Kevin Kiermaier, Breakout Candidate
Kevin Kiermaier has long been underrated in the mainstream baseball world. He provides value in ways that tend to get overlooked or, at least, receive less attention. You probably know, for example, that Kiermaier is an elite defensive player. You’re probably aware that Kiermaier is an above-average baserunner. You might also know that Kiermaier has recorded a league-average batting line despite having faced the most difficult pitchers and that he owns a pair of piercing green eyes.
The total package is quite valuable. Kiermaier has already produced 13.1 WAR for his career over parts of three major-league seasons. He produced more than five wins in 2015, and per 162 games, he’s a 5.8 WAR/season player for his career.
I’m guessing most in the FanGraphs community consider Kiermaier to be a star. If things go well, everyone else might believe that this year, too.
Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus editor Aaron Gleeman posted some of PECOTA’s top breakout picks for hitters in 2017. Some of them aren’t all that surprising: I think a lot of people suspect there is more in the bats of Byron Buxton and Gregory Polanco and Addison Russell. But one name on the hitters list did jump out at me, and that was Kiermaier’s.
Wrote Gleeman:
WARP has long viewed Kiermaier as one of the most underrated players in baseball and now PECOTA thinks he has a chance to add above-average offense to otherworldly defense. Last season Kiermaier upped his power and plate discipline, but it went largely unnoticed because he hit just .246 and missed two months with a broken hand. If he continues to be plus-20 runs in center field Kiermaier is a star no matter what, but PECOTA sees untapped offensive upside in the 27-year-old. At the 60th percentile he’d reach 6.0 WARP and at the 70th percentile or higher he’d be among the MLB leaders in WARP, combining amazing defense with an .800 OPS.
Kiermaier’s top age-27 PECOTA comp? Vernon Wells. While the older version of Wells wasn’t productive, the 27-year-old version recorded a 128 wRC+ as a center fielder in a six-win campaign.
If Kiermaier goes from being a plus-plus glove and league-average bat, to a player with a plus-plus glove and better-than-average bat, he will be (or should be) near the top of the AL MVP voting. He finished third in bWAR (7.3) in 2015, but 17th in AL MVP voting.
So is this breakout possible? Maybe it’s already happening.
Last season, Kiermaier more than doubled his walk rate, which jumped to 9.7% from 4.5% in 2015. The improvement was the the product of an improvement in Kiermaier’s out-of-zone swing percentage by five points, which he lowered from 32.8% to 27.9%. His strikeout rate remained steady, as did his swinging-strike percentage.
And while his plate discipline improved, he also began to lift more balls into the air, which is generally a good thing for hitters. After posting GB/FB ratios of 1.71 and 1.63 his first two years in the majors, Kiermaier produced a 1.11 GB/FB ratio. (That said, he was also the anti-Votto, with a 25% infield fly-ball rate, which was highest percentage in the game among hitters with at least 300 plate appearances.)
His pull percentage also jumped — to a career-best 49.5%, an eight-point jump from his 2015 mark (41.3%).
Consider this video evidence of a home run against an up-and-in fastball location:
Kiermaier saw more changeups than he did in 2015, and was more effective against them, batting .250 and slugging .438 versus changeups in 2016, compared to a .218 average and .346 slugging mark in 2015. Some visual evidence of Kiermaier doing damage to a changeup:
Moreover, his 15-game rolling wOBA has the look of a player slowly improving over the course of the last two seasons:
Kiermaier is probably never going to be an elite offensive force. His average exit velocity last season of 89.7 mph was near the league average (89.5 mph), after an 87.8 mph average in 2015. He had a pedestrian rate of barrels per batted balls (4.2%) last season. Statcast suggests there is a cap on his offensive upside.
But perhaps we saw some signs of Kiermaier acquiring new offensive skills and better learning to hit in the majors. Perhaps PECOTA is right and there is more in his bat, offensively. ZiPS sees Keirmaier as largely the same player for 2017, posting a 101 wRC+. But if PECTOA is right, Kiermaier won’t be underrated any longer, anywhere.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
On the last sentence, he would still be underrated for his defense even if people take note of an improved bat.
This article desperately needs a discalimer about Kiermaier’s defensive numbers. That 13 WAR cited is based on a UZR/150 of 30, and there is very good reason to believe that’s not possible in the OF, given the number of chances.
There has long been speculation (back to Andruw Jones) that the OFs with gaudy zone-based defensive stats are stealing highly cathchable balls from other OFs and IFs and getting excessive credit for them as out-of-zone plays. i.e. if a CF ranges into a zone to make a play where the average CF only catxhes the ball 5% of the time, but the RF catches it 95% of the time, he really hasn’t created any value.
Now the batted ball data is starting to come in, backing up this hypothesis. It is pretty likely that in 10 years, we won’t believe Andruw Jones, Jason Heyward, or Kevin Kiermaier ever had a +30 fielding season.
Care to cite something backing this up, as in the batted ball data supporting this hypothesis (that you say is “starting to come in”) or any other work suggesting that KK is stealing highly catchable balls from other OFers and thus padding his defensive stats.
KK rates even better by DRS for his career (+68) than UZR (+44), so if Fangraphs used DRS, like Baseball Reference, KK comes out looking even better (16.4 career WAR).
Andruw Jones’s defense ratings were based on Total Zone, which uses play-by-play data rather than more granular batted ball data, and I think the skepticism there is more well-founded. Still, if you’re going to just throw out this stuff, you ought to back it up with something, or at least understand and acknowledge the difference bw the metrics (UZR vs. DRS vs. Total Zone) you’re saying overrate Jones, Kiermaier, and Heyward.
Look at Tango Tiger’s blog. They’ve had plenty of good stuff. Here’s an example:
http://tangotiger.com/index.php/site/article/statcast-lab-how-much-impact-great-fielding-outfielder-have
“Fielders have about 120 balls in their Opportunity Space per season. That is, a rightfielder’s range talent is tested about 120 times per season. And so you can see that the range of outs made between the best and worst rightfielders is about 25 outs, which is around 20 runs.”
Thanks for the link. That is required reading.
This is awesome stuff, thanks for sharing.
That research doesn’t support your hypothesis, or if it does, only does so weakly. Tango suggests that there is roughly a 20 run spread in *range runs* (things like arm, errors, and DRS’s “good fielding plays” aren’t incorporated) between the best and worst rightfielders. Positioning is another factor left out of this. Last year the spread in UZR Range Runs among RFers was 28.7 (It was 20.9 if you exclude JD Martinez). Tango himself says …
“Positioning is its own skill, range its own, arm its own”
“This is actually in-line with what you see from other fielding metrics.”
“I am only focusing on Range for the moment.”
It may be that the data from Statcast eventually shrinks the difference in range runs between the best and worst OFers, but I don’t see anything in that research suggesting that UZR or DRS are wildly inaccurate in gauging a fielder’s value. It stands to reason that the spread among CFers would be wider than among RFers, since CFers have more opportunities to make plays than RFers. It’s also not hard to believe that other aspects of OF defense, once incorporated, would lead to ranges of defensive similar to UZR and DRS.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the spread from “best to worst” is 20 runs for rightfielders from range. The worst CF in 2015 was Gerardo Parra at -22 or Angel Pagan at -12.5 if you don’t trust the Parra numbers.
To get from Parra to Kiermaier is 54 runs on defense that year. Either the difference in best and worst centerfielders is significantly more than 20 (possible) OR a ton of the runs come from arm/error/positioning (less likely) OR the numbers aren’t right (most likely). Or it’s a combination of all three.
I was never a Braves fan, but I did have the chance to watch peak Andruw Jones on television quite often. Line drives up the middle were the worst. As the batter made solid contact, you’d roll your eyes. “Why is this idiot hitting the ball to center?” Sure enough, Jones would just be waiting for it. He’d never play a ball into an amazing catch. I’m not even sure I ever saw him dive. He just always happened to be gliding around where the ball was hit.
Sometimes you’d forget which team you were watching (we’d have 5 simultaneous games on different cable stations), and you’d be astonished when balls driven into center would drop in for hits or find the gap. Oh, yeah. Not Andruw Jones.
I realize this is all anecdotal, but I just want to say that if the gap between the best and worst rightfielders is around 20 runs, I can easily believe that peak Jones was worth 30 in center.
Anyone with eyes can tell how much better KK is over a subpar CF like McCutch
Some anecdotal support for Kiermaier’s defensive stats, from his best season (2015):
— The 2015 Rays allowed the AL’s lowest rate of [Doubles+Triples] per ball in play, by a large margin. They allowed 40 fewer [D+T] than would be expected from a league average rate on their balls in play.
— Their LF and RF defenders had neutral D ratings, collectively, which doesn’t show any obvious poaching.
The [D+T] rate was best again last year. And it was close to average in 2013, before Kiermaier.
As I said, anecdotal. But better than nothing.
Not really anecdotal, but I see what you mean.
Huh. I always thought it could be used that way. Apparently not. Let’s call it “indirect,” then.
Following up, I ran the team [Doubles+Triples] rate for Andruw’s 5-year defensive prime, 1997-2001.
— Andruw’s Braves were a runaway #1, yielding [D+T] on just 6.2% of balls in play.
— MLB average was 7.6%.
— #2 was 6.9% (Arizona and KC).
— No other gap between adjacent teams was more than 0.2%.
For comparison, I ran Willie Mays’s 5-year peak (per B-R’s Rfield), 1962-66:
— Willie’s Giants were tied for #1 at 5.0%.
— MLB average was 5.7%.
In terms of expected [D+T] per year based on the MLB rate times their own balls in play:
— 1962-66 Giants, 31 fewer [D+T] than expected per year.
— 1997-01 Braves, 54 fewer [D+T] than expected per year.
None of this speaks directly to Andruw vs. Willie or the validity of Andruw’s outlandish D stats. But these numbers are entirely consistent with those stats.
That “defense first” tag can be a blessing in disguise when it makes other managers dismissive of a player. I was happy to snag KK for Ian Kennedy and Robert Stephenson this offseason.
In addition to the improvements you mentioned, he stole bases at a higher clip (72%), somehow got on base in 2/3 (!) of his bunt attempts, and legged out 18% more doubles.
Not at all crazy to imagine a 15HR/30SB season if healthy.
Kiermaier was pretty awesome last year in general. If you annualized his counting stats based on 600 PA, you get:
80 R, 17 HR, 54 RBI, 30 SB
Who knows if he runs that much again, or maintains that SB success rate, but I think that he’s a top 30 OF without much progression.
I’m not sure how you get past that 25% IFFB rate….I mean that wasn’t just worst in the league, it was worst by a few points and more than double the median for that level of PAs. Isn’t that the worst outcome possible these days?
Yep, the worst possible outcome of a batted ball is a popup. If you look at Tony Blengino’s Contact Quality reports(based on exit velocity and launch angle), he has Kiermaier at an 85 Adjusted contact score. i’d assume that’s mostly because of that astronomical popup rate.
Look at his IFFB rates for the two seasons previous… doesn’t that strike you as more of an anomaly than the new norm for him? The rest of his batted ball profile shows mostly positive trends, with more incremental changes. I don’t see him posting a IFFB rate north of 20 again.
The pop ups are the downside of the new “pull it in the air” approach. Generally fly balls and pop ups are correlated but there are guys with premier barrel control skills who can avoid this, Murphy and altuve could even lower the pop ups but those guys have the best barrel control out there.
For the average player trying to pull it in the air means more pop ups and lower babips (not just because of pop ups but also due to he shift and more out field fly balls). Brian dozier and jose bautista are good examples of those low babip, high pop up fly ball pull hitters. I think that especially happens of you like fastballs in the upper half of the zone, low ball hitters seem to get away a bit better with regard to pop ups.
Still the approach was effective for dozier and bautista, I generally like it but we should accept Murphy and altuve who continue to hit 320 plus are the exception and for most that approach will come at a babip cost. Dozier is probably the more normal outcome but the increase in power and hopefully also walks often still is worth a 10 to 15 point babip drop.
I think kiermaier paid that cost but nonetheless I expect some regression in the pop ups. If he regresses to a still high 15 percent and runs maybe a 290 babip while keeping the power and walks he could still improve.
Good points. Thanks for adding Dom
I wouldn’t expect him to repeat at 25%, but I do like to point out how we (the royal ‘we’) tend to see a player improvements as skill growth, but the negative side-effects as factors that will regress to the mean.
Like you pointed out, Kiermaier seems to have improved his peripherals by pulling the ball more…..which has led to higher IFFB rates. If that’s the case, why wouldn’t you expect him to continue to have elevated IFFB rates if he continues the pull-happy approach?
I don’t expect him to regress to the mean but I would expect him to regress from astronomical to high.
eagerly awaiting the next articles in this series: “justin turner, breakout candidate”, “brandon crawford, breakout candidate” and “nolan arenado, breakout candidate”.
If KK has a fluky BABIP year he can put up some massive WAR numbers, like somewhere upwards of 8.5