My first thought was that #2 was likely to be a result of #1. But wouldn't it be possible, if not likely, that it is #2 that might be a contributiing factor to #1. Perhaps it's a chicken/egg thing.Savin Hillbilly said:
As a gloss on this: It seems like he has, until this recent breakout, had two main problems as a hitter:
1) Pitch recognition/selection issues--swinging at pitches he shouldn't or vice versa.
2) Quality of contact issues--having trouble hitting the ball hard with any consistency even when he did swing at the right pitch.
(1) is almost a given for young hitters; you expect to see it, and you hope it gets better with time and experience. It's (2) that has felt like the potential deal-breaker for JBJ, and it's (2) that he seems to have solved, or at least made major progress on, this year.
So while the recent breakout doesn't guarantee anything, it has removed what seemed (to me, anyway) like the main obstacle to projecting any kind of ML success for him. It feels like the question has shifted, in the past month, from "will he ever hit major league pitching well enough to stick?" to "how good a major league hitter can he be?". Even if the answer to the latter is far from certain, it's a nice question to be asking.
Wouldn't issue #1 show up all along his climb? I understand that ML pitchers are better than mL pitchers and that opposition scouting would be a great factor, but it seems like most of those issues would be part of the algorithm that create the ML/mL equivalent ratings.
#2, on the other hand, seems like the one that could very well be caused by the quality of pitching. In other words, he hadn't changed as much as the opposition had. That then caused him to adjust which corrected #2 and then will lead (if it hasn't already) to improvement on #1?