This Nolan Schanuel trend is starting to frustrate Angels fans in a big way

Nolan Schanuel has begun to heat up for the Los Angeles Angels. After beginning the year with a .200/.278/.314 line from Opening Day through April 16, the 24-year-old is hitting .304/.340/.457 over the last two weeks, from April 17 through May 1. It's an encouraging development for a unique young hitter who is an odd fit in the lineup without making further strides to develop his power.

If there's one thing that continues to be a frustrating development with the first baseman, it's his growing ineptitude when it comes to ABS challenges. Schanuel leads Los Angeles hitters with 11 challenges, four more than runner-up Zach Neto. He's gotten just three of them correct, for a pitiful 27% success rate. It's becoming a real problem.

Nolan Schanuel's baffling ABS ineptitude is holding the Angels' lineup back

On face value, Schanuel should be excellent at discerning when to and when not to challenge. He's an incredibly patient hitter in the Halos' sea of free-swingers. He's walked at a well-above-average 11% cliip for his career, though so far this year that has fallen to a below-average 7.8% mark.

Still, he rarely strikes out thanks to a chase rate of 23.3%, which ranks in the 82nd percentile. If he's this good at identifying when not to chase, and is only striking out 14.7% of the time, you'd think he'd know when to pull the trigger and challenge a questionable call.

Instead, he's been awful. We're still learning about ABS startegy and the like. As the season unfolds, we'll know more about best practices, if challenges are an actual skill or luck, and have a better grasp on the impacts and ripple effects of it all.

But for now, we can use some general logic to make sense of what we're seeing. Common sense would dictate that a club's best hitters should make the bulk of the challenges. Mike Trout having an extra strike to work with is more valuable than it would be for a hitter like Schanuel, for example.

Moreover, guys who are inefficient can have negative consequences on others later on. You only get two challenges, so if you lose them both early, you don't have them for the tight situations later where they might be beneficial. That could also lead other hitters to be more judicious in challenging after the first one has been burned.

Measuring that effect is hard to do, but for now, we can assume that Schanuel's frequent challenging and regularly choosing wrong have had some sort of negative impact on the Angels' run production.

And that's the really surprising thing. Schanuel's one elite skill is his patience, yet that seems to have no bearing on his effectiveness at uncovering the differences between a borderline strike and a borderline ball.

Perhaps more than improving his power, Schanuel needs to improve his ability to challenge pitches. Okay, maybe not quite. But it is kind of close. Perhaps the best answer for right now is simply revoking challenge privileges from him entirely. It's clearly not benefiting the club, and it would lead to more challenges for the others who have been more effective. At the end of the day, it would be a marginal gain, but a gain nonetheless.

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