Machado Joins Harper and Trout at the Awesome Party

Last season, the Orioles unexpectedly won the AL East. I say “unexpectedly” for two reasons. One, because almost nobody called for it during the preseason. And two, because Baltimore experienced injuries to and underperformance by some of their best players to such a degree that, had any of us known about it beforehand, it would have caused us all to project them falling backwards into last season, let alone last place. At the end of the year, their top-five players by WAR were Adam Jones, Steve Pearce, Nelson Cruz, J.J. Hardy, and Nick Markakis — a list within which Chris Davis, Matt Wieters, and Manny Machado (i.e. much of the team’s hypothetical core) are conspicuous by their absence.

This season things are different. This season, the list basically goes like this: Manny Machado, Manny Machado where you mispronounce his name for some reason, Manny Macahdo where I mistype his name for some reason, and then two more Manny Machados where you and I summon the humanity to get the man’s name right. Essentially this season, the second-place Orioles are Manny Machado and a bunch of .500-ish players or worse. That’s how good Manny Machado has been in 2015.

You may have read Dave Cameron’s recent trade-value series. If not read it. READ IT. On it, Machado ranked eighth, which is a very high ranking. However, if you look at the projected WAR by ZIPS over the next five seasons listed for each player in the articles and then re-ranked the players on that basis, you’ll get a top two of Mike Trout (double duh) and then Manny Machado himself. Machado, whose name my computer badly and inexplicably wants to change to “man mated,” has the second-highest projected WAR over the next five seasons. He’s that good now. He projects to be better soon. He hasn’t always been that good, though.

Last season he wasn’t anywhere close to that good. Last season Machado was just above a two-win player, a nice player to have but nothing close to the championship level he’s at now. Projected by ZIPS and Steamer to be worth about two-and-a-half wins this season, Machado has already slammed through that barrier as though it were insulting his mother — which, yes, is a weird way of putting things but until someone invents a button on the keyboard that allows one to go back and “delete” things one has written, what choice do I have but to stick with it? To date Machado has put up 4.5 WAR this season, more valuable than Buster Posey, Anthony Rizzo, and Giancarlo Stanton (thanks, injury!) to pick three guys who are having awesome seasons.

He’s 23, an age in a hitter’s career where large leaps can occur, especially in players as talented as he is. So it shouldn’t be shocking that, finally healthy after a few seasons spent suffering serious knee injuries (ask your doctor if serious knee injuries are right for you), Machado is breaking out. That said, these things can’t be assumed. Talented players exist who, for one reason or another, never put “it” together. But, alright, Machado is good or whatever. We get it, Kory. Why? What is he doing differently?

Mostly, Machado has refined his approach at the plate and is demonstrating the skills to back up that refinement. In other words, it’s fine to recognize a hittable pitch, but it’s another to hit that pitch well enough to do significant damage. In previous seasons you could get him out by enticing him to chase pitches outside the zone. But even if he got his pitch he wasn’t anywhere near as adept at hitting it. Now he is both more skilled at waiting for his pitch and at hitting it when it arrives.

Here’s an illustration of Machado’s increased patience, charts featuring his swing rate from 2014 and 2015:

The lack of red in the 2015 image represents Machado’s increased patience.

In this next pair of images, a greater portion of red is positive: the more red, the higher the isolated-slugging figure in that particular segment of the strike zone.

Machado has gone from filling up roughly a quarter of the strike zone with red in 2014 to filling up over half of it this season. In total, he’s swinging less, but hitting more. It’s ironic that the thing that can make a hitter great is not hitting, but there we are.

So really, he’s learned what he can hit and is waiting for it and isn’t fooled nearly as often when he doesn’t get it. When he doesn’t get it he waits which results in more walks. Walks are the byproduct of selectivity at the plate crossed with a dash of fear from the pitcher. Spicy! That selectivity and his actualized power have led Machado’s walk rate to almost double from last season.

Now that he isn’t getting himself out as frequently, he’s hanging around the plate longer, which in turn increases his chances of seeing his pitch (the more pitches you see, the greater your shot at finding one you can crush). When he gets it more often than not, at least in a baseball sense, he crushes it. Last season, 19% of Machado’s hits were “soft” and 29.3% were hard. This season the soft hits have dropped to 15.9% and the hard hits have gone up to 34.6%. More hard is better and that’s all I’ll say about that! Oh, other than this: it’s been easier to get those hard hits to go further because he’s hitting almost 10% more balls in the air. All of this (more balls hit hard and more in the air) helps explain his 20 homers.

All that is fine and wonderful if you’re Manny Machado, but perhaps the most interesting thing, at least to me, are the parallels to another phenom this season, Bryce Harper. Harper is setting the sport on fire in a way that no other player has this season, but last season, like Machado, Harper was a young player playing well, clearly talented, but not yet able to display all his talent to the world. This season it clicked. Like Machado, Harper’s walk rate has shot up, virtually doubling last season’s rate. Also like Machado, Harper’s strikeout rate has dropped by 5% and his hard hits are way up (by 10 percentage points) and his soft hits are down (by about 3.5 points).

There are just four months of age separating the two players. The phrase “generational talent” is thrown around now in the same way that seemingly half the population gets labeled a genius for doing mundane tasks like recycling. I’m sure both Machado and Harper are excellent recyclers but I’m going to stay away from those phrases just the same. Even so, it’s hard not to gawk at what the two are doing this season, especially when you consider their age (23) and compare this to what they’ve done in the major leagues to date. What we’re seeing here is two of the premier young talents in the baseball world simultaneously take huge steps forward in actualizing their talents in a similar way.

For the last four seasons, when talking about great young players, the list began and ended with Mike Trout. Now, with Harper’s ascent and the corresponding leap forward by Machado (and Harper), Trout has company. We may be entering a decade when you’ll get to read articles comparing the brilliance of Trout to the slightly different but no less brilliant brilliance of Harper and Machado. Who is better? Why? These are fun questions that serious analysis can address but, if we’re truly lucky, never definitively answer. We may have another Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, or Duke Snider situation on our hands. Choose sides, baseball internet. This should be some fun.