Nimmo struck out at an alarming 27.9% rate last season, a rate nearly 50% higher than he had struck out at any of the high minor league levels prior to 2017 (he also struck out 24.7% of the time in Las Vegas, after doing so just 16.4% of the time the year before). Although his walk rate was an acceptable 15.3%, both his average and on-base percentage were buoyed by an unusually high .360 BABIP — the highest on the Mets by 30 points. Long story short: Nimmo struck out way too much but his overall numbers were bailed out by some good luck(2).

Nimmo is not going to BABIP .360 again next year (that kind of elite figure belongs only to the Mike Trouts, Paul Goldschmidts, and Dee Gordons of the world) so he’s going to have to strike out less and hit for a little more power if he wants that bat to play at the major league level(3).

The good news is that it’s likely that Nimmo won’t strike out at that rate again in 2018. Not only is that rate high relative to his career, but it’s higher than we might expect given his “good” plate discipline and his relatively low swinging strike rate. Nimmo swung and missed just 7.9% of the time last year — ranking 14th out of 19 Mets with at least 100 plate appearances. He was much more Asdrubal Cabrera (7.9%) than Amed Rosario (18.1%) in terms of his aggressiveness at the plate. Although there are many variables which go into how often a player will strike out, they tend to trend together:

With that said, one might expect that Nimmo’s selectivity at the plate might lead to a high number of strikeouts looking. Here is his heat map with two strikes:

Nimmo was more aggressive than I expected he was with two strikes, but nonetheless it appears that about 20 of his 80 career strikeouts (25%) have been looking. As a frame of reference, just 18% of Travis d’Arnaud’s (11/59) and 14% of Michael Conforto’s (16/113) were the result of not swinging the bat.

This is potentially problematic. Sometimes players are passive at the plate because they have a great eye. Other times… it’s not that (and sometimes, it’s just a young player losing “the tie” on close pitches while he pays his due in the major leagues). Whether Brandon Nimmo ever succeeds in the major leagues will largely be a function of the answer to that question.

Steamer projects Nimmo to hit .241/.333/.371 next season, representing a standard regression to the mean on BABIP and strikeout rate. If you think that Nimmo can hit a little better than that — and I do — what role is there for him on this team given what we expect from him defensively?