>sounds like:
>1. a really bad month combined with
>2. swing tinkering

He came into Spring Training with the leg kick that he used in September, but ditched it over the course of the spring. It was gone by Opening Day. On one hand, that seems like an extraordinarily strange decision given:

a) the successful close to 2016
b) that the new hitting coach James Rowson was hired in the winter and presumably could have communicated to Buxton the need to simplify his swing prior to spring training - so they could have ironed out the wrinkles without W/L stakes in Ft. Myers

On the other hand, it's a pretty solid recommendation of how seriously Rowson takes his job that he didn't just look at Buxton's 2016 finish and shrug "good enough." Most of the discussion of Rowson's work in the media includes players speaking pretty glowingly about him, and he really doesn't seem ideologically wedded to certain tenets of hitting like Brunansky was. He meets players where they are and tweaks based on what's best for them. The result is that outside of Buxton and Polanco, most of the roster is hitting at the upper end of what I'd have expected from them.

Again, I'd love to see the longterm results of Buxton's swing tinkering because I can't imagine they took a look at a player with as impressive physical tools as him and decided to make him into Jason Tyner. And the note by Sr. Hageman about contact quality is where we should be pinning our hopes. Per fangraphs *excellent* split breakdown:

-both June (relative to Apr/May) and July (relative to June) were pretty substantial increases in hard contact % and declines in soft contact %

-both June (relative to Apr/May) and July (relative to June) were pretty substantial decreases in strikeout percentage. I'd love to see more over-the-fence power, but I'm more than fine settling temporarily for increased contact *and* increased hard contact

-his walk rate declined in June (relative to Apr/May) but has been a very respectable 9.4% in July.

Or, to put it more simply, he's been .241/.300/.353 since that almost impossibly bad first month. That's not very good either, but it's more "when is Byron Buxton going to start hitting?" than "what the hell is wrong with Byron Buxton?"