Baseball Is Wonderful and Horrible: Two Pictures
I just wrote a little bit about Joc Pederson making gains in his ability to make contact. The first commenter underneath got me thinking about Javier Baez. In the Pederson post, I began by reflecting on George Springer, but Baez was a little like Springer to an even somehow more extreme degree. When Baez was a prospect, it’s possible no one else had his maximum bat speed. But at the same time, few shared his propensity for swinging and missing. Fold in an over-aggressive approach and every single at-bat was boom or bust.
Baez got extended playing time as a rookie in 2014. During the PITCHf/x era, there have been more than 3,000 player seasons with at least 200 plate appearances. Baez posted the lowest contact rate out of all of them, at 59%. He wasn’t too hard to diagnose. Barring something almost unbelievable, Baez would need to get better at contact in order to have a real big-league career.
Good news! Javier Baez is making it. He’s 23, he has a league-average wRC+, and this is how his contact has gone:
He still misses the ball, and he still swings at a whole lot of pitches out of the strike zone, but where Baez as a rookie struck out an impossible 42% of the time, now he’s down to 25%. Javier Baez is putting things together. He should factor firmly into the Cubs’ plans, if nothing else but as a valuable trade asset. The bat is meeting the ball more often, and that was always going to be the struggle.
Shifting gears, turn your attention to the Royals. Last offseason, the Royals re-signed Alex Gordon, getting something of a hometown discount in the process. I wrote about that, and here’s a quick excerpt!
[…]one, Gordon shouldn’t hit the wall all of a sudden[…]
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Gordon this year has been worth 0.3 WAR. After back-to-back wRC+ marks of 122, this year he’s down at 77. Even more troubling, Gordon hasn’t been hitting the baseball. His approach and his results were always consistent. In a sense I guess they might still be considered consistent, but they are also much much worse. Gordon’s career contact:
There’s nothing subtle about that. And you could blame a wrist injury he sustained toward the end of May, but there’s something curious — Gordon, before that, batted 166 times, with bad offense and an elevated strikeout rate. Gordon, after that, has batted 171 times, with bad offense and an elevated strikeout rate. Alex Gordon was having problems making contact before getting hurt, so I don’t know what one’s supposed to make of that. Gordon has gone through ruts before, and he’s earned the benefit of the doubt. But this is worrisome, not just because Gordon is a franchise legend, but also because the Royals are a team that can’t afford to spend such big money on underachievers. Don’t sleep on Gordon as one of the big reasons why these Royals probably aren’t getting back to the playoffs.
Baseball is wonderful and baseball is horrible. There’s evidence for both of these everywhere, but Baez and Gordon are stuck in my mind. As recently as 2014, Gordon had the higher wRC+ by 69 points. He had the higher contact rate by 19 points. Now it’s 2016, and they’ve both cleared 300 trips to the plate. Baez has been the better hitter. And so much more improbably, Baez has made more frequent contact. I’ll be damned. This is a hell of a thing that we watch.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Wish you had used the same y-axis on the two graphs. I choked on my drink when I saw the Gordon plot.
The same shape line on the Baez graph would have represented a nearly 20 point drop instead of seven points. That’s the difference between terrible and “the player had a limb amputated.”
Automatically generated! Blame the computers!
Have them re-generate the graphs
Enhance.
This is pretty cool, erm, well, the part you labeled wonderful is pretty cool. I feel like there is a contigent of evaluators, including many commenters on this site, who have been throwing cold water on the latest wave of young, high-upside, low-contact, sluggers to come up, like Baez, Kris Bryant, Springer, Joc, and soon Gallo. They seem to think that low-contact prospects are particularly risky, as if there is a low-contact prospect penalty above and beyond the penalty we are already applying.
I feel like there was probably an earlier wave of these kinds of guys with a lot of busts among them. Branyan comes to mind. I’m thinking people starting noticing a pattern that wasn’t there. The story that came out of it was that players almost never improve their contact rate, but can totally get worse, so these guys will always have to play at the top of their potential to compensate for their strikeouts.
I remember a commenter insisting that Kris Bryant’s 4 WAR ZIPS projection pre-2015 was absurd, and that Byron Buxton was clearly the best prospect in baseball. I’m not going to rub Buxton in anyone’s face, but I think the way things played out is pretty good evidence that the two were rated appropriately at the very least.
Really, at the end of the day, you know who comes out looking pretty good on these guys? ZIPS and KATOH. Obviously Joc’s story has not been one of uninterrupted success, but maturing at the plate and improving his approach was probably always a significantly likely outcome, one which some people seemed to dismiss.
Correct, that was and still is the story:
One thing you should note that wasn’t explicitly addressed in Mr. Sullivan’s work is that Z-Contact% is more stable than O-Contact%, and therefore significant gains in Z-Contact% are even more rare. That’s why you worry less about a young player with a respectable Z-Contact% but terrible O-Contact%. Baez is an example of that, as his overall Contact% gains have come from O-Contact% since his Z-Contact% is just a point better than his major league career total. For that matter, a poor O-Contact% isn’t necessarily even a bad thing due to how difficult it is to do damage on pitches outside of the strike zone. Assuming there are less than two strikes, in most cases you would prefer a missed swing on one of them than to put the ball in play weakly.
It is also important to put Contact%, Z-Contact%, and O-Contact% in the proper context. I was very pessimistic about George Springer (too much so, obviously), but I did say at the time that his recipe for success would be “if his Z-Swing% is very high and his O-Swing% is very low.” Fortunately for the Astros, that has been precisely the case. Among qualified batters over the last three seasons, only Brandon Belt and Freddie Freeman have a larger disparity between their Z-Swing% and their O-Swing% than George Springer. Fortunately for the Cubs, Kris Bryant is just behind them in fifth. By contrast, in 2014 when Javier Baez was struggling so badly, his Z-Swing%/O-Swing% differentiation was third worst in major league baseball behind Reed Johnson and Charlie Culberson. His overall improvement at the plate has coincided with a ~10% increase in his Z-Swing%. If you miss at pitches in the zone more than most, you want to swing at pitches in the zone more than most in order to maximize your chances of putting the ball in play authoritatively. You also want to minimize your offerings at pitches outside of the strike zone.
Now we get to Joey Gallo, who I and others have so strongly dismissed. Not only are his Contact% and Z-Contact% the worst since those statistics started being recorded, but his minor league totals in those categories were also terrible (unlike Pederson). Then to add in another factor, Gallo obviously does not possess the defensive or base running value of Springer, Bryant, Baez, or Pederson. Essentially, he is an even more extreme version of Russell Branyan. This does not guarantee that Joey Gallo will be a failed prospect, but it does elevate his risk of failure dramatically. And as for Byron Buxton, it is well worth noting that even #1 rated prospects have a significant failure rate, but in this particular case I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame prospect analysts who praised him for failing to anticipate that the Twins would complete ruin his swing. In case you missed it, this excellent column should and probably will infuriate you: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-changes-byron-buxton-has-and-hasnt-made/
Yes, I want to be clear I am not hindsight questioning everyone’s ranking of Buxton, just the confidence with which some considered him clearly a better prospect than Bryant. My main point of evidence is that Bryant is a 6-win player, not what has happened to Buxton.
Otherwise, this is very good information, thank you.
In the five days since this post, Gordon has hit 5 home runs and raised his wRC+ from 77 to 96. Baseball is wonderful and horrible, indeed.