The Non-Speed Components of Double Plays

Last week, we rolled out some minor tweaks to WAR, one of which was the addition of wGDP. If you haven’t read the primer, wGDP is a measure of double play runs above average and captures how many runs you save your team by staying out of double plays.

In general, it’s a minor piece of the overall puzzle with the best and worst players separated by less than a win of value over the course of a full season. Staying out of double plays helps your team, but even the best players don’t stay out of a large enough number to swing their value in a big way. Introducing wGDP makes WAR a better reflection of reality and that’s a good thing, but it also allows us to better measure the GIDP column we’ve all seen for years because it puts double plays in the context of double play opportunities.

Dave and August have already looked at some surprising and obvious players who are great at staying out of double plays, but I wanted to consider this new statistic from another angle. For the most part, it seems like staying out of double plays should be a base running issue, as you have to be fast enough to get to first before the infield twists it.

Yet there are other factors, based on the fact that Adam Dunn was also pretty great at it. Lefties start closer to first base, fly ball hitters don’t give infielders many chances to turn one, and hitting behind a really good base runner probably helps too because they can get on top of the bag and break up the double play. Dave already cover the strikeout aspect pretty well. What I’m curious about is players who are simultaneously good at avoiding double plays while being otherwise poor base runners, and vice versa, because they should help illuminate these other factors.

To put it another way, we know that the speed of the player is a relevant factor in staying out of double plays. What we don’t know is what other characteristics are associated with avoiding double plays. We obviously have some suspicions, but we can dig in a little further.

In order to look into this in an exploratory way, I isolated the batters who had 100 PA in 2014 who were at least one standard deviation above the mean by UBR and at least one standard deviation below the mean in wGDP. Then I did the same for players with low UBR and high wGDP. What can we learn from these groups?

Good Runners, Lots of Double Plays

Seven players qualified as good base runners by UBR while also costing their team by hitting into double plays. It’s a pretty diverse group of players, but a few things caught my eye. First, five of the players have a strikeout rate of 15% or lower. This makes sense because batters who don’t strikeout are putting the ball in play and hitting into a double play is predicated on putting the ball in play. It’s also a low walk group, with only two players topping a 7% walk rate, and that follows the same logic as strikeouts. More balls in play equal more double plays. That’s not a surprise.

It’s also a very low power group, with only two players running an ISO above .120 and both of those players only landed in the .138 to .145 range. Again, this makes plenty of sense because guys who hit for power are less likely to hit tailor-made ground balls.

Perhaps more interestingly, none of the seven were particularly great base stealers (wSB) with the high water mark being Austin Jackson’s 1.1 wSB. This lends some credence to the idea that they aren’t fast as much as they are smart, which allows them to advance an extra base but not beat out a grounder. And also, to no one’s surprise, the group has a ground ball rate about 4% above league average and makes contact about 6% more often.

We’re also looking at six right-handed hitters and Robinson Cano, which fits with our expectations about which batters should beat out double plays.

We’re dealing with players who aren’t exceptionally fast but work smartly on the bases. They’re also right-handed hitters who put a lot of balls in play and put a lot of those on the ground. In other words, this group of hitters is exactly what you’d expect to find. Take the population of smart base runners who aren’t super fast, and then filter by those categories. It’s always nice when a theory fits so neatly with the data.

Bad Runners, No Double Plays

If we try to reverse engineer what we just learned, these ten hitters should look pretty different. We should expect to find lumbering runners or poor decision makers who don’t put the ball in play that often who also happen to be lefty sluggers. How did we do?

Let’s look at strikeout rate, walk rate, ISO, GB%, and contact rate for both groups and the league.

Split	BB%	K%	ISO	GB%	Contact%
Bad wGDP/Good UBR	6.0%	14.2%	.105	48.4%	85.7%
League Average	7.6%	20.4%	.135	44.8%	79.3%
Good wGDP/Bad UBR	7.8%	23.6%	.153	38.5%	74.9%

There you have it, folks. More walks, way more strikeouts, and loads more power. Their ground ball rate is much lower and they do not make contact. That chart says it all.

This is one of those cases in which we probably didn’t learn anything terribly surprising, but we now have data that confirms our beliefs. In addition to the role speed plays in avoiding double plays, a certain type of player can avoid them or attract them, lending a bit of credence to the game’s shift toward higher strikeout, higher power players.

Double play runs don’t play a huge role in the overall outcome of a season, but it certainly does seem like we have enough evidence to indicate that avoiding them is a skill and we should be mindful of the runs a player can save or cost their team based on their style of play. There are benefits to having players who make contact, but there is also a very clear negative as well.