Struggling MLB Stars Ready to Get Hot in the 2nd Half | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats, and Rumors

New York’s Max ScherzerJim McIsaac/Getty Images

It’s not too late for Major League Baseball’s struggling stars to salvage what has been a disappointing season.

(Though, it may already be too late for them to save their teams from missing the playoffs.)

Last year, J.T. Realmuto had a .722 OPS in the first half and wasn’t even an All-Star. But a .949 OPS in the second half propelled him to a seventh-place finish in the NL MVP vote and helped carry Philadelphia to its first postseason appearance in over a decade.

In the AL, Toronto’s Bo Bichette did darn near the exact same thing, carrying a .720 OPS into an All-Star Game to which he was not invited, only to post a .921 OPS in the second half en route to a few MVP votes and a spot in the playoffs.

And though it did nothing to help Arizona crack the postseason, Zac Gallen went on a scoreless streak of 44.1 innings during a second half in which his ERA (1.49) was more than two runs better than the first half (3.56).

Which stars are poised to flip that switch this year?

We’ve highlighted eight MLB players (four pitchers and four hitters) who have fallen well short of living up to their normal standard of excellence, but who are poised to turn things around in the second half based on a combination of advanced metrics, recent performance and career splits/accolades.

Players are presented in alphabetical order. Statistics are current through the start of play Monday, unless otherwise noted.

Scott Taetsch/Getty Images

2023 Stats: 3-9, 126.1 IP, 4.70 ERA, 1.28 WHIP, 7.6 K/9, 1.0 bWAR

Fresh off winning the 2022 NL Cy Young with six complete games and a 2.28 ERA, Sandy Alcantara was supposed to be the ace of what Miami hoped would be a breakthrough year.

Instead, the Marlins might win 85 games for just the fourth time in franchise history in spite of Alcantara weighing down the rotation with what has been the worst ERA of his career and the worst ERA on the staff.

The problem has been a sharp decline in the effectiveness of his changeup.

Last year, it was arguably the most valuable pitch in all of baseball, worth 24.5 runs above average, per FanGraphs. This year? It has been worth 6.5 runs below average, good for near dead last in the majors.

Per Baseball Savant, opponents hit .146 with no home runs off Alcantara’s changeup in 2022. They’re hitting .317 against it this year, with three home runs allowed in just his last four starts.

Still, all signs point to improved luck the rest of the way, with both a FIP and xFIP down around 4.00.

His .301 BABIP against is much higher than it had been in any of the last five seasons. That should regress to the mean in a good way. And he has at least gotten the walks under control, issuing just 11 free passes in his last nine starts compared to 25 walks in his first 11 games.

If he can also get his changeup working to a reasonable degree, Alcantara could mow through August and September to carry the Fish to a rare postseason berth.

Dustin Satloff/Getty Images

2023 Stats: .241/.281/.283, 0 HR, 33 R, 17 RBI, 10 SB, negative-1.1 bWAR

“Ready to get hot” isn’t a fair description of Tim Anderson, who has already been scorching since the All-Star Break.

But considering the White Sox are irrelevant this season, there’s a good chance you hadn’t noticed.

Over his final 54 games before baseball’s intermission, Anderson batted .201 with an atrocious .462 OPS. Per FanGraphs, he was the least valuable position player (negative 1.3 fWAR) during that nine-week freefall from “One of the most intriguing trade deadline candidates” to “Will the White Sox even pick up his $14 million club option for next season?”

The 30-year-old has yet to homer in 2023, but with a .378 batting average and multi-hit performances in six of his first nine games of the second half, he has rapidly resurfaced as one of the biggest names to monitor as we close in on the deadline.

From 2019-22, Anderson hit .318 with a batting crown in ’19, a Silver Slugger in ’20 and All-Star Games in ’21 and ’22. That guy vanished for a while after coming back from a knee injury suffered less than two weeks into this season, but he seems to have found his mojo once again.

And it bears mentioning that he has, historically, done his best work late in the calendar. Anderson has been a career .255 hitter between June and July, but a .299 hitter in August, a .310 hitter in September/October and has hit .485 in seven career postseason games.

Cole Burston/Getty Images

2023 Stats: 7-6, 97.0 IP, 4.36 ERA, 1.26 WHIP, 9.7 K/9, 0.8 bWAR

Here’s a very simple fix for Yu Darvish: Quit throwing sliders.

The 36-year-old has a seven-pitch arsenal, and according to Baseball Savant, most of those seven pitches are pretty tough to hit.

Since the beginning of 2021, he has had at least 87 ABs end via each of the four-seamer, curveball, cutter, sinker, splitter, sweeper and slider. Against the curve, opponents are batting a meager .127. They haven’t been much better against the splitter (.173), four-seamer (.177), sweeper (.186) or sinker (.190). And while the cutter (.299) wasn’t great in 2021 or 2022, he has been using it more often and with greater success this season.

And then there’s the slider, against which opponents have hit .341 since the beginning of 2021, and a ghastly .442 this season.

Darvish is throwing the slider much less often this season (17.9 percent of pitches) than he did the last two seasons (31.3 percent of pitches), but he’s still going back to that well way too often for how ineffective it has been.

On the whole, though, Darvish has been just plain unlucky en route to his 4.36 ERA.

For his career, he has a BABIP against of .283 and a left on base percentage of 76.1. And over the previous seven seasons, he never once had a BABIP against greater than .295, nor a LOB% below 72.3. But he entered Monday night’s start against Pittsburgh sitting at .311 and 70.8, respectively.

Darvish also entered Monday with both a FIP and an xFIP of 3.77 and an xERA of 3.56, suggesting that his quality starts against Philadelphia and Toronto to open the second half of the season may have been the beginning of a strong finish.

Steph Chambers/Getty Images

2023 Stats: .271/.341/.463, 17 HR, 49 R, 64 RBI, 4 SB, 1.3 bWAR

For as long as there have been Home Run Derbies, people have worried that players participating in the exhibition might screw up their swing.

But with Vladimir Guerrero Jr., we were optimistic that the derby might do something to fix his lack of home runs.

Through his first 88 games of this season, the man who led the majors with 48 home runs in 2021 had hit just 13 dingers. He was averaging one home run for every 29.5 trips to the plate.

Since hitting a total of 72 to win the 2023 H.R.D., though, the 24-year-old has rediscovered his power to the tune of four home runs in 38 plate appearances. (That’s once per 9.5 trips to the plate.)

Even before the derby, he was overdue for improved luck.

Per Baseball Savant, Guerrero’s average launch angle, his sweet spot percentage and his hard hit percentage are all basically identical to the marks he posted in 2021, and substantially better than what he did en route to 32 home runs last year. But for some strange reason, he just hasn’t been depositing fastballs into the bleachers like he used to.

At the start of play Sunday, his .539 XSLG (expected slugging) was 82 points higher than his actual slugging (.457). And among the 16 qualified hitters who had an XSLG of at least .520, he was the only one slugging below .485.

And that’s even with the mini hot streak since the All-Star Break. Guerrero should continue to mash at a high level.

Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

2023 Stats: .290/.385/.404, 4 HR, 40 R, 28 RBI, 7 SB, 1.1 bWAR

Bryce Harper seems to be seeing the ball just fine.

His batting average, on-base percentage, walk rate and strikeout rate are all pretty close to his career norms. His line-drive percentage (25.3) is higher than any previous season of his career, and he is using the entire field unlike at any point in the past decade, sending 30.6 percent of batted balls to opposite field.

But at 6.7 degrees his average launch angle is broken.

We’re talking “worst of his career against fastballs, worst of his career against breaking balls and worst of his career against offspeed pitches” broken.

Before this season, Harper had never had a launch angle below 11.8. And that huge drop has resulted in just one home run dating back to May 26, and a woeful-for-him year-to-date slugging percentage of just .404.

Now, I’m no hitting coach, but a guy with nearly 300 career home runs doesn’t suddenly forget how to swing at the age of 30.

It is possible he came back too early from the Tommy John surgery and we’ll just have to wait until next year for him to start homering again—as happened with Ronald Acuña Jr. after his rapid return from a torn ACL last season.

But maybe a minor tweak from Kevin Long will get Harper back into the swing of annihilating baseballs. Or perhaps his recent return to playing the field for the first time in 15 months will have some sort of profound effect on his swing. He does already seem to be having more fun out there, diving all over the place with reckless abandon at first base.

Al Bello/Getty Images

2023 Stats: 8-4, 100.2 IP, 4.20 ERA, 1.19 WHIP, 10.2 K/9, 1.6 bWAR

Just like Yu Darvish, the slider has not been Max Scherzer’s friend this season.

But while it has been a multi-year problem for Darvish, this came out of nowhere for the 38-year-old.

Since FanGraphs started tracking pitch values in 2002, only Clayton Kershaw (211.2) has had a slider worth more total runs above average than Scherzer’s (170.2).

Per Baseball Savant, from 2019-22, he ended 495 plate appearances with a slider, resulting in a .166 batting average, five home runs and 198 strikeouts. Each year, his whiff percentage on the pitch was north of 46 percent.

But this year, his whiff percentage on sliders is just 33.7, with opponents batting .265 with nine home runs in 84 plate appearances that ended on a slider.

That’s a home run rate of one for every 9.3 plate appearances. Compared to one for every 99 plate appearances over the previous four years combined. Yikes.

Notably, the velocity on Scherzer’s slider is down more than a full MPH from where it had been for more than a decade. But unless he’s tipping his pitches somehow, there’s no way right-handed hitters should be suddenly teeing off on what had been one of the deadliest pitches in the game for years, as he’s still getting good movement and a ton of spin on that slider.

Everything else in his arsenal is still pretty good, especially the cutter that is destroying left-handed hitters. And the slider has been more effective over his last seven starts, with opponents hitting just 7-of-36 (.194) off it. (Granted, four of the seven hits were home runs.)

If Scherzer can continue to hone that—perhaps with a new team after the trade deadline?—maybe he can go on a tear down the stretch.

Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

2023 Stats: .249/.302/.390, 10 HR, 56 R, 34 RBI, 21 SB, 1.3 bWAR

The Phillies spent $300 million on what they assumed would be a .300 hitter, but season No. 1 of Trea Turner’s gargantuan 11-year contract has not gone according to plan.

It looked like Turner had finally turned a corner in June. There was a 23-game stretch in which he hit .308/.388/.451 with 10 stolen bases.

But he has struggled again for much of July and remains on track for the least productive season of his career.

Curiously, while teammate Bryce Harper’s launch angle (6.7) is well below his career norm, Turner’s (14.6) is substantially higher than in any previous season of his career, resulting in way more flyouts than usual.

Sure seems like he got his big payday and felt the need to start swinging for the fences. Instead of more home runs, however, after a seven-year stretch with an .845 OPS, he has plummeted to .692.

Turner is also striking out 23.8 percent of the time (compared to a career average of 18.6 percent) and has seemingly lost the ability to hit offspeed pitches. Per Baseball Savant, he hit at least .262 on offspeed pitches each year from 2018-22. Last season alone, he had seven doubles and four home runs from offspeed pitches. But he’s batting .173 against them this year with just two extra-base hits.

It’s all just not very good.

But, come on, he’s not this bad.

Turner got votes for NL MVP in each of the past three years, won a batting crown in 2021 and was a Silver Slugger last year. And he turned 30 less than a month ago. There are age-related concerns about the back end of this contract, but not this year.

Unless there’s some nagging injury that hasn’t been made public, he should get back on track at some point.

Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

2023 Stats: 7-6, 75.1 IP, 5.02 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, 8.6 K/9, 0.4 bWAR

From 2019-22, Julio Urías stubbornly refused to let his ERA balloon to where it was “supposed” to be.

As a flyball pitcher with an average K rate, below-average BABIP and HR/FB rates and an above-average LOB%, all signs pointed to regression at some point. Per FanGraphs, he had a 2.63 ERA, this in spite of a 3.45 FIP and 3.99 xFIP. (During that same timeframe, Toronto’s Alek Manoah had nearly identical marks of 2.60 ERA, 3.51 FIP and 4.05 xFIP, and he has suffered through an absolute train wreck of a season.)

But Urías has regressed so much that things should swing back in his favor soon.

His home run rates (1.79 HR/9, 15.5 HR/FB) have skyrocketed to well above the league averages (1.20 and 12.5, respectively). And after a four-year stretch of allowing a .210 batting average to opponents hitting with runners on base, he’s allowing a .323 batting average in those scenarios this season. It has been particularly bad if there’s a runner on third, when opponents have gone 10-of-18 (.556 AVG) with five sacrifice flies.

As poorly as things have gone on the whole, though, the 26-year-old has peppered in a few gems, recording a quality start in seven of his 14 outings. And since returning from six weeks on the IL with a hamstring injury, he has allowed just one home run in 20 innings of work.

If Urías can continue keeping long balls to a minimum and get back to not completely falling apart with runners on base, this impending free agent—who has historically done his best work in August and September, going 22-2 with a 2.02 ERA—should have a solid final two months with the Dodgers.