The Best Hitter in the NL Central (Minimum 29 Plate Appearances)

Baseball is flush with randomness. Time and time again, we trick ourselves into believing we have a good sense of what’s going to happen next, armed with an ever-growing arsenal of measurements, metrics, and projections. Yet, without fail, baseball constantly finds a way to catch us by surprise. One of those surprises has taken St. Louis by storm the last couple of weeks. First baseman Luke Voit debuted for the Cardinals on June 25th and has proceeded to hit .333/.379/.704 between then and now. He’s currently sporting a 179 wRC+, which as the title suggests, is one of the best in baseball among batters with at least 29 plate appearances.

Of course, 29 plate appearances is too few to tell us much of anything about what Voit will do going forward. Luckily, Voit has a lengthy minor-league track record that can. And now that you’ve fallen for the clickbaity title, you’re stuck reading about it.

While surprising, Voit’s performance didn’t come completely out of nowhere. He was a good hitter in the minors, amassing over 30 homers since the start of 2015. He slashed .322/.406/.561 at Triple-A this year and .297/.372/,477 in 2016 at Double-A. Voit also managed to keep his strikeout rate comfortably below 20%, which allowed him to hit for both average and power.

However, there’s a difference between being a good hitter in the minors and being a good prospect. Voit falls into the former category more than the latter. For one, he’s a first baseman, which means he’ll absolutely need to hit to stick at the big-league level. First basemen have put up a 118 wRC+ this year, which is a pretty high bar to clear just to be average. Just as importantly, though, Voit is already 26. That means he’s unlikely to get much better than he already is — and very likely to get worse sometime soon.

Voit is swimming upstream against two very strong currents: positional value and aging curves. To have any sort of a career, he more or less needs to be a very good hitter right now. To his credit, Voit has been that and more since joining the Cardinals, although his minor-league performance doesn’t necessarily suggest he’ll keep succeeding.

As gaudy as his Triple-A numbers look, it’s important to remember that they took place in the PCL, which tends to make everybody’s numbers look gaudy. A cursory glance at the league’s leaders reveals that Voit was out-wOBA’d by Oswaldo Arcia, who was well below replacement level last year, and someone named Garrett Cooper. Very failed prospect Ivan De Jesus Jr. wasn’t too far behind. To wit, both Steamer and ZiPS project Voit for a mid-90s wRC+ from here on out, which is hardly anything to write home about for a lumbering first baseman.

My KATOH system pegs him for just 1.6 WAR over his first six seasons by the stats-only method and 0.9 WAR by KATOH+, which incorporates his (lack of a) prospect ranking. Voit is already creeping up on these numbers after his strong two weeks. So those projections can be interpreted as what he’ll produce from this day forward.

To put some faces to Voit’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps. I calculated a Mahalanobis distance between Voit’s Triple-A performance and every season since 1991. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. Please note that the Mahalanobis analysis is separate from KATOH. KATOH relies on macro-level trends, rather than comps. The fates of a few statistically similar players shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions about a prospect’s future. For this reason, I recommend using a player’s KATOH forecast to assess his future potential. The comps give us some interesting names that sometimes feel spot-on, but they’re mostly just there for fun.

Voit probably isn’t St. Louis’s first baseman of the future. But then again, nobody ever expected him to be. The Cardinals took Voit in the 22nd round — a round mostly full of players who have since flamed out. Since he was drafted, three different lead prospect analysts omitted him even from the honorable-mention sections of their prospect lists. He’s never made the Fringe Five and KATOH didn’t even catch him in its Super Deep Sleeper lists. The Cardinals have a knack for finding useful position players of nowhere, but Voit is a deep cut, even by Cardinals standards.

This is the first time Voit’s name has been invoked in a FanGraphs article, and he’s doing his best to make that look like a mistake. It doesn’t appear as though Voit has a lengthy career ahead of him, same as it hasn’t for his entire baseball life. But he’s more than earned the opportunity to show what he can do against big-league pitching, and he’s made the most of that opportunity. I’m not going to pretend to know what he’ll do next.