If Junior Caminero Had Any More GDPs He’d Be Macroeconomics

Junior Caminero has, as of this writing, grounded into 22 double plays in 333 plate appearances this year. The first year both the AL and NL counted double plays was 1939; since then, there have been some 9,295 individual player seasons of 300 or more plate appearances. Caminero’s current campaign is already in the top 300 in double plays.

Two months ago, Leo Morgenstern wrote an article titled “Carlos Correa Is Keeping the GIDP Alive,” which conceded, right in the lede, that even though Correa had grounded into an appalling six double plays in April alone, Caminero was leading the league. The Rays third baseman has only expanded that gap; Jacob Wilson is second with 15 double plays.

Grounding into a double play is the second-worst thing a hitter can do at the plate. But, somewhat perversely, great players ground into a lot of them. The all-time career leaderboard in double plays is a list of the greatest hitters who ever lived. In the top 27 hitters in career double plays, you’ll find 18 Hall of Famers, a number that will only grow when Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, Yadier Molina, and (if people chill a little about PEDs) Robinson Canó hit the ballot in the next few years.

Well, of course, the career leaders in double plays are all in the Hall of Fame; you have to be a great hitter just to last the 20-odd years it’d take to rack up big numbers in any counting stat. OK, well, of the 12 players who have grounded into 30 or more double plays in a season (Jim Rice, the single-season record holder, did it three times), you’ll find six Hall of Famers (Rice, Cal Ripken Jr., Bobby Doerr, Ivan Rodriguez, Carl Yastrzemski, and Dave Winfield), plus an MVP (Jackie Jensen), a guy who’s probably going to end up in the Hall of Very Good (Correa), and three other All-Stars (Ben Grieve, Billy Butler, and Tony Armas).

Incidentally, five of these 12 players had their big double play season for the Red Sox. That includes Armas and Rice, who each grounded into 31 twin killings while sharing an outfield in 1983. That team grounded into 171 double plays, tied for the third-highest total ever. Of the 14 position players who recorded at least 50 plate appearances on that team, seven grounded into 12 or more double plays. I cannot imagine what that must’ve been like to watch.

But again, double plays, just like strikeouts, are part of the bargain for a certain type of hitter. Going back to 1983, Rice grounded into 31 double plays, but he also hit .305 and led the league in home runs and total bases. That seems like a pretty good trade-off.

So, too, for Caminero, who has best-in-baseball bat speed and above-average contact skills, but also has a career 1.32 GB/FB ratio. That’s not an outlier or anything, but it’s high. The Rays will take it because he’s leading the team in home runs and slugging percentage, and is second among Tampa Bay’s position players in WAR, by a tenth of a win. But Caminero has a staggering double play propensity.

The Rays know a thing or two about this kind of hitter, having had Yandy Díaz in the lineup for seven seasons now. Díaz will hit into a double play — he’s currently at nine, which is tied for 15th in the league — but not to this extent.

Nobody hits into double plays to this extent. Well, I guess that’s not literally true. Billy Hitchcock did, but only once.

You know you’re in deep when Sherm Lollar shows up.

This is a prodigious double play rate. Caminero’s double plays per team game rate has him on pace for 42 double plays. On a per-plate appearance basis, if he gets as many PA as Rice did when he set the record (708), Caminero will ground into 47 double plays this year. Remember, the single-season record is 36. If Caminero grounds into double plays at this rate for the rest of his career, he’ll break Pujols’ all-time record in his age-30 season.

What I want to know is why he’s doing this. On one hand, hard contact means the ball gets to the infielders quicker and gives them more time to turn two. Add a slow, right-handed hitter into the equation, and there you go.

But while Caminero is a groundball hitter, he’s not even close to the most extreme groundball hitter in the league. The same for his foot speed; he’s slow, but he’s a third of a second quicker to first base than the slowest guys in the league.

Maybe it’s a combination of the two. There are 416 players who appear on Baseball Savant’s sprint speed leaderboard and also have at least 30 PA this season. The mean home-to-first time among those players is 4.47 seconds; one standard deviation below the mean is 4.66 seconds. Let’s do the same with groundball rate; the mean is 42.9%, and one standard deviation higher than the mean is 50.55%. So how many players are on one end of the bell curve in both speed and groundball rate?

OK, I cut the pie too thin. All four of these players are above the median double play-per-PA ratio, but Rodríguez has barely played, and Quero is barely above the median. Let’s loosen the restrictions a little: Home-to-first of 4.6 seconds or slower, groundball rate of 47% or higher, and 200 or more PA.

This is more like it. We’ve got Caminero, plus Alec Bohm, who’s one of the National League leaders. But there are a couple other variables I want to try.

The other thing about Caminero is he hits the ball incredibly hard. Hitting the ball hard, on the ground, increases the chances that the ball gets into the outfield, through the fielders, for a base hit. But it’s a double-edged sword; a hard-hit grounder that doesn’t find a hole only gets to the infielders faster, and therefore gives them more time to get both outs.

A hitter with big groundball exit velocities ought to have a high BABIP on those batted balls, but he also would hit into a lot of double plays.

After looking into the numbers, what I found surprised me a little.

The relationship between groundball exit velocity and BABIP isn’t linear, because a 40-mph flop shot that lands on the third base line 50 feet from anyone is always going to turn into a single. But above a certain threshold of exit velo, the harder you hit a ball the more likely it is to turn into a base hit.

The surprising thing is that the same relationship did not exist for double plays. Grounders below 60 mph are too soft to turn two on, but everything else turns into a double play on about a third of relevant opportunities. For every bucket 71 mph up, a groundball with a runner on first and less than two outs has between a 32.9% and a 38.4% chance of being converted into a double play.

Nothing is getting through for Caminero, even at extreme exit velocities. And when there’s an opportunity to turn a double play, the ball not getting through to the outfield means it turns into two outs, not one.

But where you hit the ball matters.

It shouldn’t be surprising that balls hit to the three non-first base infielders generate the highest double play conversion rate. Caminero hits 78.0% of his grounders to those positions, which is not actually that unusual, especially for a right-handed hitter.

What is unusual is that across the entire league this year, 7.1% of pull-side grounders by right-handed hitters — regardless of base-out state — have turned into double plays. For Caminero, that number is 25.0%. How is that even possible?

It’s because Caminero comes to the plate with a runner on first and less than two outs more than almost anyone in the league. And almost everyone who hits in those situations a lot grounds into a lot of double plays.

Soto and Alonso are among the league leaders in GDP this year. Judge grounded into 22 double plays last year, which is half a season’s work for Caminero but a lot for anyone else. Olson’s been in double digits every full season since 2018. Fly ball guys like Albies, Rooker, and Suzuki don’t hit into that many double plays, but speed isn’t as much of a help as you’d think. Chourio and Rodríguez can absolutely motor, and they get doubled up all the time.

I went into this exercise looking for one magic reason why Caminero can’t stop hitting into double plays, and there isn’t one. It’s that he hits every stereotype for a guy who makes outs two at a time: Groundball hitter, right-handed, slow, comes up with runners on base all the time. Even with all these comorbidities, what he’s doing is kind of ridiculous, but we’re in the realm of the explicable now.