FanGraphs Baseball

Last week, Jeff Sullivan showed how easily pitchers can exploit the flaws in Yasiel Puig’s approach right now; simply pitch him away. He’s swinging at something close to two-thirds of the pitches on the outer third of the plate or further outside; the league average on those pitches is roughly half of Puig’s rate. While he’s never been a selective hitter, Puig’s approach is undermining his entire offensive game right now.

But the problem with chasing pitcher’s pitches isn’t just that you stop drawing walks. It has that effect too — Puig has drawn just two walks in his last 126 plate appearances, dating back to April 12th — but swinging at pitches on the fringes of the strike zone means that you are much less likely to make quality contact. Puig’s problem isn’t really that he’s swinging through pitches; his contact rates are not that different from what they were a few years ago. He’s not even striking out any more than he used to; his 20.3% K% this year is lower than his 20.7% career mark.

But there has been one huge change in Yasiel Puig’s game this year, and it’s killing his production; he’s turned into a pop-up machine.

Yasiel Puig’s Infield Flies

Season	Plate Appearances	Infield Flies	Popup%
2013	432	9	2.1%
2014	640	11	1.7%
2015	311	7	2.3%
2016	158	13	8.2%

Puig has already set a career high for infield flies in a season, and we’re six weeks in to the year. And as the season has gone on, this has only gotten worse.

12 of Puig’s 13 infield flies have come in the last 30 days. During that stretch, 39% of his fly balls have not even reached the outfield, a staggeringly high total; no other player is over 30% during the same stretch, and the guys who are over 25% are guys like Billy Burns and Didi Gregorius, and they only are that high because they rarely hit the ball in the air.

His popup rate per plate appearance over the last month is a staggering 11.8%, over five times higher than the league average. It’s easy to look at his .203 BABIP over the last month and say there’s some positive regression coming, but when you’re just hitting towering fly balls to the shortstop, that’s not bad luck; that’s bad hitting.

And that’s why Yasiel Puig is batting .180/.196/.300 over the last month. And it’s one of the main reasons the Dodgers offense is scuffling. If the Dodgers are going to contend for the NL title this year, they’re going to have to figure out how to get Puig to stop hitting so many infield flies.

Usually, we expect players to follow a more or less expected curve of decline when they hit their 30s. Obviously everyone is different, but baseball is a young man’s game, and father time comes for us all. Research by Jeff Zimmerman in 2013 showed that hitters don’t even tend to peak nowadays: on average, they perform at a plateau upon reaching the majors, then they decline. Take the wRC+ aging curve for a few different time periods, for instance:

We often talk about a player being “in his prime,” but primes are probably younger than many (or most) people think. In this era, 26 is really the beginning of the average hitter’s offensive decline. Which brings us to Ian Kinsler, who will turn 34 in June: he’s currently posting what would be the highest wRC+ of his career, and Isolated Power marks in line with his best home run-hitting seasons of 2009/2011. That isn’t particularly huge news: plenty of veteran hitters have ~40 game stretches in which they match close to their prime production.

The real news is that Kinsler is currently going beyond that, showing a few underlying indicators that amount to him turning back the clock. He’s also altered his approach, and the combined forces are helping to drive what is currently shaping up to be his best offensive season since he posted a 123 wRC+ with 32 homers in 2011. Kinsler is probably never going to steal 30 bases again (or maybe even 20), but he’s picking up that slack in his production at the plate, especially power-wise.

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You don’t need numbers to gain a sense of how Adam Wainwright’s season has started. You just need Adam Wainwright postgame quotes. After his Opening Day start, he wasn’t “anywhere close to being excited,” and called himself “the definition of average.” The next start tied his “career-high-of frustration level” because he was “so upset about the way the ball [was] coming out.” After start number three, he postulated that he’d “made more mistakes these first three games than [he had in] entire seasons.” Start four: “still not great” and “getting tired of losing.” Following his penultimate outing: “The only way I can move on from that is I have to start over. It’s a new season for me from now on.”

That’s a brief rundown of the first eight starts of Adam Wainwright’s 2016 season, in words. I said you didn’t need the numbers, but now you’re going to get them anyway. Through those eight outings, Wainwright ran a 6.80 ERA. The FIP was better, but still a below-average 4.32, and the expected FIP even worse than that. The strikeouts were way down from what we’ve come to expect, the walks were up, and too many balls were being put in the air and leaving the yard. It was the worst stretch of eight games that Wainwright had had in nearly a decade.

Wainwright being 34, and his arm having had the number of surgeries it’s had, a start to a season like that raises some questions. It raises some questions that would be tough to ask to Wainwright’s face. He probably didn’t care about the questions, but he still wanted to give some answers to make the questions stop. Consider his most recent start like the beginning of an answer.

As far as professional athletes go, Wainwright is notably candid. If his stuff isn’t good, even in a win, he’s going to say his stuff wasn’t good. A couple of those negative quotes from the first paragraph came after victories. He doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to his opinion of how he pitched. The key quote following his most recent outing: “I’m dangerous. You can say I’m dangerous again.”

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) received a future value grade of 45 or less from Dan Farnsworth during the course of his organizational lists and who (b) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on an updated prospect list or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Toronto at Minnesota | 20:10 ET
Sanchez (52.0 IP, 84 xFIP-) vs. Duffey (24.1 IP, 84 xFIP-)
While it’s possible, it’s not at all probable, that all DJ Khaled does “is win.” Or, if his life really is marked by constant victory, it’s almost certainly the product of some seriously risk-averse behavior. For example: has he ever played chess? It’s unlikely that DJ Khaled would defeat a grandmaster, or even a pretty good master. Has he ever tried drugs? Because, when you try drugs, everybody loses. And here one finds merely two examples in which failure, of some sort, is inevitable. With regard to Minnesota right-hander Tyler Duffey, it’s incorrect to say that all he does is win, too. But during his brief major-league career, he’s recorded fielding-independent numbers — and also other kinds of numbers — that suggest he’s likely to win more than he loses. Which isn’t a comment one maybe expected to make about Tyler Duffey two years ago or one year ago.

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Think about everything you’ve ever heard about team chemistry. People say it’s an important thing, maybe the most important thing, but it’s impossible to put any numbers to. So let’s put some numbers to it.

Those are numbers. Those are your numbers, in fact. I guess you could say those are technically bars, which represent numbers, but, you know what I mean. And, you’re responsible for what you’re looking at. I polled you guys on Tuesday. That’s the meat of the outcome. Congratulations, Cubs. Sorry about your clubhouse, Atlanta.

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Ben and Sam talk to former Sonoma Stomper (and The Only Rule Is It Has to Work character) Santos Saldivar, a pitcher they discovered on a spreadsheet last summer who was just signed by the Brewers. (No book spoilers.)

Jackie Bradley Jr. has been doing amazing things. To be absolutely clear, they’ve all been doing amazing things. Every last one of them. That 91 mile-per-hour sinker outside? Amazing. That opposite-field roller past the shortstop? Amazing. The reason we bother to pay attention in the first place is because everything that happens out there is amazing, performed by amazing players. Yet Bradley has been particularly amazing. Here’s an amazing thing from yesterday:

Bradley is riding a long hitting streak, and while we don’t really care too much about hitting streaks, on their own, they’re tightly correlated to good offense. That’s what we do care about. This year, Bradley ranks eighth in baseball in wRC+, between Manny Machado and Nick Castellanos. Of course, some things still look a little weird — Aledmys Diaz, for example, ranks second. So looking over the past calendar year, Bradley ranks 15th. That covers 401 trips to the plate, and he’s sandwiched between Machado and Nelson Cruz. Regardless of whether this is for real, Bradley is now definitely a hitter. And in this season, he seems to have taken one more step.

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Harrison Bader is raking in his first full season of pro ball. The 21-year-old St. Louis Cardinals outfield prospect ranks second in the Double-A Texas League with a .351 batting average. Batting leadoff for Springfield, Bader boasts a .401 OBP and his slugging percentage is a sporty .554.

Last year, he hit the ground running after being drafted in the third round out of the University of Florida. Splitting his debut campaign between the New York-Penn and Midwest Leagues, the Bronxville, New York native put up an .891 OPS. This year he’s been even better, which he partly attributes to being a sponge.

Bader talked about his approach to the game, including his insatiable thirst for knowledge, earlier this week.

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Bader on how he identifies as a hitter: “I don’t see myself as a power guy. Not by any means. I think that’s evident from where I’m batting in the lineup at this level. I’m a leadoff hitter, so I’m expected to get on base as often as possible. I’m expected to work a lot of counts, have a high level of plate discipline and a good understanding of the strike zone. I also need to know my hitting zone, where I can do damage.

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