Is Pablo Sandoval Different in the Postseason?

You might hear a lot about how Pablo Sandoval is better in the postseason over the next week. His career .333/.372/.609 batting line and a seminal three-homer performance are easy enough to point to. The problem, of course, is that we’re talking about 94 plate appearances, the equivalent of about three weeks of regular season play. Not a great sample.

On the other hand, somewhere around 100-150 plate appearances, certain things do actually accrue enough sample to become meaningful. Things like swing and contact rates, since they are on a per-pitch basis and we get close to four pitches per average plate appearance, tend to tell us if a player has changed in a meaningful way over a short period of time. Ground ball and flyball rates can do the same.

So let’s pretend that Pablo Sandoval’s postseason history is the first month of a season. Has he changed? Does he do anything significantly different in the postseason? Because if he has, than maybe we can smile knowingly and pass on Sandoval’s postseason OPS. Because we know some of the underlying skills look different once the lights shine brighter.

In terms of things that are easily tracked here at FanGraphs, Sandoval doesn’t look any different in the postseason. Except for one number. Maybe you can spot it.

Roughly two times the number of fly balls he hits leave the yard in the postseason. But still, that doesn’t tell us much, especially since home runs per fly ball take about a half season to become meaningful as a stat.

Instead, we might ask ourselves: does Sandoval pull the ball more? Swing less often? More often? At better pitches?

Once you started dicing up balls in play too much more than in ‘ground ball’ and ‘fly ball’ buckets, you can get in trouble. He’s put 79 balls in play in the postseason, after all. But thanks to BrooksBaseball we can try. If you focus on the spray charts of his at-bats against right-handers in the regular season (on the left) and the postseason (on the right), it’s hard to see a difference in the general tendencies. Looks like Sandoval hits the ball everywhere, any time.

John Kruk was impressed with Sandoval’s takes in the Wild Card game. In particular, Kruk pointed out that Sandoval took a first pitch in that game, something he didn’t think Sandoval did much. Sandoval has swung at 43% of the first pitches he’s seen in his career during the regular season. In the postseason, he’s swung at 44% of the first pitches he’s seen. Even if his first-pitch strategy changed a bit over the course of this season, he ended the season having swung at 42.5% of the first pitches he saw. There doesn’t seem to be anything here.

Maybe it’s not about the first pitch. Sandoval has swung at 58.3% of all the pitches he’s seen in the regular season, and 60% of the pitches he’s seen in the postseason.

Maybe it’s about what type of pitch he swings at. Ooh. We may have something here. If you break it down by pitch type, there’s a difference that’s been of a higher magnitude than any we’ve seen so far. Look a the fastball and cutter swing percentages:

Since only 17 pitches are in the ‘postseason cutter’ bin, let’s focus on that four-seamer result. Over his career, Pablo Sandoval has swung at 53% of the four-seamers he’s seen in the regular season. In the postseason, that number jumps to 68%. With a sample of 104, maybe it’s something. Maybe Sandoval keeps his eyes out for fastballs more in the postseason.

Or maybe it’s nothing, considering the rest of the package. If he doesn’t change his swing plane and hit more fly balls, and doesn’t pull the ball more, and doesn’t show more patience, how much weight should we put into the fact that he’s swung at 15 more fastballs than he normally would have, spread over three more postseasons?