To say that Los Angeles Dodgers utilityman Chris Taylor has struggled they year would be an entirely objective statement. For example, FanGraphs wRC+ metric, providing an indication of a player's offensive value above or below an "average" threshold of 100, has him at 14. That's...extremely bad.
Looking at Taylor within the larger context of the league, though, tends to make the picture somehow worse. There are 339 players with at least 80 plate appearances to their name this year. Taylor's average (.108) is fourth-worst. His on-base is the 11th-lowest. His 40.2 K% trails only Joey Gallo as the league's worst. His ISO (.014) is ahead of only José Abreu, who had already spent some time in Triple-A this year.
Even with two players maintaining a negative wRC+, Taylor still sits as the fourth-worst. In a very general sense, Chris Taylor has been one of the five-or-so worst hitters in all of baseball.
There are some things that Taylor is doing that aren't completely abnormal. He's still walking at a 10.5 percent clip, which is actually above his career average. His contact rate (66.7 percent) is almost identical to last year's, and both are higher than 2022. He's whiffing at a rate reasonably near his career average (16.0 percent). Taylor is also swinging at more fastballs than he has at any point in his career, which is something that generally would indicate some decent contact at least.
You look at some of the underlying stuff and wonder if he's just been unlucky. A BABIP of .200 would seem to indicate that, at least to an extent. But then you look at the contact trends.
Taylor is making hard contact less than 18 percent of the time. His career average sits around 36 percent. His career groundball rate is 36.8 percent. This year, he's at 46.2. He's been increasing pull-heavy each of the last two years, too. None of that bodes well for any level of quality from a production standpoint. Soft, groundball contact to the pull side is irredeemable in the box score. Even a decent walk rate can't compensate.
It's important to note that Taylor is working through swing changes that he made during the winter. Those changes haven't taken in the way that he'd hoped, leaving him to revert largely within a game context. In-between swings doesn't exactly bode for a turn as we prepare to hit the summer stretch.
And then you start to wonder at what point the Dodgers can no longer afford to roster him. They have, after all, given him a backseat to the majority of the position players on the roster. Eleven players have more PAs to their name this year, including somewhat-recently-optioned James Outman.
It is important to consider how much the team values his versatility. Taylor has appeared at six different positions in his Dodger career. But given that Miguel Rojas can move around the infield, Miguel Vargas can bounce to the outfield grass on occasion, and Enrique Hernández is famously versatile, that justification starts to wane.
As much as the Dodgers may want to cling to sentiment and allow Taylor an opportunity to mold his swing back to something useful, justifications are starting to disappear. And if the Dodgers' offensive struggles start to manifest again, they're likely eliminated altogether.