In the offseason, Jacob Young set-up shop in Tampa, Florida to be close to the Driveline hitting lab and get in work with Travis Fitta. The goal for Young was to increase his bat speed and get his launch angle raised from where it had been in his career. Last night, Young smashed a pitch for his 10ᵗʰ homer of the season and the top exit velo (106.2 mph) in the game for any Nats player as well as the top distance of 427 feet.

Young isn’t trying to be a power hitter. Young is trying to be a line drive hitter with hard contact. An important distinction. He got over a .700 OPS and now ranked 4ᵗʰ on the current roster only trailing James Wood, CJ Abrams, and Keibert Ruiz in OPS.

This improvement by Young shouldn’t surprise anyone if you were paying attention. Young kept what Fitta taught him, and continued to evolve with tweaks with his current hitting coaches with Matt Borgschulte, Andrew Aydt, and Shawn O’Malley. Pitchers were killing Young on the outside of the zone, and Young adjusted. Then they were getting chases above the zone and he adjusted. It has taken time, and the results have made Young, who is the team’s best defender and a ‘plus’ baserunner into the team’s third most valuable position player with a +2.2 WAR.

With Young’s 10ᵗʰ home run, the Nationals have now tied a team record (2005-pres.) with four players with 10 home runs and 10 stolen bases:
Young, Wood, Abrams and Daylen Lile. Once Dylan Crews gets three more stolen bases, he will become the 5ᵗʰ player on the Nats to join the 10/10 Club and set a Nats record for the most players with those marks.

Yes, coaching matters. After Young smashed his homer last night, play-by-play announcer, Dan Kolko, said this, “… Pretty awesome for a guy who was told to hit the ball on the ground quite a bit …” You can interpret that quote however you want. To me, that was a clear diss to ex-hitting coach Darnell Coles and ex-manager Dave Martinez who were accused of teaching players like Young a groundball mentality.

While I defended the old coaches in their intent that they were trying to teach Young to hit down on the ball like Mike Trout and create backspin — it just did not work for Young who was pounding balls into the ground last year at nearly a 50 percent rate compared to 39.1 percent this year.

Young finished with a .583 OPS last year and just two home runs. Young’s average launch angle last year was just 3.8° and this year is 11°. Bat speed has gone from 68.3 mph to 69.3 mph, and the most important stat is that his ideal attack angle (5°-to- 20°), is in the near-elite range of 61.2 percent. Young’s squared-up percentage is in the elite range of the top 94 percent in baseball. And his sprint speed is top 93 percent in baseball, and his defense is top 99 percentile.

A response to that tweet is a good segue to Nasim Nunez‘s decline in offense from last year to this year. You would be wrong to think that he is hitting more flyballs this year. He is just hitting weaker flyballs. He is nearly down 50 percent in his hard hit rate from 42.2 percent to 21.8 percent. His exit velo is down nearly 5 mph. Nunez’s OPS has dropped from .699 to .583. His value is in baserunning and defense.

If this coaching staff has improved every offensive player except for Lile and Nunez, maybe this is on the player. And in Lile’s case, his numbers are still good — just not as good as last year. This is really about Nunez who clearly needs to be standing more upright with his bat on-plane longer to get return to hitting more baseballs on the barrel. His quality of contact is down significantly. Nunez’s barrel rate wasn’t great last year, but it was at 4.7 percent compared to only 0.4 percent this year.

An aside on Travis Fitta who was Young’s offseason coach, the Nats hired him afterwards as their Triple-A Assistant Hitting Coach. Mid-season, Fitta took a job as a college coach. There is no doubt that he will be a top coach in the country.

We all know the tired line from Martinez that “It’s never on the coaches.” But truth is that coaches do matter, and nobody is perfect. The difference in a good coach and a great coach can be a game-changer. Do you think it’s a coincidence that over 74 percent of offensive players in this system have shown OPS improvement by over 10 percent? And some of the players that didn’t show improvement have been released. The coaches can teach, but in the end, the players have to execute.

Cover Photo by Jake Stephens/Nats.Talk; Graphic by Baseball Savant