Near the start of West General Robinson street, right by the ticket offices near the intersection with Federal Street, there is a giant schedule of the Pirates’ 2021 season with two players prominently displayed to grab the eye.
On the right is Ke’Bryan Hayes -- the Pirates’ top prospect, rookie of the year favorite and one of the faces of the team’s rebuild. He had one of the greatest introductory months in the history of the sport last September and is, in all likelihood, going to be the main draw for the team in 2021.
On the left is Bryan Reynolds. At this time last year, most of the excitement surrounding the Pirates was around him. He was in the chase for a batting title for most of the season and finished fourth in one of the deepest rookie of the year classes in decades.
He followed that terrific rookie campaign with a nasty sophomore slump. Instead of competing for a batting title again, he finished with a .189 average, just one point better than the worst in the National League. His OPS dove from .880 to .632, and perhaps most surprisingly, it took him 18 games to pick up his first RBI.
It wasn’t all bad for him. In a 60-game season, 0.6 WAR is hardly horrible. He led all National League left fielders in assists (four) and fell just short of a Gold Glove nomination. His expected stats were also noticeably better than his actual results. Going based on the quality and frequency of his contact, Baseball Savant had his expected batting average at .228 and slugging percentage at .400 with a .302 xwOBA.
That’s by no means good, but it’s at least better. If Reynolds can provide the same level of defense and his actual stats even out to his expected ones over a larger sample size, that would project him to be about a 1.5-2 WAR player, which is average for an everyday regular. But this Pirates team needs building blocks for the future, not just average players.
Reynolds admitted at the end of last year that he put a little too much pressure on himself in a shortened season, knowing that a slump could greatly impact his season stats. Instead, he slumped the entire season:

Courtesy of FanGraphs.
There really was no point last year where Reynolds was good or even average, which is the exact opposite of how his 2019 went. Outside of his late-season slump and crash back into this stratosphere in his rookie season, he rarely dipped below average in 2019.
What was the cause? Good question. Too bad there isn’t a good answer.
It wasn’t that he started chasing bad pitches. If anything, he became more selective. This graphic generated by Baseball Savant shows how often he swings depending on where or what type of pitch it is: Over the heart, in the shadow of the zone, the area for chase and the area for wasted pitches. Reynolds decreased the amount of times he swung at garbage while being aggressive on pitches in the zone. It’s what you want a hitter to do:

Courtesy of Baseball Savant.
There’s another part to that graphic though, and that’s Baseball Savant’s estimates for how many runs Reynolds produced against pitches in that zone compared to how many a hitter should produce. Reynolds doesn’t chase a lot of pitches and he walked over 10% of the time last year. He creates a lot of runs by not swinging at junk and is rewarded for that. The pitches in the shadow are tough for every hitter, so he can’t be faulted for having a hard time with the edges.
But -2 runs over the heart of the plate? That’s a problem. Compare that to last year:

Courtesy of Baseball Savant.
In 2019 Reynolds made hitters pay for pitches over the heart of the plate. He hit .360 with a .664 slugging percentage on pitches located there. His .418 wOBA was good, but his .462 xwOBA ranked in the top 15% of hitters with at least 100 PAs. Or to put it more bluntly, if he got a meatball, he hit it.
In 2020, he recorded a .339 batting average, .629 slugging percentage and a .397 wOBA/.401 xwOBA on pitches in that attack zone. Without context, those 2020 numbers look really good, but compared to his 2019 output, it’s definitely a step back.
Time for some GIFs and a look at his swing. Here is Reynolds in August of 2019 clobbering a bases clearing triple off a Trevor Bauer fastball:
At the risk of oversimplifying all of the intricacies that go into the game, let’s boil Reynolds’ swing down to a couple key parts. His hands are set low until the pitcher starts his motion, at which point he brings them up to a load position. He usually starts in a more open stance but closes it up during his swing. Instead of a leg kick, he has a double toe tap (well, one and a half taps) and a short stride. Top that off with a short, compact swing through the zone and you have the basic elements of a Bryan Reynolds swing. Both left and right-handed. Unlike some switch-hitters, Reynolds’ swings are mirror copies.
Now a 2020 swing:
It checks a lot of the same boxes as the 2019 swing. Hands, stance, toe taps, stride, compact swing. These are pretty much the same mechanical fundamentals that he had the year before.
Granted, there were some very small discrepancies over the course of a season. At times the stance looked a little more open. The second toe tap could be a little more pronounced. The hands sometimes got to the load position at different times in the pitcher’s windup. These were all minor things though, and the only one that looked truly intentional was there were brief pockets of time where he just kept his hands in the load position. Over the course of a season, even a 60-game season, no swing will be perfectly emulated every game. But this swing is very similar to what it was last year.
If anything, the hands might be the most telling part of his 2020 swing. In that first GIF, he has Bauer timed up so well that his hands start to creep into the load position before Bauer even begins his motion. There might not be a better way to indicate just how locked in he was at that moment. He created the swing equivalent of a running start.
By contrast, in his final swing of the 2020 season, his hands are playing catch up as James Karinchak is coming towards home:
This time he stumbled out of the gate. Karinchak has a wicked fastball that can get blown by anyone, but in the same way Reynolds almost won the Bauer at-bat before the ball left his hand, he lost this one at the same point.
That’s not to say the hands were the cause of Reynolds’ problem last year. This looks like a symptom of not having his timing down, which is what Derek Shelton attributed his and many other struggling Pirates’ troubles to.
How do you fix timing problems? If there was a clear answer, the Pirates wouldn’t have finished last in most major offensive categories. They did a lot of work on the high-velocity pitching machine, with Shelton believing that a hitter’s timing is based off of the fastball and reacting to breaking and offspeed stuff. Most hitting principles would support that, but it didn’t work for Shelton, Rick Eckstein and a lot of Pirates hitters last season.
Don’t underestimate the power some time away from games can have. Perhaps all Reynolds needs was to unplug from games for a while. He said towards the end of the season that he found some things he wanted to address in his game this offseason. He’ll have a chance to put those potential changes to use this month in spring training.
Earlier this offseason, Ben Cherington expressed his confidence in Reynolds going forward, saying, “there's too much history there and too much good stuff still happening under the hood with Bryan.” I like that metaphor. He has a few scratches on the exterior now, but there are still a lot to like about his game. The 2020 season was him at his worst, and even then he still had 0.6 WAR. Being a serviceable player is a very good floor. He can’t stay at that level, though. The Pirates need a cornerstone in an outfield that has already seen a lot of turnover the past few years and will see even more in the near future. They need the guy on the PNC Park schedule to be that cornerstone.