JABO: What’s Wrong With Jacoby Ellsbury?
When the New York Yankees signed Jacoby Ellsbury to a seven-year, $153 million contract before the 2014 season, the team was certainly hoping for a version of the 2011 center fielder: a speedy, defensively-sound player with serious power upside. A prevalent thought was the short porch in Yankee Stadium’s right field might help him regain some of his power after injury-marred seasons in 2012 and 2013.
Following a healthy 2014 — in which the left-hander was able to post a respectable power/speed combination while staying relatively healthy — the 2015 season has seen Ellsbury take a step back. In recent weeks, during the thick of a September pennant race, he’s actually sat against left-handed pitching in favor of Chris Young. These are the depths of the slump that Ellsbury is currently in, and it’s obviously not the return on investment the Yankees had in mind when signing him to a long-term deal.
With New York headed toward a very probable Wild Card berth, it’s time to take a close look at Ellsbury. What are the driving factors behind his current struggles? What is the outlook for the Yankees without his production?
We assign many beginning and end dates to baseball statistics, which is a part of our natural desire to organize things we’re trying to understand. We’re going to do that now, because it’s necessary for us to understand Ellsbury’s season before and after a certain event. The Yankees’ center fielder has had two very different halves — separated by seven weeks on the disabled list with a knee injury — and understanding how they’re different is the first step we’ll take in evaluating his performance.
During the first six weeks of the season, Ellsbury was putting up great leadoff numbers: Although the power stroke wasn’t quite there — he hit only one home run along with a .047 Isolated Power average before May 19 — Ellsbury was still creating runs for his team at a 25% greater rate than a league-average player.
The classic Ellsbury tools were on display during this stage of the season. He was hitting lots of line drives, showing great speed on the base paths and playing sound defense in center field. Between April and the first two weeks of May, the 32-year-old was even walking at a much higher clip than his career norm (11.2% vs. 7.0%). The caveat with those stats, of course, is six weeks is a small sample size, so whether he would have continued his early season production is hard to gauge.
Owen Watson writes for FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. Follow him on Twitter @ohwatson.
This article is two weeks too late. He’s 16 for his last 44 ABs. He found a flaw in his swing, which was corrected.
He’s also 16 for his last like 70, with only 3 extra base hits, all doubles. Did he mention this ‘flaw’ before or after he bunched a few singles together?
You must not have read the article before declaring it “too late”….
“According to the Yankees, they’ve identified the problem with Ellsbury’s swing, and it relates to the inconsistent landing point of his front foot.”
Whats wrong with Ellsbury? His power is down and his strikeouts are up.
Stay tuned for the 2016 version when his BABIP sinks as his age catches up to his legs and he loses his speed.
Owen,
Interesting read. The major question I have is how unexpected the observed amount of deviation from career swing rates the recent stretch is, given the sample size and given the amount of variation in swing rate Elsbury has shown over his career? An easy way to test this is to resample games X number of games from Elsbury’s career and calculate your swing statistics for the sample (with X = # of games in recent poor stretch). Repeat this thousands of times and make a distribution. If the observed data from his recent poor stretch is within the resampled distribution then we are probably just looking at normal small sample size noise here. If it is outside the distribution, then it is appropriate to start looking for things that may explain the change.
Those career numbers for Ellsbury in the article seem very different than his current career numbers.
Everything went downhill after 2011.
He had one great year, and his stretch run in ‘ll for a dying team was every bit the match for Yaz in ’67. But he has always been very prone to maladies and accidents, and his approach at the plate is wooden, stiff. Terrible contract, always was.
I think you hit the nail on the head in paragraph 1, why would the Yankees be expecting 2011 Ellsbury in going into 2014, foolish wishful thinking. This is much more representative of who he is, a league average hitter with declining defense/speed in his 30’s.
They could have signed Shin-Soo Choo that offseason.
Or saved some money/years and re-signed Granderson.
The Yankees were doing just great for various months and leading the AL East division when both Jacoby Ellsbury and Brett Gardner were both hitting for .300 plus and inclusively getting their share of walks. What is the reason that both batting averages declined to the level of .250-.260 ? Perhaps the Manager or the Batting Coach may have an answer to this. The bottom line is that now the Yankees are losing more often, and hopefully they will succeed in retaining their wildcard placement.
You have the career numbers wrong on OBP. It’s .344, not .317. That’s a big difference.