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Interesting Pham fact I'd have never guessed.
Tommy Pham had the lowest rate of swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone of any OFer in major league baseball with more than 500 PAs. 3rd lowest overall. If you threw him a ball, he spit on hit better than 80% of the time. That's damn impressive and puts him in Votto territory.
Pham's biggest problem prior to last season (apart from health) was a tendency to get himself out on bad pitches. The scuttle was it was because his eye issues were keeping him from seeing it, but the bottom line is he occasionally looked completely lost for long stretches prior to 2017.
Last year, however, he demonstrated pretty spectacular strike-zone judgment.
Next step would be moderate improvement on his inside the zone rates; he swings at about 60% of the pitches he sees in the zone and makes contact on about 87% of those. So we know that he has a really good feel for what he should lay off of, but if he gets a similarly strong feel for what he should be swinging at, there's no reason his overall production should decline significantly.
That's how he'd need to make up for an inevitable decline in batted ball luck and a reduced HR/FB ratio. If he swings at, say, 66% of the strikes he sees rather than 60%, he's gonna put a shitload more balls in play. It would reduce his BB rates but his K rates would improve and his number of base-hits would likely offset the number of walks due to a higher N on his BABIP figures. It would also likely help keep him from falling behind in counts by taking strikes and could see that ISO stay elevated.
Seems to be the next obvious and reasonable area of improvement for him.
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