Help Evaluate Some of the Game’s Worst Hitters
Hello! Yesterday I posted this. In that post, I briefly discussed five outrageously hot offensive starts — specifically, those achieved by Eric Thames, Bryce Harper, Eugenio Suarez, Mitch Haniger, and Aaron Judge. I solicited feedback in the form of a rest-of-season wRC+ projection for each bat. Although I didn’t include every hitter off to a scorching start, I touched on five of significant interest, and your overall participation level has been great. Thank you for that — without participants, these polls would be super embarrassing.
Comments and tweets were left suggesting I run a similar post, focusing on guys who’ve been bad hitters. This has happened because humans love symmetry, and also because it’s just simply the obvious thing to do. So now, same thing, with different players owning very different numbers. Again, the post below doesn’t cover everyone who’s mired in a slump — sorry for those of you who want to read about, say, Carlos Gonzalez or Keon Broxton or Jonathan Lucroy. I’ve chosen five players and stuck with five players, and I’d love it if you’d participate once more. There’s no such thing as a participation trophy, but if there were, you could get one! All for placing an internet vote. (Actually up to five internet votes.)
Byron Buxton
- Current wRC+: -13
- Rest-of season projected wRC+: 83
The most obvious of all players to include. I think it’s not just that Buxton had such a promising month last season — it was his last month, which meant we had all offseason to dwell on how promising it seemed. So the hype train might’ve gotten a little out of control, and now we’re here, with Buxton once again looking entirely helpless against major-league competition. I know I’ve made this crack dozens of times before, but wRC+ is a statistic with a plus in the name. Byron Buxton’s wRC+ is negative. Even his numbers are backwards.
Buxton’s been bad because his strikeouts have been bad. Why have his strikeouts been bad? Because his contact rate has been bad. Pitchers have opted to throw Buxton fewer fastballs, and he hasn’t yet had an answer. He’s been credited with literally one line drive. Meanwhile, he’s hit five routine pop-ups. His soft-hit rate is more than twice as high as his hard-hit rate, and four of his six base hits have stayed in the infield. Everybody knows about the tools. The tools are no less present than ever. The question is, will he ever know how to use them?
Dansby Swanson
- Current wRC+: -6
- Rest-of season projected wRC+: 82
This one’s been quieter. Relative to Buxton, Swanson hasn’t generated the same kind of hype, and he also isn’t experiencing the same sort of strikeout problem. Strikeouts are the most conspicuous outs, so Swanson’s slump has been a bit more under the radar. But we’re talking about a wRC+ gap of seven points. Swanson’s still negative. Of the 224 players who’ve batted at least 50 times, Swanson’s been more productive than only Buxton, Leonys Martin, and Paulo Orlando. This is the young player who’s supposed to be safe.
Something just about everyone bad has in common: a low BABIP, and limited power. Swanson has one home run, and only 10 hits. Compared to last year, his exit velocity is very slightly *up*, and his launch angle has also increased. That seems like it should be good news, but Swanson’s been exposed against heaters and sliders, and he’s walked only twice. You could say he’s been caught in-between, and one wonders if he’s had trouble adjusting to the top of the order after spending the bulk of his debut hitting eighth. The Braves will be patient, but the same might not be said of their fans.
Gregory Bird
- Current wRC+: 23
- Rest-of season projected wRC+: 102
So much for carryover momentum. Bird was, by a fair margin, the best hitter in spring training, and that’s without adjusting for Florida’s more pitcher-friendly environment. To all observers, it looked like Bird’s game hadn’t missed a beat, and one would’ve wondered whether Chris Carter would ever get a chance to play. Carter might now feel a little worse about the Yankees but a little better about his own playing-time projection. Bird has five hits out of 54 chances. He’s gone deep once, and he’s had issues pulling the ball.
Bird’s hard-hit rate is just fine. The issue seems to be twofold: Bird’s contact rate so far has plummeted, and he’s hitting nearly twice as many balls as before out toward left. Bird isn’t a zero when he goes the other way, but he’s supposed to be benefiting from the Yankee Stadium porch. That’s one of his major selling points. In a sense, Aaron Judge has been on fire the way Bird was supposed to be, and Bird has been slumping the way people expected Judge to slump. All right.
Alex Gordon
- Current wRC+: 37
- Rest-of season projected wRC+: 92
Gordon didn’t just start slumping. In case you missed it, he turned in a mediocre season a year ago, when he saw his strikeout rate spike. Some tried to pin that on injuries he sustained, but the whiffs began early, even when Gordon was fine. Anyway, fast-forward, the good news: Gordon’s strikeouts are now back to normal. He’s making a league-average amount of contact again. But the contact itself is not what it was. So now Gordon just has a new problem, which is preventing the Royals from scoring consistent runs.
Gordon has always been a fly-ball hitter. His career grounder rate is 39%. Last year’s grounder rate was 38%. His current grounder rate is 59%, and he hasn’t hit a homer. Gordon’s hitting grounders like Christian Yelich, without hitting the ball as hard as Yelich always does. He’s struggled to elevate anything down and away. It could be a simple timing issue. It could just be a few too many mis-hits, that don’t mean anything. But Gordon was supposed to be a safe and reliable investment when the Royals gave him a new contract. The Royals can’t afford to miss with that much money.
Jose Bautista
- Current wRC+: 38
- Rest-of season projected wRC+: 121
Bautista isn’t the sole reason why the Blue Jays are where they are in the standings, but he’s probably the face of their slump, since he’s been the face of their team. So many different players have been hurt, or they haven’t been pulling their weight, but Bautista doesn’t do what he does in the shadows. People notice when he’s on fire, and people notice when he’s cold.
There was hope that this would be a bounceback campaign. And, you know, it could still turn out that way. Bautista’s eye hasn’t gotten any worse, as determined by his various swing rates. He still has one of the best strike-zone ideas in the sport. But, you know — Bautista, historically, has made 81% contact. So far, he’s made 71% contact. His whiffs are up both in the zone and out of it, and Bautista, rather uncharacteristically, has struggled most against fastballs. Have I mentioned that he hasn’t pulled the ball? Bautista’s whole game is to left and left-center. Instead of pulling the ball half the time, Bautista to this point has pulled the ball a third of the time. So his hard-hit rate has cratered, and the picture is painted of a guy who just isn’t catching up. How much can he still do at 36? Don’t look at me, I’m not God. You’re the people I’m crowdsourcing. There’s a poll! There’s a poll right there!
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.
Last year I speculated that Swanson would see some struggles in his first full year of action with the Big League club, ultimately producing between 1.5 and 2.0 fWAR on the season. My opinions were not particularly welcome at that time. I still think that Swanson has a couple of 4+ fWAR seasons in him. I just expect an adjustment period for him for the 2017 campaign.
not welcome here? or not welcome in more braves-centered outlets?
It’s worth noting that Swanson is (or was a couple of days ago, haven’t looked since) tied for the major league lead in lineouts, and had a .150ish BABIP. There’s been a fair amount of bad luck in his poor start. Not that it’s stopped the Braves from benching him, dropping him in the lineup, and screwing with his swing, the last of which could potentially create a real problem and make this last.
It was at fangraphs, I was commenting on the following article:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/freddie-freeman-is-lifting-up-the-braves/
Swanson was in the middle of a hot streak at the time and my fellow Braves fans did not want to hear about regression.
I told everyone Swanson would suck ass like a month ago.
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/shelby-miller-is-trying-to-salvage-the-shelby-miller-trade/
everyone can check out what I said like a month ago and see all the hateful comments that followed.
I irrationally think Swanson will fail because he’s not Alex Bregman. So when I see Swanson’s batting line, I instinctively think “ha! I was right” before I realize that if I’m right it’s for all the wrong reasons. My more rational side still thinks he will be like Erick Aybar–a high contact, low strikeout guy who does good work at short.
Swanson doesn’t have star-level tools. Obviously, he has been bad and he will improve, but there is not a star in there. A lot of people are unfairly expecting him to be something that he is not. WAR will favor his skill-set, but he doesn’t do anything really well, except have a pretty cool name.
– there is also the plus hair. I can tell that I may have offended a few users by neglecting to mention that.
I voted, but what the hell do I know?
these are like popcorn
Where are John Jaso and the other lame Pirates ?
For the first couple of weeks, Buxton’s timing on everything was off, and he didn’t seem to have any semblance of a plan at the plate. Both of those seem very fixable though, and you can tell from the last few games that the timing at least is coming back. Sent an opposite field home run just barely foul last night and I’ve seen a lot better contact over the past week, strikeouts are down too – for what it’s worth I’m expecting the hits to start falling sooner than later.
“Sent an opposite field home run just barely foul last night ”
I think Buxton should hire you as his PR person. “It was a good night, as he doubled into the glove of a diving center fielder and swung just over the top of a hard line drive back up the box!”
Meh, you are basically making a case for outcome bias. Am I being optimistic? Sure, but good process (or in Buxton’s case, less bad process) sometimes produces poor results. He’s taking walks and hitting some balls well, neither of which he was doing two weeks ago, and if some of those well struck balls didn’t become actual hits yesterday, I don’t really care, because eventually good process wins.
Yeah, his wRC+ was something like -55 and now he’s up to -13. So things are going better for him, if only a little bit. But maybe you’re like me and you just want him to not be permanently broken because that’s sad.
On the other hand, he has a wRC+ of -13 but a 0.0 WAR because his defense has been rated so highly. So hopefully he’s at least giving the fans some excitement in the field.
At some point those “very fixable” things become unfixable because it is just who that player is. Buxton can still be good but nothing about is hitting is “very fixable” anymore.
Many players have reinvented themselves. No reason to rule it out for a good kid with elite athleticism. He needs a bit of a re-boot though.
Some time off has certainly benefited him. He was just digging a deeper hole every day and he needed to break out of that cycle. Last night was his first good game of the year offensively. I don’t expect some magical turnaround, but anything better than a historically bad start is good at this point.
Unfortunately, timing is the hardest thing to fix – it is literally what separates success from failure. Most people who play baseball will never be elite at it. It is the reason some guys can destroy the baseball while the rest of them hit the ball like mortals. Some hacks will sell some kind of quick-fix, but it is not something that you can acquire. You can certainly put yourself in a bad position mechanically, but you can’t make it go well with an adjustment. Some guys do figure it over night though… it is mental.
In theory you would think that anyone can adopt a plan at the plate, but I am not sure that they can. Formulating a plan is one thing, but being able to execute in a fraction of a second seems to be impossible for a lot of people.
If anything, I think the Twins just need to handle Buxton really gently. He has demonstrated that he is not elite mentally at this point. If he scuffles, he probably needs a day off. Sit him in tough match-ups etc. If he has some continued success, the mental side of things might come together for him. This is in stark contrast to the idea that the kid just needs reps and the Twins aren’t’ going anywhere this season. I figure, the Twins aren’t going anywhere, so they should take their time and try developing some talent.
I wonder how long it’ll take Byron Buxton to go so far backwards that we start calling him Buxton Byron. Or he just goes to Japan and actually gets referred to as Buxton Byron-san. Here’s hoping he does pick it up, though. I want him to succeed. I just don’t know if he can.
(Note: I don’t actually think he’s going to Japan.)
Joey Bats having troubles with fastballs is quite reminiscent of AROD at the end of his career.
…no Jose Reyes?
He hasn’t really been a starting caliber player for a couple of years now. His era is over.
Seriously. He wasn’t even really a starting SS anymore when he was with the Blue Jays. I mean, he was, but he shouldn’t have been.
Bautista is still good at the things he can control. But age appears to have taken everything else.
There’s a reason no one wanted to sign him.
No Chase Utley?
For a minute I thought Dave had done the best hitters post and that you published this just to troll him
FREEEEEEEBIRD!!!!!
(Jeff could have been talking about me with the Aaron Judge-Greg Bird comments. I guess I’m not so special after all.)
He got hurt so I know why he wasn’t one of the five but I do wonder why Miggy started poorly. He did start hitting just before injury but his his reign as an elite hitter done?
Miggy had terrible luck the first two weeks of the season. He had roughly the same if not better avg ev as Sano and his underlying metrics look great. He’s running a 7% soft contact rate with only 23.8% GB.
If you’re looking for something that changed he was oppo heavy to start the year with 42.9% going the other way.
Anecdotally he smoked a lot of line drives to RF that were caught, nothing really changed he is still hitting 108 mph liners all over the field just slightly further away from outfielders.
Batting eye and bat to ball skills are still fine, its his aging big body that will be his eventual downfall from eliteness. Already had to miss time for a back strain and groin strain (or hamstring?).
Swanson was mostly the babip, that should come back.
However going just by offense I’m not sure I love his profile. A lot depends on his power. Last year his line was good but on the strength of a 380 babip.now I think he has a good hit tool and could maintain a 310 to 315 babip but for a guy with not terrible but limited power he also strikes out quite a bit (last year 23%). Now low 20s are basically almost average in these days but if he strikes out 23% with a 310 babip and 13 HR (used to be okay for a ss but in a league where Freddy galvis hit 20 it is well below average) or so with average to slightly better walk rate you have probably like a 95 wRC+ or so. That plays of course with his defense and he could still be a 3 win player but if he wants to become a real star what some hope for him he either needs to lower his Ks to 15 to 16% or get his HR up at least to average (18 to 20).
Those adjustments are not unheard if at his age and even if he doesn’t do them he can be a productive regular but he has to do them if he wants to become a real star.
I compiled a list of 21 interesting, low wRC+ hitters through 4/24/16 (51 wRC+ or lower).
I also did this same exercise with last year’s high wRC+ hitters in the prior article.
If you thought those results were interesting, you are NOT going to believe these results!
I compared the preseason Steamer wRC+ to the player’s actual rest of season wRC+…
* = Limited rest of season playing time (140 – 200 PA)
Significant Improvement [6 players] (>15% increase preseason v. actual rest of season production)
Mallex Smith* (76 / 101 +33%)
Kyle Seager (112 / 144 +28%)
Freddie Freeman (128 / 164 +28%)
C.J. Cron (102 / 131 +28%)
Brad Miller (100 / 122 +22%)
Logan Morrison (101 / 122 +21%)
Improvement [5] (8% – 15% increase)
Austin Jackson* (89/102), Eddie Rosario (85/97), Pedro Alvarez (119/131), Russell Martin (100/110), Byron Buxton (89/97),
Stagnant [5] (7% inc. to 7% dec.)
A.Pujols, K.Wong, A.Garcia, C.Headley, H.Kendrick
Decline [2] (8% – 15% decrease)
Carlos Gomez (105/94), Justin Upton (123/113)
Significant Decline [3] (>15% decrease)
Prince Fielder (124 / 74 -40%)
Alex Rodriguez* (102 / 62 -39%)
Drek Norris (93 / 60 -35%)
Average 4/24/16 wRC+: 26
Average Steamer preseason wRC+: 105
Average Actual ROS wRC+: 111
Tallies
Best wRC+ / Worst wRC+
2 / 6 Significant Improvements
7 / 5 Improvements
6 / 5 Stagnant
1 / 2 Declines
5 / 3 Significant Declines
Note that this is a very small sample size so these results are not conclusive at all, but for 2016, a very bad start was more indicative of increased ROS production than a very good start. It may be interesting to conduct this activity over several years.
Moral of the story: Keep Trusting the Projections
Fantasy Spin: Buy Low, Sell High
Great study/data thanks. But you’ve grabbed enough data points that it is sort of metadata so its going to match the projections. The projections are built off large data sets. The fun part is picking out the individual points to see if something is really changing with that player or not.
This is going to sound very gambler’s fallacy-ish, but bear with me…
Anecdotally, Jose Bautista (as an example) seems like a very streaky hitter. Obviously he’s been very cold to start the year, but assuming he isn’t actually just bad now, I would expect him to get hot sometime relatively soon (he looked a lot better in the recent series in Anaheim). Based on that, would that make it somewhat likely that he exceeds his preseason projections over the rest of the year?
I guess worded differently, let’s say a streaky hitter is projected to post a 130 wRC+ for the year, with 3 50 wRC+ months, and 3 210 wRC+ months. If he posts 5 a 50 wRC+ in April (and his ROS projections subsequently drop slightly), does/should that decrease the likelihood of him following up with 3 210 wRC+ months and 2 50 wRC+ months?
“does/should that decrease the likelihood of him following up with 3 210 wRC+ months and 2 50 wRC+ months?”
In a word, yes. You prefaced it nicely by referencing the gambler’s fallacy.
If the only possible results were 50 wRC+ and 210 wRC+ (for simplicity’s sake) and you expected a 50% probability of each, and all the months were independent of what had come before, then having one month in the books of 50 wRC+ would lead one to project… 2.5 months of 50 wRC+ and 2.5 months of 210 wRC+. NOT 3 months of 210 wRC+ and 2 months of 50 wRC+ to “make up” for the one already in the books. I other words, the one that has already happened has no bearing on the expected 50/50 split of the 5 months going forward.
Yes, but that ignores the presence of streaks. A true talent .250 hitter isn’t going to go 1-4 every single game…they’re going to have enough good/bad games and hot/cold streaks that in the long run they’ll bat around .250. For example, here’s the rolling wRC+ graph for everyone’s favourite player in 2016:
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphs.aspx?playerid=10155&legend=1&statArr=61&split=base&time=game&ymin=&ymax=&start=2016&end=2016&rtype=mult>1=20
If a player’s true talent level stays constant, and you can predict when a player is at his coldest, his ROS numbers will have to exceed his preseason projections (and moreso his ROS projections) in order for his full season numbers to match his preseason projections. Obvious statement is obvious, but that means hot streaks and cold streaks should be expected.
I know, this completely follows the gambler’s fallacy. But maybe baseball breaks the gambler’s fallacy a little bit, as each plate appearance isn’t an independent event?
Sure no one is still reading this, but it’s a fun question. Maybe I’ll only expose my own ignorance by trying to answer it, but … here goes.
A “true talent .250 hitter” is sort of a Platonic ideal and does not exist, so that’s a problem right there. By that I mean: if a player were exactly the same throughout his career, and opponents never adjusted to that player, and that player played in the same park every night, and that park never experienced any kind of changes, and neither did the ball or bat or anything else consequential to the outcome of a batted ball, and his opponents never changed in any way, and quantum uncertainty ceased, it is possible that the exact way a hitter hit, the opposing pitcher pitched to him, and the opposing fielders fielded him, &c., could result in a hit exactly one quarter of the time. Since none of that’s possible, the closest we’ll ever get to a “true talent .250 hitter” is a hitter whose exact blend of skills and talents, health and approach, environment and opponent, is relatively stable enough that they achieve a hit in roughly one quarter of their at bats.
So let’s set that aside. Maybe I’m a fool and there’s such a thing as a true talent .250 hitter, but it seems exceedingly unlikely.
However, let’s grant that Bautista is streaky. In this case you are not committing the gambler’s fallacy, necessarily. Well … you’re not, because the probability of a hit for Bautista is not known. In fact, his continuing struggles have (probably) decreased the chance of him recovering, because his continuing struggles increase the robustness of the data, particularly adding most-recent and therefore most-predicative data. His overall performance from which we predict from is now worse. He has struggled at a time when many similar players have collapsed. This new Bautista may be loaded for failure.
I digressed–not fruitlessly–but! If Bautista is streaky, truly streaky, it is possible nothing has changed and we’ve simply stumbled into a cold streak, a cold streak that opened the season, and because it opened the season, kinda exists in a vacuum and seems more important than it may be.
It depends on why he’s streaky. If he struggled against a certain kind of pitcher, and there was a strange concentration of that kind of pitcher in his first month, but by getting that pitcher out of the way–that is, if by some scheduling quirk the kind of pitcher which so dominated him in April was seldom faced for the rest of the season–he could be reasonably expected to streak hot for the rest of the season. If all that, yes, his cold streak could in fact predict a hot streak coming up. The same thing could be true if this month exposed some mechanical flaw, and the very failure of this month forced him to adjust, and that adjustment was super effective. Basically anything about this cold streak that may positively affect Bautista going forward could help induce a hot streak.
If, instead, Bautista has simply hit em where they are, or been victim of a buncha iffy called strikes, &c. then though this new data would not imply he’s any more washed up then he seemed to be at the beginning of the season, it would also not presage any kind of rebound. It would be like four flips of tails to start a sequence of ten. You’re updated most likely outcome would be seven flips of tails, because in this case the bad luck is just that, stupid evil God forsaken bad luck.
So: I don’t think there’s anything such as true talent level as you’ve defined it. Performance will always be the output of an interaction of countless variables, many of which the batter does not control. It is possible Bautista has struggled because his ability has declined. That seems most probable–especially given his age. It is possible something about Bautista being streaky, something about what determines that streakiness, something specifically about what determines his cold streaks, has been used up in April, and, in that case, he could be hot for however long, and end close or even best his pre-season projections. That seems least likely. Most likely whatever caused Bautista’s bad April is either declining ability or dumb luck, and at best he is likely to simply revert to his previous performance (ie be less screwed), and his overall season performance will be worse because of all the dross accumulated in the first hundred at bats or so.