Christian Yelich’s Arrow Is Pointing Up
(Photo: Corn Farmer)
We all love Christian Yelich the baseball player. Or, at least, we all should love Christian Yelich the ballplayer. He’s coming off back-to-back 4.5-win seasons and is just entering his age-26 campaign. ZiPS calls for him to produce just slightly more than 20 wins in the next five seasons. He is, in short, one of the game’s great young stars.
The Brewers certainly made their love for Yelich evident recently, shipping off a rich prospect package to Miami in order to acquire him. No doubt part of their interest in him is due to the fact that he’s also signed to one of the most club-friendly deals in the sport. If he produces wins at the sort of rate that ZiPS suggests, the Brewers will be quite happy no matter what becomes of Lewis Brinson and company.
But there might very well be more to Yelich. There might be another level.
Despite his lithe frame, Yelich packs surprising power — and he is trading spacious Marlins Park for hitter-friendly Miller Park as a home venue. That’s a big deal. Consider: over the course of his career, Yelich has recorded a 20.5% HR/FB in road parks compared to 10.9% at home. Since 2015, he ranks 49th among all hitters in HR/FB (17.3%) but 20th by that same measure on the road (20.4%). For comparison, Mike Trout ranks 12th (21.6%), J.D. Martinez 15th (21.0%).
To place the difference between his road and HR/FB figures into greater context, consider the top home/road HR/FB differentials over the last three seasons among hitters with at least 500 plate appearances:
| Rank | Player | PA | Home HR/FB | Road HR/FB | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tommy Pham | 886 | 17.2 | 31.8 | -14.5 |
| 2 | Danny Valencia | 1395 | 11.0 | 22.2 | -11.3 |
| 3 | Coco Crisp | 637 | 2.9 | 13.2 | -10.2 |
| 4 | Ryan Schimpf | 527 | 14.5 | 23.9 | -9.5 |
| 5 | Keon Broxton | 709 | 20.3 | 29.3 | -9.0 |
| 6 | Nelson Cruz | 1967 | 21.5 | 30.4 | -8.9 |
| 7 | Ryan Raburn | 526 | 13.0 | 21.4 | -8.5 |
| 8 | Logan Morrison | 1510 | 12.5 | 20.9 | -8.4 |
| 9 | Tim Beckham | 1013 | 14.1 | 22.1 | -8.0 |
| 10 | Chris Taylor | 735 | 8.5 | 16.1 | -7.6 |
| 11 | Gregor Blanco | 902 | 1.0 | 8.5 | -7.5 |
| 12 | Aramis Ramirez | 516 | 5.8 | 13.2 | -7.4 |
| 13 | Yoenis Cespedes | 1540 | 14.1 | 21.3 | -7.3 |
| 14 | Brandon Belt | 1662 | 8.4 | 15.7 | -7.2 |
| 15 | Chris Coghlan | 891 | 8.0 | 15.1 | -7.1 |
| 16 | Jorge Polanco | 826 | 3.6 | 10.7 | -7.1 |
| 17 | Hunter Pence | 1204 | 10.6 | 17.6 | -7.0 |
| 18 | Kyle Seager | 2012 | 9.1 | 16.0 | -6.9 |
| 19 | Christian Yelich | 1879 | 13.8 | 20.4 | -6.6 |
| 20 | Ben Zobrist | 1662 | 7.7 | 14.3 | -6.6 |
And Yelich’s trend of road success appears to remain even after adjusting for park: over his career, he has produced a higher road wRC+ (128) than home (113).
So some of Yelich’s surprising power has been masked and subdued by the dimensions of Marlins Park. Consider his batted-ball spay chart form the last three seasons overlaid with Miller Park:
There appear to be opportunities for Yelich to convert some long doubles and a couple field outs into homers. But Yelich is making improvements that go beyond a change of environments.
What’s interesting about Yelich is that, in this age of launch-angle awareness and uppercut swing paths, he remains a ground-ball hitter, pounding 2.2 batted balls into the turf for every fly ball last season. Yet last season was also the least ground-ball prone he has been. He has begun more and more to lift pitches into the air. And Yelich should be motivated to continuing to lift: as with most hitters, he has produced a subpar wRC+ on grounders for his career (54) but an above-average mark (263) on fly balls.
And unlike hitters who have struggled to increase launch angle in accumulating too many infield fly balls, Yelich has kept his infield fly-ball rate Votto-like.
Yelich has reduced his ground-ball rate by seven percentage points over the last two years, yet he recorded only three infield fly balls last season. Three! That’s the sixth fewest amongst qualified hitters. Yelich appears to be adjusting his swing without the adverse side effect of increased pop ups suffered by hitters like Trevor Story.
Yelich hit 56 fly balls in 2015, 89 in 2016, and 118 last season. If he continues that trajectory, if he can reduce his ground-ball rate by another few percentage points — and his HR/FB rate remains high away from Marlins Park — then he is a threat to surpass 30 home runs and boost his overall performance.
If he can post a HR/FB rate of 20% over 140 fly balls the simple math yields 27 home runs. He’s hit three homers on line drives over the last two seasons combined. So, fantasy players, there could be some more home-run potential here. This is also a player who has increased his walk rate in two straight seasons and maintained a zone-contact mark around 90%. There has been no uptick in strikeouts tied to lifting more pitches off the ground. I suspect he’s a good bet to beat his depth-chart projections of 23 home runs and even the projected 127 wRC+ forecast.
Further underlying skills also hint at the presence of more power. His average batted-ball exit velocity of 90.1 mph, for instance, ranked 30th in the sport last season, according to Statcast data via Baseball Savant.
Perhaps he could also benefit to change the direction in which he directs his air balls.
Only 10 qualified hitters since 2015 have directed a greater percentage of fly balls to the opposite field than Yelich’s 31.7% mark. While spraying the ball gap to gap can be effective, pulling the ball in the air is most valuable. Over the last three seasons, Yelich has pulled only 10.7%, 11.2%, and 11.9%, respectively, of his fly balls. He pulled only 14 fly balls last season. He has something of a Joe Mauer approach to air balls. Of course, Miller Park’s pinched-in power alleys should boost his opposite-field power and 11.4% of balls he lifted in the air to the opposite field have gone for home runs.
Perhaps the Brewers do not want to alter his spray profile. Maybe the Brewers will not want to do too much tinkering at all. But even if they don’t approach Yelich with any suggestions, there’s more trending up for Yelich beyond Miller Park as a new home.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
Are those crazy long singles to left field coming at Fenway? Can’t imagine he’s played too many games against Boston
He has played 2 games in Fenway that resulted in 3 singles and a double. That may well be them.
I’m not really seeing them on the Brooks Spray chart, though.
FWIW, here is a picture of the Fenway Park dimensions.
https://www.google.com/search?q=fenway+park+dimensions&client=firefox-b-1-ab&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiPv_qAz4XZAhUMyFkKHWpXCoAQ_AUICigB&biw=1553&bih=843#imgrc=o4OExErxIsFOdM:
The representation of those three way-out-singles may just be their way of showing “this landed pretty high on the green monster” and not “this single was 80 feet beyond the outfield wall”.
This could all be wrong though.
Still had the 6th lowest GB rate of all qualified hitters.
But what is interesting is that he is pretty good at lifting high pitches (spoiler most are, community piece is coming soon:)). This is different from hosmer who also isn’t lifting high balls. That points to a mechanical issue rather than an intent issue. Maybe he should target higher pitches even more – he already did that to some extent.
He still is absolutely unable to lift lower pitches (like minus 5 degrees LA in the lower third), for that he probably would need to change his swing path and bat angle (like trout who drops the bathead and keeps the hands up while yelich has more the classic drop the hands and keep the bat horizontal bat angle).
I think this is largely missing the reason why he has a high GB rate. It isn’t because he needs more lift in his swing plane, it’s because he can’t square up anything other than a fastball.
You guys are cruel masters. Comments like this, I think, are at least checking out before you downvote into oblivion.
…and, maybe you tried to check like I just did and realised that Statcast is “Down for Maintenance” . I guess we’ll just use pitch splits and what not.
First check, I wonder what his per-hundred says about off-speed on a pitch-by-pitch basis? Yup. Seems great against fastballs and meh-to-bad against everything else.
Second check, 64% groundball rate against curveballs over his career? Dear Sir, you have my attention.
Sliders are next on the docket, and 60% of those hit the dirt as well.
Okay it’s change-up time, no whammy, no whammy, no whammy and we have… 65% on his career.
Following it up with the dong-show, Yelly –a nickname that i’m not sure he has, but which I’ll give him– has hit over his career:
Curveball Dongers: 2 Dongers
Slider Dongers: 9 Dongers.
Change-up Dongers: 5 and that’s including his 0 dongers against splitters.
And against fastballs? 26 HR (FA), 12 HR (FT), 5 HR (FC)
The only pitch that Yelich doesn’t hit more than 60% groundballs on is the Fastball which he only hits about 54% on the ground.
Both things can be true, last year could’ve been Yelich’s best year not hitting balls into the dirt (on everything except the curveball) AND he could have a lot of problems squaring stuff up.
Last year was his best year, but he’s still amongst the top-ten qualified players when it comes to hitting stuff into the dirt.
I guess the dream is that he pulls a Tommy Pham and runs a silly-high HR/FB and BABIP and posts a 148 wrc+?
Anyways, I just thought it was silly that someone got downvoted for bringing up a point that could very well be true.
Well, I appreciate the effort anyway :p We would probably need to split off the pitch-types by zone height to truly know if my statement is accurate, but any cursory glance at his pitch-type splits does at least show that I’m not off my rocker. 😀 Just a lot of angry Yelich fans out there I guess.
That’ll teach me to make such a statement without showing my own research, though.
Has he changed anything in his swing or maybe just being pitched to a little differently over the past couple seasons causing his swing to have different results. Sometimes I wonder if we see results and only think there is one reason for them and it may be possible that their is a totally different reason. I do think Miller Park will help him, but 20 – 25 HR seems a lot more likely than 30+.
I don’t think his swing has changed, he still is one of the most extreme gb hitters in the game. Probably just swinging a little bit less on low pitches and maybe just an intent change.
He was probably thinking low liner and now he thinks hit it up a little but he is only able to do that with certain pitches.
I think the Marlins did worse with the Yelich trade than the Stanton trade within context. With the NTC, Stanton forced the Marlins hand and if there main objective was to shed money, they did that and landed a good prospect in Guzman.
The Yelich trade landed a fringe top 25 prospect and a top 70 guy in Harrison. Brinson is already 23 and has what one more year of control than Yelich? 5 years of Yelich with his contract should land a Sale (3 years of control) type deal. Brinson and Harrison the two and three guys in the deal instead of 1 and 2 would make more sense. I think you add a top 25 overall prospect to this package and then its a fair deal
I think Yelich is a nice MVP candidate and teams will be asking themselves why they didn’t pursue him harder.
Using the FV to dollar table of that article on prospect worth by dave the deal is almost exactly break even. Not a haul but also not a steal. The time of +50m surplus value deals like the shelby miller deal is over (except for a few reliever deadline deals).
The only thing I don’t like is that all the guys are risky high ceiling, low floor guys.seems like almost all of the marlins prospects are like that. Could lead to some stars but also to another stars and scrubs team. Would have liked a little more balance between risk and upside.
I think looking just at FB% and GB/FB rate is the right approach with Yelich or any other hitter. As this article points out Yelich increased his FB% last year as well as decreased his GB/FB ratio. This article makes it sounds like Yelich improved last year but I think just the opposite. 80% of the improvement of Yelich’s FB% came at the expense of his LD%. This is not a good thing. The stats bear this out. His BA dropped from .298 in 2016 to .282 in 2017. His ISO dropped from .185 in 2016 to .156 in 2017. His HR dropped from 21 to 18 and his Slg% obviously dropped since both his BA and ISO dropped. From where I sit 2016 was a much better offensive year than 2017. That said I think Yelich is going to hit 25 HR this year.
Finally, not that it matters 20% of 140 is 28 not 27.
LD% is also, like, the most volatile batted ball statistic. Plus, having a stellar 2016 isn’t a *bad* thing.
Marlin fan here. Yelich should wear #43. That’s the outcome of nearly every bat: grounder to second.
Yelich hits HR launch angle balls to all fields at 97+ mph as often as anyone in baseball. If he goes back to his minor league flyball rate (35%) the full blown breakout would be complete.
You wonder if the home park informs the swing approach because he wasn’t hitting 60% groundballs until he came up.
You see a guy like Brandon Belt, who also has power, prefer to err toward hitting liners in his non-power friendly park as well.
I’m excited for the 2018 Yelich.
As a keeper league owner of Yelich since he was in the minors, great analysis.
“If he can post a HR/FB rate of 20% over 140 fly balls the simple math yields 27 home runs.” I could always be wrong but I think it’s 28 (not that this fundamentally changes the point of course)
I’m glad the Brewers liked Yelich so much – the return for Miami was fantastic. Those of us who watched Yelich every night aren’t saddened by his departure.