Zach Wilt: The numbers show Schoop continuing to progress

On April 30, Jonathan Schoop was hitting a lowly .218 after a week-long stretch in which he went 4-for-23. The first month of the season wasn't kind to the Orioles second baseman, as he had just eight extra-base hits in 82 plate appearances, a .679 OPS, and a .256 on-base percentage, the lowest of any qualified Orioles starter in April. Schoop has been a career .234/.269/.446 hitter in the first month of the season and his .220 batting average on balls in play this April was enough to know that he'd snap out of that early-season funk.

Boy, has he. In the second month of the season, Schoop hit .298/.308/.481 with five doubles, a triple and four home runs. He had the same batting average that month as Manny Machado (.298) and drove in 17 runs, more than any other Oriole. The best part is, he's been even better this month. In June, Schoop leads qualified O's in batting average (.333), doubles (7) and is tied in wRC+ (156).

Besides the obvious, a .368 BABIP, I attempted to dig in deep and figure out what has made Schoop so good over the last two months compared to what he was doing in April. Here's what I discovered about his approach at the plate:

To my surprise, Schoop actually has a higher ground ball/fly ball rate in May and June than he did in April (1.32, 1.08). He's hit a few more line drives (17.7 percent) the last two months and has tripled his infield hitting percentage (9.1 percent). As far as his spray chart goes, it's roughly the same in May and June as it was in April. Schoop is mostly a pull hitter, 44.7 percent the last two months, but works center field 34 percent and opposite field 21.3 percent of the time.

A lot of times a BABIP hike can be explained by more solid contact. Schoop's numbers in April compared to May and June have remained relatively the same. Exactly 15.9 percent of his contact was soft in April compared to 23.4 percent in May and June. Medium contact went from 49.2 percent to 47.5 and hard contact from 34.9 percent to 29.1. He actually made more medium and hard contact in April, when he hit .234 than he has the past two months of the season, when he's hit .313.

What about plate discipline? Schoop has to have a better eye in May and June than he did in April, right? That's why he's picking up more hits. Wrong. It's almost exactly the same. In April, Schoop swung at 37.8 percent of the pitches he saw outside of the strike zone, the last two months he swung at 39.8 percent of them. He made contact with 56.5 percent of those pitches in April, 57.8 percent of them in May and June. The same similarities hold true for Schoop's in the strike zone swinging percentage and contact rate and overall swinging percentage and contact rate. The numbers make it seem as though he hasn't changed his approach at all at the plate.

The biggest change that I could find for Schoop was that he seems to have improved his whiff percentage against fastballs and offspeed pitches in June compared to how he fared in April. Against fastballs, Schoop whiffed 15.88 percent of the time according to PitchF/X data from BrooksBaseball.net. That number is down to 10.23 percent in June. He whiffed 31.48 percent of the time against offspeed pitches and that number has dipped to 22.22 percent this month.

So, is that all it took to turn a .218 hitter into a guy hitting in the three hole last night whose average is up to .285 after picking up two more hits? Certainly not. I'm sure if you talked to Schoop or hitting coach Scott Coolbaugh, they've got a perfectly good explanation for the turnaround. But Schoop's numbers are an important lesson in patience in baseball. Sometimes a player has a bad month just because he runs into some tough luck. Often times, all it takes is a few more at-bats to even out the numbers a bit.