Hitting is hard. Just ask Taylor Ward.
He was acquired in a trade by the Seattle Mariners in the middle of the season to bolster their lineup. Instead, he has found himself in one of the most unfathomable hitting slumps in recent memory.
In his tenure with the Mariners, Ward is hitting .115.
That’s not a typo.
It’s .115, as in a hit basically once every nine times to the plate — and it was even worse before Ward got a pinch-hit single on Wednesday night.
Taylor Ward Stats With Mariners
All the stats are the kind that only show up for hitters in bad dreams.
Ward’s batting average is .115.
His on-base percentage is .230.
His slugging percentage is .138.
His OPS? It’s .368.
Ward has stepped into the box for 100 plate appearances for the Mariners.
He has walked 12 times and gotten hit by a pitch once, leaving 87 official at bats.
In those 87 at bats, Ward has 10 hits.
Of those 10 hits, one is a triple. He has no doubles or home runs.
Ward has scored six runs and driven in five runs. He was caught stealing in his only attempt.
He has struck out 27 times in 87 at bats, just less than one-third of the time.
In just 31 games with the Mariners, Ward has been worth negative-1.0 Wins Above Replacement.
His OPS+ is 89% worse than league average, at just an 11 (on a scale where 100 is league average and each spot away is a percentage point in relation to league average).
No One Could’ve Seen This Coming
Ward looked just fine with the Orioles in his 111 games played there this year before the trade. He was hitting .246 with a .730 OPS. He had hit 20 doubles and seven home runs for Baltimore.
Just last year with the Angels, Ward launched 36 homers, drove in 103 runs and had a .792 OPS.
He had been on the rise for the few seasons before that with the Angels, too, turning himself into a dangerous power hitter.
For whatever reason, though, nothing has worked for Ward in the Pacific Northwest. It’s like one more element that’s emblematic of a huge step back this year by the Mariners.
Ward wasn’t there at the start of this struggling season, but he’s there at the end, and it’s certainly been rough.
Pitchers throw harder than ever before. They throw with more movement than ever before. They have more data about hitters’ weaknesses than ever before.
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how many trends or tendencies a hitter goes to the box with. Hitting a baseball is still the hardest thing to do in sports, and it’s harder now than it’s ever been — to hit a round ball, with a round bat, squarely.
Ward is discovering in an immensely frustrating, painful way that it’s not easy to hit major league pitching, even if you’ve done it before.
It’s going to be a tenure with the Mariners that everyone is going to want to forget.
Not a Typo, Hitting is Hard: Mariners’ Taylor Ward Batting Average Proves It