Fielder and Ortiz: Contact Hitters
Prince Fielder is a big guy who swings hard and hits a lot of home runs. Not surprisingly, he also strikes out a lot; those things tend to go hand-in-hand. Except, well, not this year.
I noticed Fielder’s strikeout rate a couple of weeks into the season, but at that point, he was one of a handful of sluggers who were making a lot of contact early in the year. Most of the others – Miguel Cabrera, Paul Konerko, Adrian Gonzalez, Matt Kemp, and Alex Rodriguez, to name a few – have gone right back to striking out as frequently as they had before. For them, it was just a blip on the radar.
Fielder, though, has kept making contact at a crazy high rate. Since that post was written, Fielder has struck out in just 13.1% of his plate 221 plate appearances – not exactly what you would consider regression to the mean, and the sample is getting larger by the day.
If Fielder were able to maintain this kind of contact rate, it would be something of an historic feat. Since 2000, the largest drop in season to season strikeout rate (minimum 500 PA in each year) came from Manny Ramirez in 2002, when he cut his strikeout rate down to 16.4% from 23.7% the prior year. For Ramirez, though, this wasn’t unprecedented territory – he was actually just getting back to previously established lower strikeout levels. The higher strikeout rates from 1999 to 2001 proved to be more of the outlier in his career.
In fact, it’s hard to find a comparable situation in prior years. Most of the other guys who saw their strikeout rates drop substantially from one year to the next were rebounding to prior levels. However, there is one other example of a big slugger miraculously improving his contact rate almost overnight, and it’s happening right now in Boston.
David Ortiz has had a nice long career with average to slightly above average strikeout rates. For the amount of power he’s had, they’ve always been under control, but he’s never been a big contact guy. He’s struck out 100+ times in nearly every season he’s been a full-time player, and his strikeout rate has been creeping up the last few years as he heads towards his decline phase. In fact, last year, his strikeout rate was so high at the start of the season that he was declared “done” for the second time, despite the fact that he had bounced back from a terrible April the year before.
Well, forget being finished. This year, Ortiz has just done this:
Just like Fielder, Ortiz has chopped his strikeout rate nearly in half from his career averages, and given where he was just last year, it’s an even more dramatic turnaround. After striking out 145 times last year, Ortiz is on pace to whiff just 61 times if he accumulates the same amount of plate appearances. That’s just ridiculous.
Even more incredible, it doesn’t appear that Fielder or Ortiz have had to make any massive trade-offs in order to support their new contact rates. Both have ISOs above their career averages, so they haven’t swapped power for fewer swinging strikes. Their walk rates are both down slightly, but that’s likely just a product of not being in as many deep counts. Since they’re hitting everything they swing at, it’s harder to get to ball four, but the extra hits that are generated more than off-set the loss of a few walks here and there.
Both Fielder and Ortiz are on pace to have career best offensive seasons (or in Ortiz’s case, to match his previous career best in 2007) relative to the league average, as they’ve increased their offensive output at a time when run scoring is way down around the game. Interestingly, both are free agents at the end of the season, so I’m sure we’ll hear some talk about these being examples of a “contract year”, but I find it hard to believe that these guys have been willingly striking out twice as often in previous years just because they weren’t playing for a huge paycheck.
Can they keep their strikeout rates at these low levels? History continues to suggest no, as there’s a very short list of players who have been able to hit for power while making this kind of contact over a long period of time. But, it’s no longer mid-April, and these guys are still putting the bat on the ball with great frequency. It’s gone from interesting statistical blip to thing worth watching – I don’t have the answer to why these two behemoths have been able to stop striking out, but seeing what their strikeout rate looks like in the second half is now one of the more compelling story lines of the season, especially for any team considering adding a big bat to their offense this winter.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
“Fielder, though, has kept making contact at a crazy low rate.”
Minor correction. Should be high rate, or striking out instead of making contact.
Amazing.
I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop on Papi all year. Don’t get me wrong, I am rooting for him, but as you show it’s quite out of line for him, even during his most successful years.
What’s interesting with Papi is that his O-contact is what’s skyrocketed – he’s still making a fairly normal amount of contact in the zone.
It’s too bad that our contact numbers are binary (inside/outside zone), because I have a hunch he is swinging at more quality pitches outside the zone – and by that I mean not chasing as much, and swinging at pitches that are JUST outside the zone. Which would really attribute this uptick in contact to something not so much physical but mental, and possibly sustainable – having a better eye/pitch recognition at the plate.
For the record, I don’t think it’s really sustainable – just spitballing. I’d love to see the real data.
I’ve been watching him, and I think it is.
Most of the extra hits (and decline in strikeouts) have come from a change in hitting philosophy. It looks like he finally realized that he can’t pull pitches on the outer half of the plate anymore, and has started flicking more of them to right field.
Last year he was a very pull-heavy hitter. Hes not anymore.
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/yb/159431351
http://www.weei.com/sports/boston/baseball/red-sox/rob-bradford/2011/05/23/how-adrian-gonzalez-has-helped-david-ortiz-re
I remember seeing another article specifically about Ortiz’ approach with lefties, and the changes he’s made there with Gonzalez’ advice.
“Beyond the Box Score” covered this recently as well–also worth checking out: http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2011/6/5/2206708/prince-fielder-and-david-ortiz-old-dogs-learning-new-tricks
I wrote that article. It sure would have been nice if Dave Cameron had at least linked to it, seeing as how the topics of the two posts are exactly the same, except my post came out 4 days earlier. I understand if he wanted to give his own take, but without at least a link, it sure seems like he’s ripping me off.
I was completely unaware of your article. How can I link to something I don’t know that exists?
Yea, I rip Dave all the time, but c’mon. Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard here. These two guys mashing is not exactly groundbreaking news. Similar articles yes, but relax.
I think yours is actually a slightly better article – I like the graphic especially. Pity you’ve just been such an idiot about this one.
Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!
Jeez Dave, don’t you know that your first duty is to scour the internet relentlessly in order to better massage the vanity of other SABRE-statisticians. Now say you’re sorry to poor little Jacob…
what a dumb comment by kellin. ya, you SHOULD be checking for other people’s works, especially at a popular site like BTBS. that’s how you avoid complaints of plagiarism.
Are Prince and David accepting apprentices? Mark Reynolds and Adam Dunn, hit the books.
Reynolds actually has cut his strikeout rate quite a bit this year, down 11% from last year and 7% below his career total. His ISO’s a little lower, but he’s also got an incredibly low BABIP (85 points below his career average), so it’s hard to know if he’s made tradeoffs or is simply dealing with some bad luck. He’s actually made improvements across the board- he’s swinging less often, even moreso at pitches outside the zone, he’s swinging and missing less often, and he’s making contact more often, both in and out of the zone. It appears from here that if he maintains what he’s done so far this year, he’s in for a big second half.
None of this is to say he’s a good player per se, not once you take into account his glovework (or lack thereof).
Pretty obviously stolen from above posted article, no?
I noticed something similar a while back – there are a strangely high amount of players this year walking more than striking out. Guys who have never even come close in their careers before. Usually it is just Pujols and a few other guys but this year there is a large group. Seems odd.
Contact Year?
Contract Rate?
New terms for us to use!
Too bad this didn’t happen last year. Then we could have:
“2010: The Year They Made Contact”
Forget about Prince and Papi….First there’s CircleChange11 acting douchy, and in turn, getting ripped in multiple threads today with red thumbs down a plenty. And then there’s Telo valiantly defending the honor and professional etiquette of Dave Cameron? WTF is going on?
According to the 2011 preseason ZiPS, there was an 11% chance that I would be ripped and/or thumb’d down for not supporting Little People as the Next Market Inefficiency.
Where’s regression when you need it?
*grin*
@ confused- this is obviously a sample size issue.
Isn’t ortiz also a free agent?
what I suspect, I’ll keep quiet – we’ve had enough of those discussions.
K, if nobody else will go there, I will. We are a few years out of the PED era, so would it really be a surprise if hitting (and even pitching) philosophies had to shift to account for power being less of a factor?
Prince doing well not cuz he is making contact, its thats hes more interested in making his next cont(r)act.