Pinpointing the Moment Jake Lamb’s Season Changed

Even if you didn’t predict great things for the Diamondbacks this year, it’s hard not to be disappointed by their 2016 season. You can set aside their various front-office nonsense and still come to that conclusion. Zack Greinke hasn’t been great, A.J. Pollock missed significant time, and Shelby Miller’s year has gone about as poorly as you could imagine. The club is set to lose nearly 100 games and finish last in the NL West.

You’d think that Jake Lamb offensive exploits would be among the club’s few points of pride this season. In 2015, Lamb recorded a 91 wRC+; he’s raised that figure to 115 this year. But it’s more likely that the club is worried about their young third baseman going into the season’s final games. After a scorching hot start, Lamb hasn’t just cooled off in the second half, he’s cratered.

Lamb was an early-season darling. August Fagerstrom called him a preseason breakout candidate and then triumphantly declared his swing changes a success on the eve of the All-Star break. And who could argue? Lamb had a .322 ISO and 151 wRC+ during the first half of the year, and while no one was ready to declare him a top-10 hitter, there was a sense that Lamb had really turned a corner. August compared the swing changes to the one’s made by Jose Bautista, Matt Carpenter, Josh Donaldson, and J.D. Martinez and the numbers supported it. Lamb was crushing the ball and there was a well documented swing-change origin story that pre-dated the numbers. It wasn’t just post hoc rationalizing.

Any reasonable person would have forecast some regression going forward, but Lamb’s second-half slide goes beyond normal regression.

You see that peak? That sits precisely at the moment August published his follow-up article, although it’s probably more analytically honest to point out that it also coincided with the All-Star break.

Let’s break it down pre-2016, first half, and second half:

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that, among players who recorded at least 200 PA in the first and second half, Lamb had the largest wRC+ decline and the largest decrease in pull rate. His fly-ball rate ranks as the 17th highest for the same group. In other words, Lamb is hitting a more fly balls to the opposite field in the second half than he did in the first, and his production has suffered a great deal.

But there’s not a straightforward relationship between those data points and the production. In the second half, on fly balls to left field, Jake Lamb has a 143 wRC+ in 30 PA. That’s not any sort of predictive sample, but if you’re hitting a lot more fly balls to left field and your overall production is sinking, you would expect to see a problem in that department. The real issue is that the balls Lamb is hitting to center and right field have been much less productive. In the first half, Lamb had a 525 wRC+ on fly balls to center and right field. In the second half, it’s 216. Again, there’s aren’t predictive samples, but the point is that the fly ball and pull rate are indicators of a problem more than the problem themselves.

About a week after the break, Lamb began dealing with a bruised left hand. It didn’t keep him out of the lineup for long, but it’s possible it’s as simple as a nagging injury mixed with the regression we expected. But it’s also worth looking for other bits of information.

One such bit of information is that Lamb is having more trouble making contact on pitches up in the zone, particularly near his hands.

Overall, his average launch angle has dipped about one degree, along with a roughly 1-mph loss in exit velocity. But those rough averages don’t tell us a ton we didn’t already suspect, and given that there have been some problems with the tracking system at Chase Field, we probably don’t want to lean too heavily on his Statcast numbers.

After a good night earlier this week, Lamb told Nick Piecoro that the struggles were based on “timing and a few other things.” He continued: “I’ve been working on it. I’ve been working my butt off. Hopefully we can get it to click here, repeat that, what I did tonight, a few more times.”

Players typically don’t like to make excuses, but if Lamb’s hand had been bothering him for months, you assume he would mention it as something he’s still fighting. Pitchers have gone after him with a slightly higher frequency of breaking balls in the second half, but not to the degree that you would expect a big change in results. He’s been swinging more and making less contact, but those changes started well before the slump.

Fundamentally, Lamb is not doing the kind of damage on balls in play that he was in the first half. His walk rate is fine, and while his strikeouts are up a bit, they aren’t up to the degree that they’ve tanked his value. Lamb seems to be late to the ball, getting under it more than is ideal for his individual skill set. The fact that he’s struggling to get to pitches up in the zone and is lifting more balls into the air to left field seem to support his basic timing hypothesis. Of course, rectifying something like this is much harder than diagnosing it. Lamb likely knew something was wrong in late July and early August and has been working to get himself back on track ever since.

Lamb’s season leaves me wondering a bit about the nature of the All-Star break and its impact on young players. Anecdotally and logically, the break seems like a welcome respite from the grind of the 162-game season, but it’s also disruptive in the sense that players are pulled out of their routines for extended periods of time. There’s always talk about the home-run-derby curse (which is essentially nonsense), but you might expect the break to be difficult for some players. It’s a source of friction. Some people handle friction better than others.

We frequently split player performance up into chunks to tell a story. The rolling-average graphs are helping in preventing us from falling into traps because they allow us to see how gradual or sharp a change is. In Lamb’s case, it’s unmistakable that he was cruising until the break and started to fall off immediately after. I relate to this, as I’m terrible at transitioning between things. I almost never take week-long vacations because shifting from one mindset to another, outside of my normal routine, is difficult. If a baseball player had my affliction, I assume the results would be more substantial because of how complicated and difficult their physical tasks are.

Fortunately, Lamb can reboot himself over the winter. He’s probably not going to be a true-talent 150 wRC+ hitter, but he showed this year that he has in-game power and can sustain it while running acceptable strikeout and walk numbers. The big test will be how he handles this sustained period of failure and prevents future layoffs from leading to months long slumps. Every player gets out of whack, but having strategies for getting yourself back on track quickly is an essential part of being an All-Star-caliber player. If Lamb figures that part out, perhaps he’ll only have two days off next July instead of four.