I wasn’t able to just feel good and let it play. “You feel like you’ve got nowhere to go,” said Williams, now a third base coach with the A’s. He finished the 1992 season with 20 home runs, a. It didn’t matter that he led the NL with 122 RBIs just two years earlier. Williams tried to change his stance to compensate, which only served to put him in even worse position to drive the ball. It started with his back, and then other things kept cropping up. “Years like that … ” said Williams, wincing as if experiencing the phantom pains of that season all over again, “everything just seems to nag at you.” It’s one of the premier power hitters in Giants history, and in the prime of his career, too: Matt Williams, in 1992. You’d expect to stumble on a light-hitting infielder, right? Neifi Perez, perhaps. Let’s punch up the list and find the last Giant to hit so few doubles in so many at-bats. That’s when you notice he hit just 13 doubles, too. To understand the power vacuum Pence’s season truly was, you have to scan past the 13 homers he hit and glance a few columns to the left on the stat sheet. His average launch angle of 4.4 degrees ranked 269th out of 284 major leaguers. But that just meant he burned more worms. Plain speak: he continued to make relatively hard contact. Pence’s 89.0 mph average exit velocity still put him in the 77th percentile of batters who put the ball in play at least 200 times. Only the Pirates’ David Freese and the Marlins’ Dee Gordon (who beat out a lot of bunt singles) put the ball on the ground with greater frequency. He hit 1.35 ground balls for every fly ball, which was the third highest ratio among 145 qualified major leaguers. Sluggers around baseball took strides – or altered their own - to avoid hitting them. Something so pernicious it should be stripped of its rights and put into quarantine. ![]() It was a condition that has become a scourge throughout baseball, something that is stigmatized, looked down upon, to be avoided at all costs. Something totally different plagued Pence last season.
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