The Perils of the Three-True-Outcome Slugger
For patient sluggers, strikeouts are a necessary byproduct of an approach designed to draw walks and hit home runs. We are well past the point of ridiculing strikeouts as bad when there are tangible trade-offs in on-base percentage and slugging. Those trade-offs are generally good for the player, but for players like Chris Carter this season, the three-true-outcome approach can go very wrong if the power drops or if the (relatively few) balls in play are not falling. For Chris Carter, a drop in both power and BABIP has resulted in a below replacement-level season despite leading the the league in Three True Outcomes.
Trying to get walks and home runs is generally a good strategy for hitters. Adding strikeouts to the mix is fine as evidenced by the leaders in Three True Outcome percentage (HR+K+BB/PA) below:
| Team | PA | HR | BB | SO | TTO% | wRC+ | WAR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Carter | Astros | 388 | 17 | 51 | 128 | 50.5 | 87 | -0.3 |
| Joc Pederson | Dodgers | 476 | 23 | 77 | 140 | 50.4 | 127 | 2.8 |
| Chris Davis | Orioles | 481 | 34 | 53 | 151 | 49.5 | 141 | 3.6 |
| Kris Bryant | Cubs | 467 | 16 | 62 | 144 | 47.5 | 124 | 3.9 |
| Bryce Harper | Nationals | 473 | 30 | 88 | 97 | 45.5 | 196 | 6.8 |
| Paul Goldschmidt | Diamondbacks | 520 | 22 | 92 | 106 | 42.3 | 169 | 5.8 |
| Mike Trout | Angels | 499 | 33 | 61 | 116 | 42.1 | 171 | 6.7 |
| J.D. Martinez | Tigers | 482 | 31 | 38 | 133 | 41.9 | 144 | 4.7 |
| Lucas Duda | Mets | 463 | 21 | 50 | 122 | 41.7 | 130 | 2.5 |
| Adam LaRoche | White Sox | 415 | 10 | 43 | 119 | 41.4 | 77 | -1.1 |
| Mike Napoli | – – – | 391 | 13 | 46 | 103 | 41.4 | 86 | 0.1 |
| Joey Votto | Reds | 507 | 21 | 93 | 93 | 40.8 | 167 | 5.2 |
| Brandon Belt | Giants | 447 | 17 | 44 | 120 | 40.5 | 139 | 3.6 |
For Carter, leading the list this season has not been a boon to his overall statistics. Carter has a .225 BABIP that is 50 points below his career average, resulting in a .180 batting average — and even a robust 13% walk rate could only get him to a .296 on-base percentage. While 17 home runs is a decent numbers, Carter averaged 33 home runs per 600 plate appearances in the two-and-a-half seasons entering this one, including 37 home runs last year. Houston’s home ballpark should be a help to a right-handed power hitter like Carter, but his pull percentage, hovering around 50% for his career, has dropped all the way down to 39% this season. He has been vulnerable against the fastball and is swinging through more pitches in the zone, unable to take advantage of the close left field fence in Minute Maid Park.
Carter is not alone in his struggles. Adam LaRoche has has had a rough year. Brandon Moss, barely off the list above, is struggling. Joc Pederson got off to an incredible start, but has been only experiencing the worst of the three true outcomes for a short period after the All-Star break. Given Carter’s recent success and the generally excellent numbers put up by many other TTO players, I was curious about whether these players were more prone to having bad seasons or getting worse sooner than the players who are successful without such a large percentage of their plate appearance ending in a strikeout, walk or home run.
I ran a small experiment, looking at qualified hitters from 2008 to -10. I isolated above average (100 wRC+ or higher) players whose TTO percentage was greater than 40% and who also received playing time from 2011 to -13. I ended up with eight players who had an average wRC+ of 124 and 8.7 WAR over the three years. I also took a group right in the middle in terms of TTO percentage using the same criteria above. I was able to find a larger group, of 15 players, with a wRC+ of 120 and an average of 8.3 WAR over the three years. I did not control for age, but the TTO group’s average age in 2011 was a bit older (29.6) due to a higher portion of players in their early 30s compared to the non-TTO group’s average age (28.8).
Looking at the period from 2011 to -13, the TTO group maintained their offense reasonably well, producing a wRC+ of 115, although the average WAR over that period dropped to five wins above replacement. The non-TTO group slightly improved their wRC+, moving up to 123 and maintaining their average WAR at 8.6 over the three-year period. The three true outcomes are often associated with old-man skills, so the decline in WAR could have been the result of a steeper decline, but the results of this small exercise are hardly definitive.
The last exercise made me curious about how closely tied a player’s offensive value is to his overall WAR. Looking at the players on the leaderboard above, ten of the top thirteen players above have a wRC+ above 120 and those players all had solid WAR totals. The graph below shows all qualified batters’ WAR total on the y-axis and the wRC+ total on x-axis. Players with more than 40% TTO percentages are in orange.
For the players right around the line moving through the graph, their offensive production is right in line with their total value. For those above it, they are likely providing a solid defensive value to supplement their offense, and those below the line are not likely much help on the defensive side. In general, WAR and wRC+ correlate fairly well, but for the TTO population (18 batters), the r-squared was a very high .93, necessitating further study below.
Also of note: there were no players in this season’s TTO group with a wRC+ between 90 and 119, so I decided to broaden the sample a bit to include more players to see whether this season is an anomaly. Looking at all players from 2010 to -15, I found that there were plenty of players with a high TTO percentage who fell between 90 and 119, although not quite as high of a percentage as MLB players on the whole. The chart below shows the percentage of players in each wRC+ group, both for TTO hitters and MLB players as a whole.
| wRC+ | Below 90 | 90-119 | 120+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| TTO | 10.0% | 35.7% | 54.2% |
| MLB | 17.9% | 47.5% | 34.6% |
Generally, full-time TTO players have performed better than the rest of MLB, recording an average per player wRC+ of 122 compared to 111 for all full-time players. The disparity in WAR per player does not correspond with the difference in offense, however: while TTO players have produced a 2.6 WAR on average, full-timers have averaged a 2.9 mark. The difference in offense without the corresponding difference in WAR was curious.
The same graph from above, but repeated for all players from 2010 to -14, looks like this:
The graph appears to show a lot more orange underneath the line rather than above it. For the population of more than 700 qualified players from 2010 to -14, the r-squared between wRC+ and WAR was .54, not quite as strong as it had been for 2015 alone, but still fairly well correlated. There were 53 players in the TTO group during this period, and the graph for only those players’ WAR and wRC+ is below.
This might not come as much of a surprise, but the value of Three True Outcomes players is highly dependent on their offense. When the offense is going well, and for most of these types of players it is usually going well, then the player can be incredibly valuable. However, when Chris Carter or Adam LaRoche cannot get things going offensively, he provides little value to the team. More players like Joc Pederson, Mike Trout, or even Bryce Harper could help change the stereotype of the lumbering, Three True Outcome slugger, but given the data over the past few years, that stereotype still holds true.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
Dig your stuff Craig. Fascinating topic but this one read like you rushed it to press before you understood what you had or if you had anything at all… I got no take away or bottom line out of it…
Yea agreed.. seems like he was trying to figure out something, but wasn’t quite sure, and landed on “TTO players usually are not good at defense”. The first few paragraphs of the article don’t really imply thats what was being researched.
What is the point of this? I’m absolutely still confused, and the conclusion is the value of a player is dependent on his offense?
So the point is that almost all TTO players are bad on defense? This seems like a roundabout way to demonstrate that.
Well since the stereotypical TTO player is a 1B/DH with the occasional corner outfielder, it should be no surprise that WAR lags behind wRC+. The positional adjustment kills the overall value. Non-TTO players (good contact skills with no power) are more heavily weighted toward the middle infield types, so they are more heavily represented above the line. Not that these stereotypes are universally true, but there is probably some selection bias all the way down the chain that makes this more likely.
Think you started out with an interesting q
Think you started out with an interesting question (are TTO players more volatile year-to-year than others), didn’t explore it fully since the age issue is a pretty big one, and then moved on to a much less interesting question (how dependent are TTO players on their offense to produce value?).
I still don’t know how I feel about strikeouts. I feel like the TTO player has to be a relatively decent hitter for average as well in order to stay valuable at the plate for a long time.
Would be interested in what the week-to-week or year-to-year variability looks like for TTO wRC+ vs. the general population to answer the question you posed about whether these guys are more prone to bad seasons. Not sure the WAR vs. wRC+ really answers that?
^ this. Maybe it’s a bias in the way I look at TTO players, but I have always wanted to look at year-to-year performance volatility between TTO and non-TTO players….
The guy who’s really interesting on that list is Kris Bryant, and to a lesser extent Brandon Belt. Most of the other TTO guys need a lot of homers to keep their heads above water–as witnessed by Carter, LaRoche, and Napoli–but Bryant and Belt are only in the teens, and they don’t have the amazing BB/K ratios of Votto, Harper, and Goldschmit.
What they have is very high BABIPs (and walk rates that are still elite, for Bryant, and very good, for Belt). Bryant’s BABIP is .132 higher than Carter’s! This was Bryant’s trademark in the minors too.
Imagine if he’d just stop striking out so much with that BABIP where he’d be
Why would that matter? The strikeouts are not ball in play, hence they don’t impact his BABIP.
I believe the premise is that if he struck out much less but maintained the same BABIP, his overall AVG would skyrocket, which is obviously true. Bryant’s hitting around .250 right now because of all the Ks vs. just 17 HR, and I think someone above said his BABIP is around .350. That’s a pretty incredible disparity.
Yeah… though as a Pirates fan, I prefer to think about what would happen if his BABIP drops but he keeps striking out.
Anthony, I think it’s fair to assume that if his K’s went down, his power and BABIP would drop though. Since there’s almost no correlation between K% and wRC+ at the major league level, its fair to assume the hitters who are striking out are swinging harder, or being more selective which leads to a better wRC+, even with the K’s. My guess is if Bryant made an effort to cut down his K’s, he’d walk less, hit for less power, and have a lower BABIP
I know it’s only 165 PA’s but Sano’s TTO is 56%
I love that Harper and Votto are on here, despite having fewer than 100 Ks each.
They just have so many damn walks and HRs!
I think this makes selecting TTO players strictly by the numbers difficult. For me, the spirit of TTO is a player that does enough good (HR+BB) to balance out for a lot of bad (K). Harper and Votto don’t really fit that definition in the intended way, but rather show up on the list because they do SO much good (HR+BB) that their total HR+BB+K makes the cut despite having not as much of the bad (K).
I wonder if a better list of players comparable to one another would be obtained by first sorting by TTO%, then subdividing that by the percentage that Ks represent from the TTO events (i.e., K/[HR+BB+K]). That provides a lot of separation between guys like Harper, Votto, and Goldschmidt who have strikeouts represent less than 50% of their TTO events and guys like Carter, LaRoche, and Belt who have strikeouts as more than 65% of their TTO events.
This, yes. I was gonna post this but I’ve been beaten to it… I think there are really 2 players on here — the guys that we think of as TTO players in the Adam Dunn mold and then really good hitters with exceptional plate discipline. Ignore the others for a second and look only at Votto and you see the difference — he has a 1:1 K:BB ratio! I think his strategy is not remotely similar to Chris Carter or Chris Davis or most of the others.
I posted below about Goldy, and totally agree. I think that the true TTO guy is 40 home runs capable in the post steroid era who is just country strong and let’s it fly. Mike Schmidt, Reggie Jackson type players in the modern era. The plate discipline guys walk because they don’t swing at balls, the Chris Davis types walk because they didn’t see anything they think they can mash regardless of balls or strikes. There was an article just recently that linked to a 2013 article that showed Davis swinging at pitches and hitting homers Votto wouldn’t even come out of his starting stance for.
What I wonder at is the ratio between TTO type players of all effectiveness levels in the league v. More typical hitters, and whether the TTO type player should be viewed as a more of an uncommon occurrence not to be intentionally developed but taken advantage of when a good one comes along, or conversely something that should be cultivated or taught to players that fit the image at lower levels.
I don’t really see the benefit of this analysis. I could see a (HR + Walks – SO)/PA having some value! I just don’t know what this metric could be used for? it’s relevancy or it’s purpose. The author doesn’t seem to know either..but it was a good piece albeit with no findings or conclusion
Ben Reveres TTO% is 15.5% not sure who if anyone else would have lower. Again, not sure why it’s relevant but at least provides more context.
Khris Davis misses by a few dozen PA’s but he’s at 43.4% TTO as well
I never knew that offense would correlate with another stat that included the exact same offense input.
seems like the takeaway is that TTO guys who make good contact are elite
Feels like all the negative criticism is the same person utilizing multiple names no? Spurned applicant perhaps.
No less than three times, I read the title as “The Penis of (something or other)”
Amateurs. See how those TTO% numbers hold up over 14 seasons. 49.9, baby.
TTO is somewhat misleading.
It seems that something like HR% + BB% + K% – Base Hit% would be much more informative.
I mean does anyone really think of guys like Trout, Goldy, Harper, Votto as TTO hitters?
They are among the leagues best overall hitters and hit the ball hard far more frequently than classic TTO sluggers like Dunn, Davis, or Carter
It seems like it would be even easier to just say that anyone with a K% under X (most likely 28% or so) is probably not a TTO guy.
(stupid phone cut me off)
….beacause with TTO guys the most frequent outcome is going to be K’s. So it makes sense to sort them by that main criteria.
But thats just me.
these numbers are the real deal, but watching Goldy hit in almost every game he plays it boggles the mind that he is on the list. He is the only player the Dbacks have had who so is amazingly good that when he is 0-3 with a walk and he lucks into a 5th at bat he’ll do a Tony Gwynn impersonation and hit a classic looping single, just to avoid the 0’fer. You can kind of tell it’s going to happen because normally he is totally impassive, but he walks up all pissy like, gets a hit and then stands on first shaking his head for the rest of the inning.
Obviously that’s not every time (he was 0-4 the other night), but it’s a lot of the time. BA is crap and all, Fangraphs is all knowing, but he is .333 last I checked, mainly through force of will it seems. I’m done homering know.
The problem is, you can’t win with 8 of these in your lineup, they need other productive players around them to be effective. Joc Peterson has survived his cool down by providing ++ defense, but the Dodgers will tire of his all or nothing soon enough. As a fan watching this type of player is just the worst thing in baseball, I’d rather watch a pitcher hit, at least that is comic relief.