Gavin Lux Has Let It Rip

The Dodgers built up a formidable seven-game NL West lead over the first half of the season. While they had to withstand a late charge by the Padres — whom they’ll face in a Division Series that starts on Saturday, a rematch of the 2022 pairing that ended up sending a 111-win Dodgers squad home — they were able to do so despite their starting pitching fraying at the seams. Even before Mookie Betts and Max Muncy returned from lengthy absences due to injuries, the emergence of Gavin Lux as an offensive force played a key role in the team’s second-half offensive uptick.

Lux’s overall numbers for 2024 — .251/.320/.383 with 10 home runs — don’t scan as particularly special. Dragged down by a September slump that he began to emerge from during the season’s final week, he finished with a modest 100 wRC+. Based on his overall batted ball data, including a .262 xBA and a .393 xSLG, it’s tough to make the case that he should have done much better. The key point is that he had to hit well enough to get his head back above water after a slow start that looked as though it might cost him his spot in the lineup.

The Dodgers have shown great patience with the 26-year-old Lux, both in the past and this season. A 2016 first-round pick out of a Kenosha, Wisconsin high school, he placed second on our Top 100 Prospects list as a 70-FV prospect four years later (behind only Wander Franco). While he had already debuted in the majors the previous September, he didn’t get a foothold until 2021, and needed a strong September to prevent that season from being a disappointment, though interruptions due to wrist and hamstring injuries probably played a part in his woes.

Lux finally spent a full season in the majors in 2022, hitting a respectable .276/.346/.399 (113 wRC+) while splitting time between second base and left field. The Dodgers planned to move him back to shortstop for the 2023 season after Trea Turner departed in free agency, but on February 27, 2023, he lost his balance while running to second base, and took a spill. He came up clutching his right knee; he had torn his anterior cruciate ligament as well as his lateral collateral ligament. His season was over before it had begun; he underwent surgery on March 7.

The loss of Lux led the Dodgers to play light-hitting Miguel Rojas at shortstop on a regular basis, with a handful of other players — Chris Taylor, Enrique Hernández, and Amed Rosario — pitching in. The most interesting of them was Betts; the six-time Gold Glove right fielder, who originally came up as a second baseman with the Red Sox, moved back to the middle infield in midseason when the Dodgers demoted rookie Miguel Vargas. Betts not only made 62 starts at second base, he started 12 at shortstop, a position he’d only briefly dabbled at in the low minors, and he looked like a natural.

The Dodgers planned to keep Betts at second base for 2024, but Lux’s defensive struggles in the spring — specifically with his throwing, a problem that had intermittently reared its head earlier in his career — led them to rethink their plan. With the team’s Opening Day in Seoul, South Korea just 12 days away, manager Dave Roberts decided to take some pressure off Lux by shifting him back to second, with Betts going to shortstop, a decision both players accepted.

“Just to make this move right now, it’s something that the entire organization feels is the right thing to do to give us the best chance to prevent runs and to win baseball games,” Roberts said. “Specific to Gavin, it gives him an opportunity to get to the other side of the diamond… So to get him back over there, shorten the throw, it should be less of a toll on his body overall and give him an opportunity to have success.”

Lux’s fielding proved less of a problem than his hitting, as he collected just eight hits in his first 16 games. Even while largely being shielded from lefties (just 13 of 83 plate appearances), he finished the month batting .182/.241/.208 (31 wRC+) with a pair of doubles being his only extra-base hits. As he struggled, Roberts maintained that the team would stick by him, giving him a chance to adjust after such a long layoff. “I don’t think that would be fair to anyone, to be quite honest,” said Roberts of judging Lux too harshly too early, citing 150 plate appearances as a fair sample.

Lux improved somewhat in May (90 wRC+) but regressed again in June (67 wRC+). He had blown well past the 150-PA mark, but his overall numbers still looked unsightly. After slumping through the first half of July, he reached the All-Star break with a .213/.267/.295 slash line and just three homers in 277 PA. Among players with at least 250 PA in either league, only five out of 207 had a lower wRC+ than his 60. By his Statcast expected numbers, he wasn’t quite getting his money’s worth, but even those (.251 xBA, .353 xSLG, .289 xwOBA) were nothing to write home about. Only solid defense and projections for positive regression kept him off my Replacement Level Killers list, but it seemed quite possible the Dodgers — who by this point were without both Muncy, who had strained an oblique in mid-May, and Betts, who had suffered a fractured left hand after being hit by a pitch in mid-June — would shop for an upgrade ahead of the July 30 deadline, particularly with both Taylor and Hernández struggling as well.

During the All-Star break, Lux went home to Wisconsin, where according to The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya he worked with his uncle, Augie Schmidt, a former Golden Spikes Award winner and minor league infielder who has served as the longtime coach at Kenosha’s Carthage College. Reviewing footage of Lux’s better days, the coach and hitter concluded that he needed to generate more power, and to put more trust in his surgically repaired right knee. “Together, they looked back at his best swings. They were violent, looking to generate slug more than just putting the ball in play,” Ardaya wrote. “To generate the force he wanted, he was going to have to rely on flexing out, or ‘locking out’ his right leg.”

“He’s like, ‘Screw it. If I’m going down, I’m going down aggressive,’” hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc told Ardaya. “I think there’s some freedom in that.”

The change in mindset quickly paid off. Lux collected multiple hits in five of his first seven starts in the second half, and hit home runs in back-to-back games for the first time all season on July 20 and 21 in Boston; he earned NL Player of the Week honors for that stretch. The Dodgers reacquired Rosario and added a rehabbing Tommy Edman at the trade deadline, but Lux continued to rake. Rosario made just two starts at second base before being designated for assignment; as it turned out, those two games were the only ones in which the Dodgers faced lefty starters in a 22-game span. Betts returned on August 12, as a right fielder, with Rojas retaking the shortstop job after his own IL stint, and Muncy returned on August 19.

Lux hit .333/.403/.610 with seven homers from the All-Star break through the end of August, a month during which the Dodgers went 19-8 but only increased their division lead from 4.5 games to six. His 180 wRC+ over that stretch ranked seventh in the majors behind some real thumpers: Aaron Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bobby Witt Jr., Yordan Alvarez, Juan Soto, and Lawrence Butler. Inevitably, he cooled off, with a 4-for-44 slide (all singles) from September 6 to 24, but he appeared to right the ship in the final days of the season, going 7-for-16 with two doubles in four games against the Padres and Rockies. Overall, he had the 13th-highest wRC+ of any player in either league after the All-Star break:

Among the Dodgers, only Ohtani and Muncy have been hotter, which has helped to offset more tepid second-half showings by some of the offense’s other stalwarts:

Those players have given pitchers few places to hide; over the course of the second half the Dodgers cranked out 5.58 runs per game, up from an already robust 4.94 per game in the first half, offsetting an increase in runs allowed per game from 4.03 to 4.53.

Statcast’s new-fangled bat-tracking data illustrate Lux’s increasing tendency to let ‘er rip:

Lux added 1.6 mph to his average bat speed after the All-Star break, and more or less doubled his rate of fast swings (75 mph or faster). He didn’t square up balls with quite the same frequency, which is to say that he didn’t reach at least 80% of the maximum exit velocity possible based on the pitch and swing speeds, but he did improve his blast rate, which pairs a fast swing with a squared-up result. You can see that the contrast was a bit more dramatic when comparing his first half to the aforementioned post-break, pre-September stretch, but not by that much. As for the quality of contact, expected and actual results, the splits by half are night and day:

Lux’s average exit velocity improved by nearly three miles an hour, his barrel rate nearly tripled, and his xSLG rose by nearly 100 points. He did whiff and strike out more often (for the latter, the split was 20.6% versus 25.2%), but that was a small price to pay for such robust production. As the table shows, his average launch angle rose a bit, but the more traditional batted ball stats actually spell out the improvement more clearly:

Lux hit the ball in the air far more frequently, and he even avoided popping up as often while doing that. What’s most interesting is his dramatically improved pull rate, which for some reason doesn’t show up to nearly the same degree in his Sports Info Solutions splits (37.3% first half, 39.2% second half). Particularly because we can get a spray chart visual from Statcast to support the above numbers, I’m sticking with those for my analysis. Statcast separates popups (caught by infielders) from fly balls (caught by outfielders) instead of combining them as SIS does (with infield fly ball rate then broken out as a subset of fly balls), so in the table above I’ve aggregated those two. Here are the aforementioned spray charts:

Look at all those doubles down the right field line in the second half, not to mention the loud fly balls. When Lux reached the warning track in the first half, it was up the middle or to the opposite field, and it almost never went out, whereas when he hit it far in the second half, he did more damage.

Pitch-type wise, Lux has struggled against breaking balls all season (.168 AVG, .244 SLG), but he’s gone from weak performances against four-seamers and sinkers (.222 AVG/.297 SLG for the former, .267/.378 for the latter) to annihilating them (.429 AVG/.714 SLG for the former, .444/1.056 for the latter), and he’s improved similarly against cutters and splitters.

For all of his in-season improvement, Lux was basically an automatic out against lefties (.152/.220/.174, 17 wRC+ in 50 PA), and that didn’t really change during his grip-it-and-rip-it phase (2-for-22 with 11 Ks), but the good news for him is that unless the Padres start Martín Pérez — who’s a big step down from Dylan Cease, Michael King, Yu Darvish, and the injured Joe Musgrove — the Dodgers won’t face any southpaw starters in the Division Series. In Adrian Morejon, Yuki Matsui, Wandy Peralta, and Tanner Scott, San Diego has no shortage of lefty bullpen options if manager Mike Shildt needs a favorable matchup, but Roberts has his own levers to pull if that’s the case, with Enrique Hernández the most likely option. I wouldn’t expect Lux to carry the Dodgers through the Division Series by any means, but his in-season improvement has lengthened their lineup, and he could well prove to be one of those low-in-the-lineup difference-makers that separate the winners from the losers in October.