Leury García can't keep playing like this - Sox Machine

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The effect of protection in a lineup is often overstated, mostly because the times a slugger was denied a chance to drive in a run looms larger than all the opportunities he had to swing away.

Tuesday night provided such a refresher. After launching a cannon shot 458 feet deep into the Progressive Field bleachers in the fourth inning, José Abreu came to the plate with a runner on second and nobody out in the sixth inning of a 4-2 game. With first base open and Leury Garciá hitting behind him due to a defensive swap at first base, Terry Francona could've had Zach Plesac pitch around Abreu in order to face a guy who looks scared to swing the bat.

Instead, Plesac went after Abreu with a slider in the zone, and Abreu shot it back through the middle for an RBI single that extended the White Sox's lead to 5-2.

Francona pulled Plesac for Cal Quantrill, who both threw and caught his first pitch to García, because García did what he's been doing all year: bunting for no good reason. It was a terrible idea poorly executed:

García's bunting is both a cause and symptom of his .163/.182/.209 line. I went through all of the 157 pitches he's seen over his 45 plate appearances in 2021, and it surprised me that he's only shown bunt six times. You could've told me it were two or three times that amount and I would've believed you.

Yet it's also not really an exaggeration to say García bunts all the time, because he kinda does. García has come to the plate seven times in a situation where a sac bunt might make the slightest bit of conventional sense — runners on first and/or second, zero outs — and with the meek pop-out to Quantrill on Tuesday, he's now tried to bunt in more than half of them.

"Tried" is the key word, because it's getting diminishing returns. Here's a chart of the six times García has shown bunt this season.

García's bunt attempt on Tuesday drew immediate criticism from Jason Benetti and Steve Stone. A transcript:

STONE: Leury —

BENETTI: Why are we bunting?

STONE: — well, I can't believe that's a signal. I think Leury's doing it on his own…

And it turned into a breakdown of García's technique from there.

It's not a surprise to see García bunting, because it's been a prominent part of his arsenal. In his last full season in 2019, García led the league with 11 sac bunts, bunted twice for hits, reached once on an error, and showed bunt 12 other times. He's not usually this bad at it. In fact, he's mostly good at it, which inspires enough confidence to square around in suboptimal situations.

The problem now is that he's bunting at the expense of everything else, possibly because he feels like he has nothing else to offer. His early-season swinging data is a mess, especially when compared to the form he'd shown from 2017 through 2020:

  • Ground-ball rate: 63% (53.4%)
  • Zone contact: 77.4% (86%)
  • Exit velocity: 80.7 mph (~88 mph)

The plate discipline numbers are largely the same, but he's reverted back to his pre-2017 form when both of his switch-hitting swings lacked a repeatable plane and he seemingly had little sense of how his barrel was going to meet the ball in the hitting zone. If he's not smashing strikes into the ground, he's fouling them back or missing them completely, resulting in one unenviable Statcast chart:

It wouldn't surprise me if García were merely mired in a funk he could play his way out of, because extremely aggressive hitters tend to look clueless when their approach isn't working, and the White Sox roster has given García plenty of such company over the years. It also wouldn't surprise me if he were hiding an injury, because García's effectively forfeiting plate appearances whenever possible, as though the faintest bunting scenario gives him a welcome excuse to avoid swinging.

Whether we're discussing mindset, aesthetics or production, there's little separating him from a pitcher who's batting for himself. The biggest difference is that a National League pitcher is in the lineup once every five days, while García has the eighth-highest total of plate appearances on the team.

Injuries are to blame for most of that, because four players hit the injured list at García's two primary positions. But now that Tim Anderson is back with vengeance and Adam Engel is set to return during the next homestand, circumstances will cut off García's avenues to organic playing time.

Tony La Russa can act sooner than that, because as long as García looks this meek at the plate, La Russa may as well give Andrew Vaughn all the plate appearances possible. I wouldn't have high hopes for production there either since Vaughn posts his best plate appearances during innings where everybody else is raking, but at least Vaughn is trying to do damage, while García looks like he's trying to obscure his own.

(Photo by Frank Jansky/Icon Sportswire)

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