Eddie Rosario is 25 years old. He’s had 2 partial seasons in the majors with the Twins; spending time in AAA, not because of injury, but for his development. He’s always been known for having an array of tools and throughout the minors has flashed some interesting potential, hitting 20 home runs and stealing 20 stolen bases in separate seasons. His rookie campaign in 2015 was excellent hitting double digit doubles, triples, and home runs while stealing double digit stolen bases, all in 450 at bats.

Since then he’s been trying to improve upon his great start but terrible plate discipline has been standing in his way. In 905 career plate appearances he owns a 3.3% walk rate and a 24.4% strikeout rate. Given his potential as a power/speed guy, I’ve always kept him on my watch lists hoping for some change that unlocks his abilities. Well thus far in 2017 it doesn’t appear he’s unlocked anything, but there is certainly a major change in his game. In 77 plate appearance he is sitting at a 3.9% walk rate (completely normal for him) and a 15.6% strikeout rate. In his past 6 games he’s only struck out once! This type of change warrants a deeper dive into the underlying numbers.

On the plate discipline stats we can see his Contact% has bumped up from 73% to 78%, and correspondingly his SwStr% has dropped from 15% to 12%. His O-Swing% has remained just above 40% just to remind us this is the same guy. All these numbers say that while he’s still in the “bad” category for plate discipline, there is some genuine improvements being made. So I’d guess his 15.6% strikeout rate is probably a little lower than he deserves at this point.

For fun lets take a look at how his batted ball stats are doing. Things are definitely getting stabilized this early in the season but so far it’s worth pointing out he’s hitting a ton more ground balls, he’s pulling the ball less, and his soft contact rate is way down. So what I make of that is… yeah… I don’t know. Things are still getting stabilized.

Two weeks ago there was a news post on ESPN about Manager Paul Molitor talking to Eddie Rosario about how he appeared to be trying to do too much and to calm down his leg kick a little. He said he’s been putting in good at bats but wasn’t seeing the hits come and therefore was trying to force it a bit. Well maybe that was the talk he needed because in the past two weeks Rosario is hitting .317/.333/.488 with 2 home runs. He is on a 9 game hitting streak at the moment. Rosario is still batting in the bottom third of the order every day but perhaps he gets moved up if the success continues. All in all this seams like a situation that’s worth monitoring. If your league is deep enough I’d recommend making the add and see where this goes. Shallow league players might only want to add him to their watch list for the time being. The season is young but so far things are getting interesting for Eddie Rosario.