The Goods and Bads of Lorenzo Cain’s Struggles

Lorenzo Cain has had a rough go of it so far. That much we can say with absolute certainty. Cain’s coming off a seven-win season in which he finished second runner-up — behind Josh Donaldson and Mike Trout — for the American League MVP, and there was also that whole world championship thing. The Royals weren’t — and aren’t — a team built around stars, but if there was a star of last year’s champs, Cain was the guy. It was also something like his breakout season, and while Cain isn’t young at 30 years of age, he’s certainly not old enough that we entered the offseason wondering whether he could sustain most or all of that breakout. Cain was the de facto star, and there was little reason to believe he wouldn’t continue being the de facto star.

Through 20 games of Kansas City’s victory lap, he’s been anything but. The only number you really need to know for now is 64, which is Cain’s wRC+ in 83 plate appearances. It’s a bad number. We know that. The bigger questions are ones like, “Why is the bad bad?” and, “Is there any good in the bad?” and, “Am I being the best version of myself?” We probably won’t get to all of that, but we’re going to try.

Let’s start with a good thing!

A good thing: Lorenzo Cain is walking a bunch! That’s a good thing. Because walks are good, and he’s doing them a lot. It’s not like Cain has just totally lost control of the strike zone and is suddenly going all Josh Hamilton on everything. When Josh Hamilton started going all Josh Hamilton on everything, it was almost like a flip switched and his career was put on hold until further notice. There’s beating yourself, and there’s getting beat. Beat yourself and the opponent doesn’t even have to do any of the work. Cain, at the very least, seems like he’s making pitchers work. This has been one good thing.

A bad thing: Lorenzo Cain is striking out a ton. The walks look good in a vacuum. That’s why we started there. In the grand scheme of things, though, the walks look mostly insignificant, because of what else is going on around the walks. Cain’s struck out in more than a quarter of his plate appearances. Perhaps his most important asset as a hitter has been his speed, and in order to make use of one’s speed, one must first put the ball in play. That’s been an issue. I mean, really:

Largest Decreases in Contact Rate, 2015-16
Name 15_Contact% 16_Contact% Contact_DIF%
Lorenzo Cain 82.9% 69.8% -13.1%
Mitch Moreland 76.5% 66.9% -9.6%
Daniel Murphy 91.8% 82.5% -9.3%
Marcus Semien 79.1% 69.9% -9.2%
Jason Kipnis 83.8% 75.0% -8.8%

That’s a scary table. Not only because Cain sits on top, but because of how he sits on top. Cain’s decrease in contact is unlike any other experienced in baseball. Last year, Cain was a contact hitter who added some pop. This year, Cain is making contact at the same rate as 2015 Mark Reynolds. He’s whiffing more against the hard stuff. He’s whiffing more against the breaking stuff. He’s whiffing more outside the zone. He’s whiffing more inside the zone. Bunch more whiffs.

Another good thing: Lorenzo Cain’s probably been pretty unlucky! As we mentioned before, Cain’s got a reputation for being fast as all hell, and while his batted-ball authority won’t easily be mistaken for Miguel Cabrera‘s, last year, Cain’s average exit velocity was the same as Bryce Harper‘s and Carlos Gonzalez’s. Cain’s fast, he hits the ball hard enough, and he’s not easily shifted. Grounders, then, should be his friend, and in the past, they have been. From 2014 to -15, only four players turned their ground balls into hits more often than Cain, with Jose Altuve and Dee Gordon being the only two who created more runs via the ground ball. This year, Cain’s ground-ball production has been miserable. Despite the exit velocity on grounders being slightly up from last year, the BABIP’s down from .320 to .115, and where Cain used to make his company around the Altuves and Gordons of the world, he’s now made his company around the Juan Uribes and Yonder Alonsos of the world.

When batters put the ball on the ground at more than 100 mph last season, they hit .445. Cain’s hit the ball 100 mph on the ground five times this season. Here they are:

Just a thing: Boy, is it just me, or does Lorenzo Cain look slower than he used to in these five totally not representative clips that really prove nothing about his foot-speed but still compelled me to say something about him potentially maybe looking a little bit slower?

Another bad thing: None of that was good contact! This is why exit velocity cannot be used on its own. Launch angle is important, too, as we quickly found out in the Statcast era. You might initially doubt that the balls pictured above actually came off the bat at 100 mph, like Jeff did with Hanley Ramirez in the previously linked post, but I have no concerns with the validity of the data. A ball that gets pounded straight down into the dirt is going to quickly lose a lot of its speed, as baseball physicist Alan Nathan noted in the comment section of that piece. Last year, Cain’s average lunch angle on ground balls was -7 degrees. This year, it’s down to -11. I can’t tell you where that ranks in the scope of the league, but I can tell you that means Cain’s doing more pounding into the dirt, and for context, those first two .gifs had launch angles of -12 degrees, so those are close to representative of Cain’s average ground-ball angle.

So the bigger issue here becomes: those were the five hardest-hit grounders off Lorenzo Cain’s bat this season, and they weren’t hit particularly well. Cain’s hard-hit rate is down significantly from a year ago, and in fact, he has one of the lowest hard-hit rates in baseball. Not a positive indicator, that.

Another good thing: He’s still probably gotten unlucky. Potential contact quality concerns aside, Lorenzo Cain should be better than 3-for-26 when he puts the ball on the ground.

* * *

So what have we learned? There’s been some bad, and there’s been some good, but even the goods are sort of just extensions of the bads. There just hasn’t been much straight-up, honest-to-goodness good. Cain’s walking, and he’s probably been the victim of poor fortune, but the walks mostly exist because he’s become more passive on account of not being able to put the bat on anything, and the poor fortune looks like it’s at least partially influenced by the fact that Cain’s not making good contact, and even the surface-level good contact is just poor contact masquerading as good contact. My hot take is that Cain’s lost his mechanics. Surprise! Something is wrong with the struggling hitter’s swing. Who’da thunk it?!

What you hope is that Cain’s just in a funk, and there’s nothing physically wrong with him. He’s 30 now, and we’d be remiss to ignore that he’d never batted more than 570 times in any professional season before batting nearly 700 times last year, and that since 2009, he’s hit the disabled list for various injuries to his knee, hip, groin, thigh, oblique, and groin again. Cain’s body has taken a beating, and it’s only natural to wonder when you see a player having these types of struggles.

But that’s just speculation. Back to the thing we can say with absolute certainty: Lorenzo Cain has had a rough go of it so far.





August used to cover the Indians for MLB and ohio.com, but now he's here and thinks writing these in the third person is weird. So you can reach me on Twitter @AugustFG_ or e-mail at august.fagerstrom@fangraphs.com.

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hebrewmember
7 years ago

Ugh why do all the videos have ads now? it’s ridiculous to have to sit through a 15 second advertisement to watch a 4 second video.