikeout rate from 31 percent to 24 percent — the new approach has led to better results on balls in play. He’s brought his average launch angle down slightly and is less prone to getting under the ball, thanks also to mechanical adjustments made with Brumley’s help, including a hip slide that put his weight too much on his front side.
The biggest knock on Riley’s bat when he was a prospect, in high school in Mississippi and in the minors, was that his bat speed was just average and he’d have trouble with good velocity in the majors. That held true when he reached the majors: In 2019, Riley whiffed on 22.5 percent of pitches 95 mph or faster, putting 19.9 percent of them in play, 5.8 percent for hits. By becoming more selective, laying off those fastballs above the zone more often, he has cut that whiff rate to 14.9 percent on pitches 95-plus mph and put 15.8 percent of them in play, 6.2 percent of them for hits.
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I’ve been covering prospects for quite some time, and in that span I have seen a lot of players remake themselves in pro ball or when they reached the majors. We’re almost blasé now when we see a hitter overhaul his swing and show up with newfound power — Max Muncy, Chris Taylor and even Ben Zobrist before “launch angle” entered the common vernacular. Pitchers add new pitches. Sometimes they change arm slots. The change that Riley has made, overhauling his entire approach, from pitch type and ball/strike recognition to pitch selection, is far less common. I can’t think of a contemporary example this dramatic: Riley went from plate discipline that threatened to send him back to the minors to plate discipline that has unlocked his natural potential with the bat. When asked about what it was like in 2019 and 2020, struggling for an extended period for the first time in pro ball, Riley said there were “a lot of ups and downs, lot of dogging myself. But now there’s some more stuff that I can work on and improve.” Even if this is as good as it gets — and I would bet there’s more upside to come with Riley — it’s more than enough.
I’ll do my regular column on players I got wrong later in September, but you can start with this: I was wrong about Austin Riley. He is a star.
(Photo: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)
