Allen Craig - Hitting machine?

Well, imo, there's been a lot of bs around his physical condition. I hear a lot of evasiveness about whether his foot is bothering him or not. Maybe because it isn't really, maybe because it is and he doesn't want to make excuses, maybe because whatever his foot is now is how it will be and no one wants to admit that it's affecting his performance to this degree because that would make his career pretty tenuous. The frustrating fact is that we just don't and can't know. It strains credulity to think that he just forgot how to hit, though, so we're left with three possibilities: he's still hurt this year and needs an offseason to fully recover; he's just out-of-whack, either because of his injury or not, and has just had a bad year; he's damaged goods.

But we don't know the answer to any of this, and we probably won't until next year. I'm already anticipating the "his foot hurt worse last year than he let on but he feels 100% now and is primed for an explosion" BSOHL story next February, though.

As noted here, here, and here (that last link has a bunch of links to other useful analysis), Craig has particularly struggled to pull the ball in the air with any authority, especially versus inside pitches, which was once one of his strong suits.

The optimistic explanation would be that due to recovery from last year's injury, he never got to build up his hitting base this year (both physically and mechanically), and his timing has just been off all year. With a fully healthy offseason, he'll regroup, rediscover his timing/swing, and return to the 2011-13 Craig we know and love next year. Good hitters sometimes just have really bad seasons, and as Garin Cecchini has hopefully demonstrated with his stellar August, there's no reason they can't bounce back.

The pessimistic explanation is that his bat speed has just fallen off, and it isn't coming back. While 30 is pretty young for that sort of thing to happen, it isn't unprecedented. Dustin Pedroia, for instance, has seen his power decline two years in a row, starting at around the same age. Remember that Craig's power had started to slip in the second half of 2013, and as a guy who had overachieved and outperformed his scouting reports his whole career, it might turn out that the halcyon days of 2011-2012 Craig were the true outlier seasons and Craig's power and BABIP declines this year end up sticking, at least somewhat. Craig was previously one of the best true hitters in the league, capable of spraying hard contact all around the field while basically never hitting infield fly balls. This year, while he's retained the aversion to IFFB, he's really struggled to pull balls in the air or hit line drives, instead rolling over a lot of ground balls to the left side and carving lazy fly balls to right field. If his bat speed has really slowed down or he just can't find his swing again, that's a big problem.

Now, even if the pessimistic read is true, he'll still almost certainly bounce back a little. For instance, I think the elevated strikeout rate this year is a little smoke-and-mirrors. His swinging strike rate is about the same as it's been in years past, and he's not really chasing pitches out of the zone more often.

c) headcase (kinda related to b)

Nah man, it's pitchers who struggle from being headcases. Get it straightened out.