FG on Fox: The Precedent for Evan Gattis’ Triples

Evan Gattis was probably never fast. That is, he wasn’t fast in comparison to many baseball players he was around while coming up through the minors. He certainly isn’t fast now, and at this point, we can confidently say that he probably never will be. And that’s fine, because speed isn’t really his game: coming into the 2015 season, he had zero stolen bases and one triple in his career. We’re all familiar with how Gattis contributes in other ways, like hitting baseballs 450 feet. Yet despite his lackluster speed, by the end of the 2015 season, he updated his career statistics to read zero stolen bases – and 12 triples.

In the span of one season, Gattis increased his triples total by a factor of 12. Because of that fact, this was a big story for most of the season; a simple internet search yields many articles ranking and commenting on his ever-increasing number of triples during 2015. Today, instead of viewing and ranking each one, we’re going to go deep on how strange and rare it is for someone as slow as Gattis to do this.

To begin with, we’re going to use a statistic called Speed Score. Very simply put, it’s a way of measuring a player’s speed and baserunning ability. Speed Score is on a scale from zero (walks around the bases) to ten (fastest/best baserunning human who has ever lived), so it’s fairly easy to grasp, and it tends to make some intuitive sense. There are a few main factors that go into a player’s score: stolen base rate, number of stolen base attempts, triple rate, and double play rate being a few of the main ones. To give you some examples, the best qualified hitter by Speed Score since 1920 is Jarrod Dyson. If you’ve watched the playoffs during the past two seasons, you know how fast Dyson is. The worst players by Speed Score are usually catchers, with Chris Snyder (who mainly played for the Diamondbacks in the early-to-mid 2000’s) at the very bottom.

So let’s see where Gattis fits into this Speed Score spectrum. First let’s look at the first two seasons of his career combined – 2013 and 2014. Here are the worst position players by Speed Score in those two years (minimum 750 plate appearances), with the number of triples each player hit:

We have three designated hitters here, a catcher, and a first baseman. Then we have Evan Gattis. We said before that he wasn’t fast, but let’s put it another way: Gattis was one of the very slowest — and worst — baserunners by Speed Score during 2013 and 2014. He was around the first or second percentile in the majors. These ten players above hit a combined three triples during these two seasons — basically, these types of players very rarely hit triples (and that helps bring their score down as well). Gattis actually improved remarkably by Speed Score in 2015, getting all the way up to 3.9 (46th percentile!) — but we can be quite confident that most of that increase was due to the number of triples he hit, and not other factors, like his aptitude at stealing bases (which did not improve).

Read the rest on Fox Sports.