Some of the most riveting and glorious things about sports are the mini battles, the games within the game. Regardless of which sport you follow, there are a dizzying amount of such contests between a pair of athletes in the two to three hour duration of the major North American sports; the tip off, drop of the puck, coin toss, getting through a screen, jamming a receiver at the line, getting the puck out of the corner, on and on. And for every single one of them, there’s a winner and there’s a loser.
Baseball is no exception here.
The pitch to pitch grind, pickoffs, all the components of a bang-bang play, fielders vs stadia and their various quirks, on and on, the sheer amount of these events is part of what makes the game so inviting, from the casual observers, all the way up to data scientists. You can look away for a sec to dig a little deeper into your helmet nachos, safely tucked behind the netting (or not, please take care of yourselves, folks), look back up, and catch one of the hundreds upon hundreds of such challenges to be found throughout a ballgame. Or, you can sit at home in your nerd war room, with dozens of tabs open across several screens, consumed by the at times overwhelming amount of live data available in the statcast era.
Everything is tracked, and while the outcome of the game may be in doubt, as hall of famer Yogi Berra famously said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” Even absent data or professional expertise, we fans can instinctively can tell you who is winning their battles, and who isn’t. And, losing enough of these contests can make for a miserable time for the player and everyone involved. Enter Michael Conforto.
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When word got out that the Dodgers were signing Conforto back on December 8th, 2024, it was widely viewed as a shrewd move; the former San Francisco Giant put up wide splits, with a .632 OPS at Oracle Park, and .852 on the road. Reality has not been so kind.
Nearly halfway through the season Conforto‘s OPS is, as of this writing, a putrid .565, and just a few days ago, he was the recipient of Dave Roberts‘ famed “chance to reset”:
As fans, we know that if Dave the perpetual optimist gets to this point, it’s pretty much rock bottom.
I have tried to maintain some optimism with Conforto; even if it didn’t look great (indeed, it has looked awful), his xwOBA suggested things should be better. If you look at wOBA-xwOBA, he has been one of the five “unluckiest” qualified batters in baseball:
Except, while xwOBA is a good tool, it isn’t the be-all, end-all, as it does not account for batted ball direction, and a similarly struck batted ball, same exit velo and launch angle, could have a dramatically different outcome when pulled as opposed to when it is hit the other way. League-wide, the wOBA on a pulled fly ball is .877, and it’s .212 on fly balls hit the other way.
The latter number is what I would like to focus on, because if you are both bad at something, and you are doing a lot of it, intentionally or not, welp.
52.5% of Conforto’s fly balls are hit the other way, and his wOBA on those is .192 (as opposed to still-not-great .427 when pulled). That 52.5% figure is a career high for the former Oregon State Beaver by a wide margin, and represents a massive increase over his average from 2019-24 of 38.7%.
That bit of ugliness brings us back to getting beat. In looking at Conforto‘s statcast bat tracking data at Baseball Savant, a couple things are noticeable. One, the stance depth and stride direction, and two, the intercept point (or point of contact).
First, the stance. This first image is Conforto from 2024, the black cleats are his setup, and the red are at intercept. He starts off 6″ open at setup, which closes to approximately 2″ open at intercept,
Contrast that with what he looks like in 2025 – he starts off 4″ open at setup, but at intercept, he is about 3″ closed at contact.
Closing yourself off like that can make it difficult to rotate and clear the hips and shoulders, which can in turn change the angle of attack on the ball, and his ideal attack angle % is down from 53.6% to 48.7%. Being closed off can also move your intercept point back, which it does here – where Conforto‘s average intercept point was 3.2″ in front of the plate last year, this year, it’s just 1.8″. A major league baseball is approximately 3″ in diameter, and Conforto is about half a baseball behind, again, relative to last year. Relative to last year, he’s getting beat by half a baseball. Whether this intentional or not is immaterial – in his current setup, he has sucked mightily, and everyone knows it.
Amid the doldrums, there was very brief zephyr, a life-giving gust of wind, or what would have been if it wasn’t so diabolically soul-crushing:
A life-giving gust of wind, one that, rather than filling Conforto‘s sails, it died in Luis Garcia‘s perfectly positioned glove.
If Conforto and hitting coaches Robert Van Scoyoc and Aaron Bates and manager Dave Roberts and president Andrew Friedman have all been searching for something, that was it. Conforto made contact out in front – he absolutely scorched the ball, it’s a line drive that was 111.6 mph off the bat, with a launch angle of 9°, which carries an xBA of .850, and all anyone got out of it was a slow walk to the dugout narrated by Eric Karros – even when he isn’t getting beat, he’s getting beat. If that entire depressing sequence has been forgotten by everyone but the handful of people I just mentioned, along with yours truly, I wouldn’t blame a soul.
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With a little over five weeks remaining until the July 31st trade deadline, the front office would be derelict in their duties if they did not explore all of their options for replacing someone who has been little more than a target of ire at this stage. And, I understand giving him all the rope possible – he came here on a pillow contract, the same sort of circumstance that netted fan favorite (and seed chucker) Teoscar Hernandez, who ended up re-upping to a deal with deferrals last offseason, along with Tyler Anderson, who put together an allstar campaign before getting his bag from the Angels. Being an attractive landing spot for these kinds of guys on team-friendly one year deals (and make no mistake – every one year deal is team-friendly), is something the club would like to maintain going forward. To that end, giving these guys every opportunity to capitalize on their platform year is part and parcel of that, even when their record says the club should abandon ship.
There is little enough time left for Conforto and the Dodgers to right said ship, but as Miracle Max said in The Princess Bride, and given the liner above (despite the results), perhaps he is only mostly dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. Pull the ball, Mike, and get hot. Or get replaced.
