Archive for Kris Bryant

2015 was an unquestionably special year in baseball: we witnessed teams that hadn’t made the postseason in 20 years break through the barrier, saw latent fanbases reborn, and finally, after falling just short in 2014, a magic-fueled, unconventional team won the World Series. Because of a mixture of player development trends and incredible fortune, we also saw something exceedingly rare: the best positional rookie class in the past century. The likes of Kris Bryant, Carlos Correa, Matt Duffy, and many others announced their arrival with exceptional first-year performances, taking the league by storm and bringing about a new golden age for young, ultra-talented position players.

We’ve stated many times how much better the 2015 rookie positional class was than any other in the past hundred years. The fact bears repeating again because of its magnitude. Below you’ll find a chart showing the average Wins Above Replacement for positional rookies for a full season of plate appearances (600 PAs) from 1920 to 2015:

As we can see, no other season is close to 2015. There are a few reasons for that, reasons that are complex and outside the particular scope of this article. For now, this should serve as background for what we’re discussing today: how sophomore/follow-up seasons compare to great rookie campaigns. We’ll be focusing specifically on the years that followed Rookie of the Year campaigns to try to discern whether a “sophomore slump” occurred among the league’s best first-year players, and we’ll also bring in the 2016 projections for our exceptional crop of 2015 rookies to look at next year’s expected performance.

Read the rest on Fox Sports.

Just as we all anticipated, Kris Bryant put together an extremely impressive rookie campaign. After he spent the season’s first two weeks in the minors, the Cubs set free their 23-year-old top prospect, and he proceeded to rake.  Bryant put up a .275/.369/.488 batting line on the strength of 26 long balls and a 12% walk rate, which yielded a 136 wRC+. Throw in that he graded out as a plus defender at third base, and the end result was a remarkable 6.5 WAR — easily tops among rookies, and was the 10th-highest figure of any hitter period. The Cubs seem to have a very special player on their hands.

We all knew Bryant had star potential long before he was called up. That’s why he got so much love on pre-season prospect lists, and also why KATOH liked him more than almost any other prospect. But now that he’s a year further along on that trajectory, we can be a bit more certain of what his career might look like. So, using this new data, let’s see what Bryant’s rookie campaign might tell us about what lies ahead. As I did yesterday in my piece on Carlos Correa, I performed a some weighted Mahalanobis distance calculations to generate a list of players whose seasons were most similar to Bryant’s. For more details on my methodology, see yesterday’s Correa post.

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Heading into the season, Kris Bryant enjoyed favored status when it came to predicting a National League Rookie of the Year. When FanGraphs writers were polled before the season, 20 of 36 votes went to the Chicago Cubs’ third baseman; seven went Joc Pederson; six were cast for Jorge Soler; Noah Syndergaard, Jung Ho Kang and Raisel Iglesias each got one. A couple months into the season, Pederson inserted himself into the race with 13 home runs by the end of May. As the year has moved on, Bryant and Pederson have come back to the pack a bit while Matt Duffy, Kang and Syndergaard have moved into the conversation for the NL’s top rookie. The award is no longer a two-horse battle, and all the players who have risen up are sure to see plenty of exposure since each of them is in the middle of a pennant race.

As Owen Watson wrote, this season has been a historic one for rookies, particularly position players. With Bryant and Pederson leading the way, the rookie class is producing at a greater level than any in the past decade. It’s likely the best class in nearly 30 years, back when Barry Bonds and Jose Canseco were rookies. In the past month, Bryant and Pederson have allowed a few other players to enter the race. Pederson — a three-true-outcomes player to begin the season — has removed the two positive outcomes over the past month, walking just 3% of the time and hitting only one home run. Bryant hasn’t fallen quite as far. He’s still drawing walks, but he is striking out nearly one-third of the time and has a wRC+ of 58 over the past 30 days. Read the rest of this entry »

Kris Bryant has a lot going for him: he’s second in rookie WAR this season*, he’s part of a long-term Cubs future that looks increasingly rosy, and he’s part of a positional rookie class that has produced the third-most first-half WAR (prorated to 600 PA) in the past 40 years. In short, he’s been everything the Cubs could’ve asked for, showcasing the power, patience, and stolen bases that were expected out of him once he hit the majors.

*All stats current as of Thursday.

That last tool — speed — might be translating to steals somewhat on the back of manager Joe Maddon’s coaching style, but Bryant’s stolen-base skills have never really been in question. He stole eight bases in just 68 games at Double-A and seven in 70 in Triple-A during 2014; this season, he’s produced right about on that level, with eight in 83 games, and that’s obviously a great return for a player with the potential to hit 30 home runs. No one seems to confuse Bryant with a speed demon, however, as he’s not a player whose skill set is based solely around his ability to run.

That final point is precisely why we’re here, because Bryant is currently leading a category you might not expect him to, and one usually reserved for those speedier players we just mentioned. The category he’s leading isn’t home runs, or ISO, or even K% (though he is close to leading that one). Instead, take a look at the top 15 this season for highest infield-hit percentage:

Bryant doesn’t hit a lot of ground balls. Only about 34% of his batted balls are on the ground (relative to a league average of about 45%.) Bryant’s lack of propensity to hit grounder is just as much a driving factor here as his speed is, because infield-hit rate is simply infield hits/ground balls. However, when Bryant does hit a ground ball, it has resulted in an infield hit almost one in five times, which is something that warrants some attention.

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Kris Bryant finally did it. After not hitting a home run in 19 games following his call up, he went out on Saturday in Milwaukee and clubbed a Kyle Lohse slider 389 feet out to left-center. The homer was the one number conspicuously missing from his season statistics, but it was always coming: the 23-year-old put up famous power numbers in the minor leagues, he’s been hitting inside fastballs to the warning track in right-center, and there was nothing telling us anything was wrong. Part of his power drought was surely his ongoing adjustment to major league pitching, something all rookies have to contend with. However, his treatment by pitchers so far shows just how unique Bryant might be, and puts him in a rare class of hitters.

Unsurprisingly, there was something special about the home run Bryant hit, beyond it being the first of many in his career. Let’s take a look at it, slowed down at impact, with a bit of an effect on the ball to make it more visible:

There are a few things to note: it was a slider, it was on the first pitch of the at-bat, and it was over the outer third of the plate. It caught more of the strike zone than Lohse wanted, but it wasn’t the worst hanging slider anyone has seen. This serves first and foremost as a reminder that Kris Bryant is very talented at hitting baseballs. It also informs us of the approach we’ve seen pitchers use when attacking Bryant so far in his young career, and the adjustments he needs to make in order to be successful at this level.

Lost in the frenzy over a big power prospect not hitting home runs is the fact that hitting for power requires getting good pitches to hit (unless you’re Vladimir Guerrero). Usually, a hitter doesn’t view a first-pitch slider on the outer third of the plate to be a great candidate for a home run to left-center field, but this is where Bryant currently finds himself.

To begin to illustrate that point, let’s start with a list. Here are the names of players since the year 2000 with at least 17 walks in their first 21 career games:

• Kosuke Fukudome (18)
• Carlos Santana (17)
• Adam Dunn (17)
• Andy LaRoche (17)
• Kris Bryant (17)

That’s it – five players. Not all of these hitters lit the world on fire, but they were/are known as high OBP/power guys (with the exception of Andy LaRoche). The bottom line is that this happens very rarely, and Bryant is being treated in a unique way usually reserved for a certain type of hitter.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Happy Kris Bryant Day!

Kris Bryant is finally free. After spending his obligatory two weeks in the minors, the highly-touted slugger has been summoned to the major leagues. He’ll slot into the Cubs lineup today, and will be playing third base, putting an end to the much-maligned Mike Olt era in Chicago.

By now, you’re probably well familiar with Bryant’s prospect pedigree. After three monster seasons at the University of San Diego, the Cubs took Bryant with the 2nd overall pick in 2013, right behind Mark Appel. Bryant made quick work of the minor leagues, destroying opposing pitchers to the tune of .330/.429/.662 in his year and a half in the minors. Bryant was a highly-touted prospect dating back to his college days, but his prospect status ticked up to elite following his 2014 performance. He hit .325/.438/.661 between Double-A and Triple-A last year, and belted a whopping 43 homers along the way — the most of any player in affiliated baseball.

Unsurprisingly, KATOH’s all over him. My system forecasts the slugger for a remarkable 16 WAR through age-28, which was the 2nd most of any prospect last winter; Only Joc Pederson earned a higher projection. Here are the probabilities my system spits out for Bryant through age-28. Read the rest of this entry »

Kris Bryant has been the talk of the baseball world this spring. Following Monday’s news that the Cubs had officially reassigned Bryant to the team’s minor league camp, speculation shifted from focusing on whether Bryant would make the Cubs’ opening day roster to whether Bryant or the Major League Baseball Players Association will challenge the demotion.

For its part, the MLBPA helped fuel this speculation in an official statement released on Monday following Bryant’s demotion:

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