How You Get a Bryce Harper Slump
Bryce Harper was in a slump! You might not have noticed. Right around the middle of April, it seemed people decided Harper had somehow taken another step forward. And maybe he has, I don’t know, but if he has, he hasn’t done it since the middle of April. As a matter of fact — I’m writing this late Wednesday, and when I look at the leaderboards over the past seven days, Harper is tied for dead last in WAR. I don’t recommend you make a habit of looking at WAR over seven-day periods, but Harper is Harper, and last is last. There was a real and legitimate slump. Could be there still is.
Let me make it clear right now that I’m not concerned. Not about Harper, not at present. I thought he was great at the beginning of April, I thought he was great in the middle of April, and I think he’s great now at the beginning of May. Everyone is entitled to the occasional off-week. I just do think there’s something we could learn from examining how what’s happened has happened. Bryce Harper slumped! Why?
From April 26 through May 3, Harper went 3-for-28 with three singles and 13 strikeouts. Now, from April 27 through May 3, Harper went 2-for-26 with 13 strikeouts, which is worse, but I made a little error when I generated the following plots and I’m too lazy to go back and fix them. It doesn’t change the point. Here’s one of the reasons I’m not worried. Harper’s wOBA trends since the start of last season, over eight-game samples:
What just happened is a low, but last year between September 23 and October 1, Harper went 4-for-29 without a homer. Here’s the same kind of plot, but for Mike Trout, stretching back to 2012, when he became what he is:
You see the dips. Everybody gets dips. In 2014, in the middle of August, Trout went 4-for-32, with no homers and 12 strikeouts. Remember all those conversations? Now, here’s the plot for Barry Bonds‘ entire career:
Dips! In 2004, Bonds finished with a 233 wRC+. That was the second-best mark he ever posted, and that was the year of the .609 OBP. But over an eight-game stretch in May, Bonds went 1-for-20. That was within a 21-game span when Bonds went deep only once. In fairness, Bonds wasn’t striking out, but even the best hitter any of us living have ever seen had his ruts. It’s not that it’s unreasonable for worry about Harper to ever be justified. You’d just need more than a week of evidence. Probably at least a month and a half.
We can safely think of this as a blip. But even blips have their reasons for being. It’s hard to prove, but let’s assume Harper has had a little bit of bad luck. That’s the way these things go — torrid hot streaks are generally performance + luck, and deep slumps are generally performance + luck. Now let’s go past that. Harper reached his new level last season, so this is a plot of how he’s produced, since the start of last season, based on pitch locations:
Harper has been at his best over the plate, and also up and away. He’s acknowledged this before, and it’s nothing unusual. Pulling from Baseball Savant, here’s how Harper was pitched this year before the slump:
That’s an awful lot of activity in the danger zones. Harper, very obviously, took advantage of the opportunities he was given. Now here’s how Harper was pitched during the slump:
You see that? It’s not even subtle. Harper’s slump coincides with a different attack. Opponents haven’t strayed much over the middle, and they’ve mostly stayed down. It’s not like anyone has ever not tried to pitch Harper carefully, but pitchers lately have been more successful with their execution. And, yeah, the mix has changed some. Earlier, Harper ranked in the 44th percentile in terms of fastball rate. Slumping Harper ranked in the 5th percentile.
Pitchers threw Harper fewer fastballs, opting for a lot of changeups, explaining the move toward the down-away quadrant. And with more secondary stuff, pitchers were just throwing Harper fewer options in the zone. Harper, usually, is sufficiently disciplined to stay away from would-be balls, but pitchers suddenly started throwing better would-be balls, and Harper simultaneously grew a little frustrated because of his slump. So then you have pitchers working carefully, and Harper expanding the zone on himself. The way out of it, if you’re Harper, is to tighten up that impatience. Even just a matter of some deep breaths. It’s not like Harper is incapable of slamming offspeed stuff. He’d just need to let the pitches come to him, without letting frustration cloud judgment.
To boil it all down: I think this is pretty simple. I think that, during Harper’s slump, he was seeing unusually quality pitches. I think the pitchers executed more than they typically do, and I think this is probably underneath a number of run-of-the-mill offensive slumps. For a week or so, pitchers mostly avoided Harper’s hot spots, and while pitchers are always trying to avoid Harper’s hot spots, their command isn’t that good, not all of the time. This was just a good run, and Harper helped his opponents out by chasing from time to time. Chasing keeps them from having to come back into the zone with fastballs. Stand in with less frustration, and opportunities will present themselves. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with Harper’s swing. He just needs to put it on the right pitches.
Wednesday, in the fifth inning, Harper went up against Dillon Gee in a Nationals blowout. Gee threw an almost perfect first-pitch curveball. He tried to come back with a second-pitch curveball, but that one was less perfect.
Pitchers make mistakes. For a little while there, they weren’t making very many of them. I don’t think it’s anything to get used to.
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.
The other thing about this slump is it felt like it started when Harper was walked cold by the Phillies. (1-2, HR, 3BB on 4/26, 0-2, 2BB on 4/27). Is this a real phenomenon, or simply being wise after the event?
And pitchers do indeed make mistakes. What I would like to know is whether, on average, they make more or fewer of them to the likes of Harper? Per pitch and per PA may of course give different results.
i love the idea of being walked cold … haven’t heard of it before! time for some research!!
You always hear, and I can speak from my own experience, that when you’re trying to be too perfect, you’re prone to making more mistakes. I certainly believe it’s true with pitching. The guys say that when they’re in the zone they’re able to just flow through their motion and execute without thinking too much about it. You see it all the time with dangerous hitters, the catcher will setup low and away and the pitch misses by 2 feet and is right down the middle and gets deposited over the wall.
That’s a lot of words and purty charts to basically say “even great players slump sometimes.”
Skim-worthy but that’s about it.
I liked it. Seems like the take away is that Harper was pitched pretty perfectly for a week or so. Not everyone likes reading about Harper, which is why not everyone should read this.
“Skim-worthy but that’s about it.”
We hate that you were forced to read it and deeply apologize. Where should we send your refund?
We? Own it and say I.
Fat chance of your suggestion translating into action from a naysayer.
You mean…a NEIGH-sayer.
@LHPSU: LMHAO!!!!!!!!
Just neighing.
If you had done more than skim, you would have seen that Jeff gets to the bottom of the current slump. Harper “slumped” because he faced significantly better than average pitching. Presumably, if every pitcher he faced was as good as what he saw this past week, he would not be a very good hitter. He won’t.
When Dave posted about Harper a few weeks back, he pointed out how great his O-swing% was. At the time, it was a career-low 21%. I cautioned that you can’t get too caught up in swing stats because it has a lot to do with the competition you’re facing. Looking at his game logs, his O-swing% has been 38% since the article was written, which would be a career high. Put it all together and he’s at 30.8%, which is essentially right at his career number of 31.0%.
He’s obviously an elite player, and is most likely the best player in baseball, but even Harper can’t keep up the pace he had in the beginning of the season when he was facing crappy pitchers.
He’s not most likely the best player in baseball. The best player in baseball, who has been by far the best player in baseball since his rookie season in 2012, who is about to be atop the WAR leaderboards yet again where he has spent the vast majority of his career to date, is most likely the best player in baseball.
I like Bryce Harper, and I love his game, and I hope he turns into the consistent monster that he was projected to be, but as of right now, I don’t think he’s the best player in baseball. Sure, an argument can be made, but “most likely”? No way.
Over the past calendar year, Trout has been worth 8.8 WAR per 650 games; Harper 10.0 WAR per 650. That’s a pretty big gap. If you use DRS instead of UZR, the gap is even bigger.
Harper has a .468 wOBA, Trout a .415, which makes them 1 and 2 on the leader boards. Harper is .053 higher than Trout: there are 27 people within .053 of Trout–Harper is completely in a league of his own interms of hitting right now. But Trout has the stronger history–years of elite performance to project the future with…
There’s an 80% chance that one of these guys leads MLB in WAR this year (90% if you assume that neither will get injured), but I don’t think you can say that one is very much more likely than the other to be the leader. Each is very likely to lead his league and either one could be the overall leader.
I get that in the last calendar year, Harper has outplayed Trout, but Harper put up what are probably unsustainable offensive numbers, and not just unsustainable for him, but unsustainable for anyone.
I get that Harper is a monster at the dish, but the talk around him taking over as the best player in the league circulates almost exclusively around his offense being so far superior to Trout’s, which is strange. Trout has a 171 wRC+ since 2012, the best in baseball. Other than Cabrera, no one has been particularly close. Trout has an argument for being the best offensive player in baseball, not just the best overall player. To project that someone is going to consistently outclass Trout offensively is already a stretch. Not a huge stretch, but a stretch. When you factor in that Trout plays centerfield, and at worst, plays it at an average level, possibly at an above average level, and is also an elite baserunner, really the only argument for Bryce Harper being the better player going forward is that you expect him to not only consistently eclipse Trout’s 171 wRC+ over the past 4 seasons, but eclipse it by a large enough gap to overcome the fact that he’s playing a less important defensive position, and playing it worse than Trout. Just because Harper did that last year doesn’t mean we should expect him to do it going forward.
And I’m not alone, since rest of year projections for Trout have him accruing more WAR over the remainder of the season than Harper is projected to have over the entire season, including what Harper’s already accrued.
Trout is the best played in baseball until he’s firmly unseated.
If it’s any consolation, while Harper is playing a less important defensive position than Trout, he’s playing it really well. He put up an excellent +9 DRS last year, and has already posted +2 DRS this year.
Its not a big gap, its just a shade over 10%. I doubt WAR is more accurate than +/- 25% relying as it does on estimates, imperfect adjustments and dubious assumptions. Also, WAR does not factor in the quality of competition. Harper hits half his HR’s against weak division rivals who were 3 of the worst teams in baseball and accounted for 1/3 of his PA. This year the Phillies and Marlins look a bit better, so I expect some regression just from that alone
The Nats schedule has got nothing on the weak schedule that the Cubs have propped their record with so far this year. Dbacks, Rockies, Braves, etc. I can only imagine what Harper would do against the teams the Cubs faced.
Because this article is in fact about the Cubs.
@Paul 1.2 War is a big gap. Ratios are not meaningful when dealing with cardinal value scales.
@Fatalotti A brief gLance at player who have ever had a wRC+ of 197 in a single season reveals a set of player’s who are uniformly among the best of their generation. If we look only at player who were at or above that level by age 22, we reveal Ted Williams. There is a very good case to be made that Harper is now and will continue for some time to be the undisputed best hitter in baseball.
@philosofool
In Trout’s four full seasons of baseball, he’s posted a 171 wRC+, which, as stated, is the best over that period. If you look at all 4-year periods in post Bonds MLB, that’s only been eclipsed twice: Pujols from 2003-06 (173 wRC+) and Cabrera from 2010-13 (176 wRC+). Essentially, Trout’s *first four* years have been on par offensively with the best hitters since Bonds.
I just don’t get why I’m supposed to accept that Harper is clearly, indisputably even, the better offensive player going forward. Yes, what Harper did last year was historic, and fascinating to behold (I loved every minute of it), but to compare Harper to Inner Circle Hall of Famers in an argument against Trout, the player who’s had the market cornered on comparisons to Inner Circle Hall of Famers since basically the day he stepped in a major league batters box, seems a little misguided.
Harper may turn out to be a better hitter over the long haul than Trout (having a higher ceiling doesn’t mean you’re the better long-term offensive player), and he may be a better offensive player than Pujols and Cabrera and all that, but that is a lofty, lofty, lofty projection, and not just for Harper, but for anyone.
Until such time as Harper has shown that he is that guy long term, I’m going to continue to believe that Mike Trout, the player who’s done nothing but be the best player in baseball since 2012 will continue to be so. I’m willing to change my mind, but Harper has more work to do than just one season, which again, wasn’t even as good as TWO seasons that Trout has already posted.
@Fatalotti:
Mike Trout has not been the best player in baseball in over a year. He’s not currently the WAR leader, he wasn’t the WAR leader last year. You don’t get to carry the crown while getting defeated.
As I said, it remains an open question who will be the best going forward.
@Fatalotti and @philosofool:
This is the kind of bar room debate that baseball desperately needs, and you guys are killing it. Seriously, great back and forth without the crap that some (ahem) commenters get personal on when they post about something they’re passionate about.
+1 to both of you.
@philosofool
I’ll echo Embiggens and thank you for the civil debate. You are raising great points, and I understand that I’m probably overplaying my cards.
But to claim that because Trout didn’t lead the league in WAR last year and isn’t so far this year, so as to strip him of the crown is strange. #1, that would mean that for a time Ben Zobrist was the best player in baseball in 2009, instead of, as most people accept, the player who had the best season in 2009. Moreover, this debate is about Harper//Trout, and Trout has a large lead over Harper in the early going, with Trout only trailing Dexter Fowler in WAR standings. Dexter Fowler is clearly not the best player, so just looking at early season WAR leaders doesn’t necessarily tell us.
This is why I’m looking at the entire career history, and apparently so are Steamers, ZIPS, and Depth Charts, since both predict Trout to blow Harper away in value the remainder of the season.
Full disclosure: I’m not an Angels fan (Phillies fan). I want Harper to ascend to the top with Trout and I want this to be a an incredibly historic two-horse race for years to come. I just don’t think Harper can claim he’s there with Trout yet, let alone above him.
Cheers for a good debate. Feel free to have the last word. 🙂
I have to admit that despite reading this article, I didn’t know quite how far Harper’s numbers have fallen this year. And while I knew Trout was on a hot streak, I didn’t know quite how great his season-long numbers were. After reading Fatalotti’s comment, I looked at both player pages so that I can show that Harper was better all of last year, plus so far this year. That’s not the case though.
So in light of recent evidence, I have to declare that Harper is *not* most likely the best player in baseball. He *may* be the best player going forward, but so may Trout.
This article reminds me of my sex life–one continuous slump! I mean, don’t get me wrong,I get it almost every night: almost Monday, almost Tuesday, almost Wednesday…I tell ya, I get no respect, no respect at all!
Overrated player. One season and he’s automatically seen as better than Trout or his equal? Seriously? This kid has way too much hype around him and will be ridiculously overpaid.