The Thing About Bryce Harper’s 2015
Bryce Harper was as good as Mike Trout, until he wasn’t. It hasn’t yet been that big of a deal, with the Nationals up in first place, but Harper has been slumping, and the slump hasn’t been short. For weeks on end, he’s hit barely .200, and though the walks have still been there, Harper’s supposed to be better than this. He’s supposed to be one of the best, actually. That’s what he just looked like, at 22 years old, and instead now he’s a 23-year-old in a lineup being carried by Daniel Murphy and Wilson Ramos. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being on track for a four-win season. It’s just not how you want to follow a nine-win season.
There are plenty of indicators to point to. What happened to Harper’s numbers? His BABIP is a lousy .237. That’s guaranteed to come up. More discouragingly, he’s making more contact against pitches out of the zone. Last year, 70% of Harper’s batted balls came against pitches within the strike zone. That ranked him in the 67th percentile. This year he ranks in the 18th percentile. That partially explains why Harper’s exit velocity has dropped — and it has indeed dropped. That’s another thing. Harper so far has lost a tick or two on average.
Yet there’s still more. We all figured that Harper’s 2015 dramatically changed his own baseline. What if it shouldn’t have?
Just to let you know now, this is all going to be speculative. And there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll find it all unsatisfying. Still, I have to follow the numbers, and if I’m going to be honest, there was something that sort of troubled me about Harper’s 2015 performance. Were it not for Statcast, I would’ve loved it. And I still did love it, but Statcast made me question some things. Per usual, a lot of this information is coming from Baseball Savant. Last season, Harper — obviously — ranked in the 99th percentile in terms of slugging percentage on fly balls, line drives, and pop-ups. Air balls, basically. Yet in terms of average air-ball exit velocity, Harper was good but not elite.
Let me show you what this looks like. I looked at every batter with at least 100 batted balls captured by the Statcast system. In this plot, you see their air-ball slugging percentages against their air-ball exit velocities. I’ve highlighted Harper in red. His name is also inserted because why not?
There’s a very clear relationship, which only makes sense. Harder contact is better contact. Using the equation for the best-fit line, it’s easy to calculate “expected” air-ball slugging percentage. Harper actually slugged 1.238; based just on the batted balls, he would’ve been expected to have slugged .876. There’s a difference between those two numbers of 362 points. That was far and away the biggest such difference for any hitter in the pool.
All right, so what? What are we supposed to make of this? All this analysis remains in its infancy. But let me now show you the same plot as above, only this time with the 2016 data instead. Harper, again, is highlighted in red.
Harper now is pretty much exactly on the line. You can see the dotted line passing right through the red Harper data point. Now, again, Harper’s air-ball exit velocity has dropped somewhat, and that’s of some concern. He hasn’t been hitting the ball exactly the same. But where last year he blew his expected production away, this year he’s where the numbers think he ought to be.
Is there something special about under- or over-achieving? I took the 2015 differences between actual and expected slugging, then I plotted them with the 2016 differences.
There’s the hint of something there, but it’s mostly randomness. And keep in mind, all the numbers are unadjusted, like for, say, the ballpark. A hitter with a big positive difference in 2015: Carlos Gonzalez. A hitter with a big positive difference in 2016: Carlos Gonzalez. You have to figure that’s in part capturing the Coors Field effect. He’s the most upper-right gray dot. Chris Davis has posted consecutive strongly positive differences, but maybe that’s in part capturing Camden Yards. Again, I don’t really know! But the numbers are pretty convincing.
Think of it this way. The plot above includes all the players with at least 100 tracked batted balls in each of the last two seasons. Among them, the 20 players with the biggest positive differences in 2015 averaged a slugging difference of 170 points. Those same players have an average difference this year of 13 points. Meanwhile, the 20 players with the biggest negative differences in 2015 averaged a slugging difference of -144 points. Those same players have an average difference this year of -38 points. This doesn’t look like something you want to regress all the way to zero, but heavy regression appears to be called for. Moving forward, that would be bad news for Jake Lamb.
And it looks like it’s already been bad news for Bryce Harper. Part of the problem is that he’s making worse contact. I’m sure he knows that, and I’m sure that’s something he’s working on. But a big component here could just be us having made too much of the 2015 breakout. For whatever reason or reasons, Harper last year maximized his air-ball contact results, and it doesn’t look like we should’ve expected that to continue. This year, he looks more normal, mostly because his air balls are behaving more normally. It’s unsatisfying because we all hate the game being reduced to fluctuations in luck, but I don’t know of another takeaway. I’m open to suggestions.
Bryce Harper is an extremely good player. And it should be said that he has an extremely high power ceiling. I mean:
We’ve seen the mammoth dingers. There’s no faking those. Harper has always been powerful, and he remains unusually young. There’s more in there for him to tap into. It just looks like Harper can’t hit the way he’s hit and expect 2015 results to follow. For those to happen, he has to hit the ball harder. I won’t pretend he can’t do it.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
The numbers are so compelling. This is why we come to this site.
Who’s the big outlier on the 2016 Air SLG vs Air EV graph?
Jake Lamb
Good stuff Jeff, I would have guessed Trumbo without the Lamb reference in the article.
It’d be cool if those graphs were interactive so you could see who each dot was by rolling your mouse over the graph. Although, my productivity at the office would definitely suffer…
On a related note, who’s the hitter in the 1st graph with a exit velocity that’s 5 MPH higher than anyone else? Stanton?
The very same!
Is there a way (now or in the future) to make these graphs “clickable” or “hoverable”, i.e. that they show which dot represents which player?
All I get when I click on one of them is a highly disappointing “page not found”.
I mean, the Stanton dot was pretty self-explanatory, but I would’ve never guessed Lamb to be the outlier on the second graph. Hovering over them and getting the reveal would be so satisfactory, for the rare occasion that there aren’t any other people wondering the same thing and you giving the answer in the comments.
My brain kinda tells me I’ve seen this before on other articles, but it might also just be playing some crazy tricks on me 😉
Regarding the article: That’s exactly the kind of stuff why we love fangraphs, and especially your writing. We knew there was something wrong with Harper, his EV and his outcomes, but seeing it put into straight numbers just really reveals how much he blew everyone (including himself) away last year.
I hope he can get back on track and to some numbers that are in-between 2015 and 16, because what we’re seeing over the last couple months is really painful at times.
Who else could it be?
I said exactly this repeatedly here for the last few months of last year and was consistently and widely booed for it. This year I’m repeatedly saying the same thing about Xander Bogaerts and I am being roundly booed for it. Fangraphs readers need to learn something about how to interpret statistics. This shouldn’t be a matter of waiting for something to happen and then saying after the fact ‘there was something that sort of troubled me about Harper’s 2015 performance’.
Noah Barron commented pretty much this article in a post last November, summarizing with his belief that Harpers numbers werent sustainable and went one for one on the internet appreciation points. I wouldn’t take it personally, I feel like most people just would rather enjoy it while its happening then speculate that its not going to continue on into the future.
I don’t take it personally. It’s just that fangraphs’ readers are supposed to be more knowledgeable that bleacher report readers and the overwhelming majority of them aren’t.
This seems to be a rather broad generalization based on a self-selected sample of readers who disagreed with you.
Really? I basically said the same thing this article said a year ago. No one here, not one person, is disagreeing with this analysis a year later when any fool can see last year was a fluke for harper. Yet last year even though the evidence was the same, essentially zero fangraphs readers agreed with my comments. Essentially zero of them were able to analyze the data in what is now clear is the correct way. Many of them gave me thumbs down, indicating that they were analyzing the data incorrectly. So what evidence do you have supporting the intelligence of fangraphs readers based on this???
Is there a way to ignore a Fangraphs poster permanently? Asking for a friend.
You insult fangraphs readers and writers on a regular basis. Most of those down votes are because of your personality; not your content.
Just so you know, I gave you that first plus 1. I don’t want you to come back next year and claim you were the only person that finds john… insufferable.
Would you mind linking where this occurred? I quickly scanned through every Bryce Harper tagged column for your name and couldn’t find where you supposedly did this. I’m probably missing it, so thanks in advance for the link.
Okay, here’s an example. On November 20, 2015, Jeff wrote an article called ‘Bryce Harper’s All-Time Breakout’ in which he wrote:
‘This was the year Harper reached a new level. It was a level people long suspected would be achievable for a player with Harper’s skills, but you have to realize how uncommon it actually is for a player to perform around his ceiling…he had some sort of all-time breakout, a breakout that ranks among the biggest in the whole history of the sport.
Precious few players have ever done something somewhat similar to what Harper just did.’
The article was 100% adulatory, you can check it out. Now, on the other hand, Jeff writes:
‘and if I’m going to be honest, there was something that sort of troubled me about Harper’s 2015 performance’.
Ahh, so now, AFTER Harper has returned to earth, we’re going to hear your honest feelings about last year. So I guess you saw this all along but decided when you wrote the November 2015 article that you wouldn’t be honest with us for one reason or another?
In response to the November 2015 article, I wrote the following:
‘There is good reason to believe that Harper isn’t nearly as good as his superficial stats suggest. His BABIP in 2014 was .369, the 13th best of 300 players with 250 PAs, although he was only #110 in LD%, #230 in IFH%, and #266 in Oppo%. In other words, he got very lucky on BABIP. His HR/FB% was ridiculously high, 27.3% (#5), but he was only #33 of 284 in fly ball distance, so here too he got lucky.’
Was this ‘insulting and rude’. Looks pretty objective to me, no? And in retrospect (if we’re all being honest about our true feelings at the time, as Jeff is), it looks pretty difficult to argue with, no? Nevertheless, for this I got zero likes and 4 dislikes.
Noah Baron made a generally similar comment (based on exit velocity) and the response to him was also uniformly negative (except from me). Gary wrote in response ‘Actually, I think he did more damage to the belief in the metrics you quote’ (in other words, if the stats suggest that we should be skeptical of the godlike status of Harper, then the stats must be wrong), lewish wrote ‘perhaps we don’t understand exit velocity’, and four other readers criticized Noah.
The general mood on Fangraphs–including the writers–is to look for the latest superstar/superteam and then heap on unquestioning adulation without any consideration of statistical facts. If anyone questions this, no matter how politely, essentially no one will support them, and everyone who expresses an opinion will support the ‘superstar’. Then, once the collapse happens, the writer will say something to suggest that he knew it all along (as Jeff did here) and the readers will go along with it. My entire reputation here is based on my questioning this, with Harper, with Jake Arrieta and the Cubs and general, and with Xander Bogaerts. As you can see from the above quote, it doesn’t matter how it’s said, it’s simply the fact that I am challenging the latest godlike player.
Bryce Harper isn’t Mike Trout. Jake Arrieta isn’t Clayton Kershaw. These should be obvious statements, yes fangraphs writers and readers routinely make comparisons like this for brief periods of time based on one set of obviously misleading statistics or another. The ‘social skill’ which I’m lacking is that if someone tries to make comparisons like this, I point out that it’s inappropriate. If you can’t deal with discussions like this, you should stick to Bleachers Report and stop thinking you have greater knowledge just because you read Fangraphs.
I think you are being rude and should have communicated it better but the Point is not that wrong, although I would not single out fangraphs, all media are like this.
all the media were saying harper is for real and nobody was warning that he might have had some luck.
Jeff and other FG writers are highly intelligent and try to be not biased but harper Shows how tough it is to stay objective if you see a 22 year old to perform at that Level.
I expect a higher standard from fangraphs. I expect some insight, more than there is in bleacher reports. It isn’t supposed to be like ‘all the media’. Some fangraphs writers are more insightful, like mike podhorzer. Jeff for the most part (though not always) isn’t like this. He pretty much repeats the story of the mainstream media, just uses more groovy new stats to do it.
The issue is not that it’s impossible to maintain that level of play. Mike trout does. Bruce harper can’t do this because he is not at the level of mike trout, and even in 2015 this was statistically obvious. The issue is that jeff and other fangraphs writers simply failed to recognize this.
johnforthegiants, just as I suspected, you have been extremely disingenuous regarding both your statements and their reception. You received only four downvotes for your “There is good reason to believe that Harper isn’t nearly as good as his superficial stats suggest” comment, and none of the responses to your comment indicated any outrage that you thought his 2015 line was luck-inflated. One guy criticized you for missing the point that Harper had a breakout even if he never again matches his 2015 production, while most of the criticism revolved around the part of your comment that you conveniently left out here:
The fact that you left that out indicates that you know not only that it was responsible for your negative reception back then, but that you would receive the same negative reception for it now. You’re not a martyr, johnforthegiants. No one bashes you for holding FanGraphs writers to a higher standard or pointing out flaws in their reasoning, people only bash you when you’re advocating ideas like “clutch hitting” that have been thoroughly discredited. You also conveniently left out that you received ten upvotes and no downvotes for pointing out that Jeff’s Harper piece should have compared “breakout” wRC+ with the previous career high wRC+ instead of just the previous season. So when you posted something ridiculous, that was received negatively, and when you posted something insightful, that was received positively. Please try as much as possible to make more insightful comments than ridiculous ones.
That Noah Baron comment had one downvote. One.
But the other six people who commented were opposed to what he wrote.
I didn’t include that part about clutch hitting because no one even commented on it, the comments were about what I wrote about his BABIP. It was not relevant.
But since you’ve brought up the topic, and at the risk of getting booed, I should make it clear that I do believe that Harper’s horrendous clutch hitting should be held against him when evaluating his performance. I know RBIs is an old-fashioned statistic, but it’s ridiculous that someone who only drove in 99 runs could have gotten the adulation Harper received last year. And it was not an accident–I you actually looked at a significant number of games, you would realize that pitchers generally know that when the game is on the line, Harper will swing at pitchers which are nowhere close to the strike zone and they pitch him accordingly. I understand that most fangraphs readers don’t believe in clutch hitting, and of course in many cases, especially when the data are limited, this is a statistical fluke, but for anyone who actually looks at a significant number of games (as opposed to just looking at statistics or playing fantasy baseball), it is obvious that there are hitters who react to being in high-leverage situations in this way. I realize, of course, that many fangraphs readers look at very few actual games or else don’t really understand what’s going on in them, and so of course this will sound heretical.
On the other hand, I do note that my post above has gotten 21 likes since the last time I looked…
If you ever wonder why your comments are poorly received, this last message of yours is a great example.
You certainly have made good points in your history. However, you completely undercut how people perceive you when you trot out an RBI argument like this.
Look, RBI does carry some information. But it’s been shown, time and time again, there are much better metrics to use. When you trot out the RBI argument like this, you’re allowing your personal belief to control the data narrative.
Your work on Harper’s clutch statistics are interesting, but incomplete. It’s also clear you’re looking into the data to prove your point, rather than letter the data determine your point.
I’m open to the idea that Harper is a historically bad clutch player; it would be amazing for him to be so good at hitting that it overcomes his flopping in the high leverage situation.
Your selective presentation of evidence (sometimes RBI, sometimes WAR) and comments dripping with bias combine with the tone of you comments. Your comments will have 1-2 good points in there, but then some batshit Dave Stewart level sentence. The negative reaction comes from the bad points.
I know I’ve told John in the past not to be an asswipe… but he says that’s not why he’s getting down votes. It’s because we don’t understand what he’s saying… and then the next article comes out and he’s an asswipe all over again and gets more down votes and bitches about it. People will tell him it’s his social skills… he says it’s not, and then shows his poor social skills repeatedly. I don’t know what else to tell you John… you can choose to listen to the people down voting you, or you can continue to be a dick. Only you control that, John.
That was exactly what he said a few months, and it takes place and constantly booing him. This year, as well Bogaerts says he is, and I booing Alex. She learned to read at Fangraphs some ideas on how to interpret the statistics that should be done. We have to have something, and then say: “wait,” I have something Harper 2015 “.
Much better than the original.
*edit*
I put a comment here and immediately regretted it. I don’t want to get into this debate. Have a wonderful day everyone.
The reason you get roundly booed is that you’re insulting and rude.
I tried telling him that months ago a couple of times, but he told me I was wrong so I gave up. Clearly he’s a smart guy, but definitely lacking certain social skills.
You would think that someone who seems to care this much about what people think of him would try to not be such a prick.
I admit that I have my awkward moments as well. I have been called out for it a couple of times here. I try to be aware of what I’m saying and how I say it, especially if I disagree with another reader. But there are some days where I’m just not feeling it, and I put my arms up and walk away rather than get in an internet argument. I think this is what other people are trying to say. I’ve seen John make some very good points. And sometimes he does stick to the point and still gets down voted, but that’s because he already has a reputation… John, I recommend staying objective, and it may not happen right away, but if you do it long enough, the down votes will decrease… but the moment you insult somebody, it’ll reset and you’ll have to start all over again. Like I said, I can have an edge as well… I’m saying this to help you out, not to give you a hard time.
What about his launch angles this year vs. last year? If you look at his hang time on air balls this year vs. last year, it looks like there’s a higher proportion of dark purple (> 4.5 second hang time) dots this year than last year. So maybe last year he was getting the most bang for his exit velocity buck by driving the ball at the optimum angle, but now he’s lofting the ball more, causing it to stay in the air longer and not go as far.
http://www.fangraphs.com/spraycharts.aspx?playerid=11579&position=OF&type=battedball&pid2=11579&ss1=2015&se1=2015&ss2=2016&se2=2016&cht1=hangtime&cht2=hangtime&vs1=ALL&vs2=ALL
Maybe I’m seeing things, but both the 2015 and 2016 EV v SLG charts look like they have a slight tail up as EV goes up meaning they’re not linear. That would align with the known “donut hole” in EV. A change in the line from linear to nonlinear tailing up (there’s probably a term I’m missing for that) would mean Lamb’s SLG might not be as far above expected since he’s at the very top of EV this year.
As to Harper, I kind of wondered after last year (really even just his 1st half) whether he had made “the leap” or if he had just had a career or fluke year. He’s young enough that you could buy the former but I figured the latter was a distinct possibility
I see it for 2015, but not really for 2016. And that third plot is kind of damning. If there were a skill for exceeding the expectation at the upper end, you’d think it would show up better.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that exceeding the expectation is a skill, more that perhaps the expectation curve should be a curve rather than a line.
Shit. That’s a good point. You could probably come up with a hypothesis to support that. The outfield wall serves as a non-linear cutoff line. UNLESS you knock one into a corner and have speed, most gappers, or fly balls to the wall are doubles. IF, however, you hit it 1 foot further, that 2.000 SLG now becomes a 4.000 SLG.
Essentially, if you plotted velocity vs distance (and assumed some range of or a constant exit angle), I think you would have a linear portion until you reach the wall. Once you reach the wall, everything beyond that is just a SLG of 4.000. So there would be some plateau. I’m picturing the shape of a logistic graph (not logarithmic).
Right now, players are only in the range of physical capability to hover around the linear portion of a logistic graph, but in the future, assuming we get bigger and stronger, and don’t change the fields, players would enter the non-linear portion.
IRL, the fields would probably change as humans grow, always making the linear portion the norm. So, we’ll likely be able to get away with linear modeling, until the transition period, that is, when humans are stronger and the field changes haven’t reacted yet.
Even more! The donut hole, could be the exit velocities that allow players to laterally make it to the ball. So from the velocity for a soft grounder to the infield to the velocity at which your average infielder could field a ball in the holes, you get the same result, 0.000 SLG. Anything harder than that, you make it through the hole, and the result is a single, SLG of 1.000. As you hit it harder, you’re entering the exit velocities that result in singles fielded by outfielders. From the liners that got through all the way up until a liner over the head of an outfielder. Then, your SLG turns into 2.000 for the next range ov velocities. If you do one plot for each exit angle from grounder angles to fly ball angles (let’s say -5 degrees up until 30 degrees) I think all 35 curves would have a similar shape, but the shape would be non-linear. The shape would look something like -(1/(x-115)). Maybe 115 would be like something unobtainable like 200, where those numbers are the exit velocity.
I’ll think I’ll post this with graphs on the community board
Interesting post. In my view Harper has always been very long on talent with only average mechanics and bat path. While I haven’t looked in depth at video of last year vs. this year, the standard deviation of his launch angles has ballooned considerably this year indicating there is likely something there regarding his mechanics/path. The fact that he is higher than normal in this area to begin with suggests to me that wide performance swings for Harper are likely to be the norm both within and across seasons.
Is it just the standard deviation or also the average launch angle that’s ballooned this year? Either way, it seems like he’s gone from an elite performance in squaring up on the ball to just a solid level for an MLB power-before-hit guy.
Both are up. Another indicator that his path and mechanics are causing lower quality contact is his IFFBs which have doubled over last year. Also, he may have changed his approach slightly in trying to hit more below the equator for spin as his FB/GBs are up and LDs down considerably. All three metric changes would be consistent with this type of approach change.
Thanks, this really makes a lot of sense to me. If Harper’s lower HR/FB rate was coming from just batted-ball luck, you’d expect a good number of those deep flies to still be extra-base hits. The fact that he’s on a pace to hit only half as many doubles as last year wouldn’t make sense unless there was a change in the quality of his contact, a lot more substantial than just a couple of MPH lower exit speed.
The Nats broadcasters have been all over him for changes to his swing – his front shoulder “flying open” during the swing during his slump, whereas last year he kept it tight. Not sure what there is to that?
He is a great player, but an article I read in here last year summarized exactly how I have felt watching his swing as a hitting instructor. His bat plane has very little margin for error. It’s a lot less flat, and his swing relies on meeting the ball “out in front” more than most, so small errors make him pop up to left or ground out to first more than guys with flatter planes. He will be more prone to slumps and heaters than most. It reminds me of when he was a kid and his dad would underhand him the ball from a few feet in front of him. Almost anyone else on earth would frequently hit the ball back at his dad, but Harper met the ball so far in front that he never once hit his dad.
any link to that?
On a phone and bad at searching but it was a comparison between elite hitters, I believe Trout, Cabrera maybe, and I feel like (pre-slump) Pederson
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/mike-trout-bryce-harper-and-joc-pederson-on-the-top-hand/
will look for it, thanks.
“And there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll find it all unsatisfying.”
Says YOU. Article was concise and eye opening. Great stuff.
This is great analysis. I has led me to wonder if you could predict the level of air ball over/underperformance by measuring the % of these air balls that arise from O-contact and Z-Contact.
My theory would be that a sufficiently powerful hitter can probably generate good EV on a less than ideal contact event but that the high EV balls arising from contact on a pitch in the zone would on average produce better results than a ball which was contacted outside the zone but possessing the same EV.
Quick mention of the Community Researcher who identified the Out of Zone Contact increase a couple months ago, also in relation to depressed performance. Except I don’t remember the name.
What is going on with the dramatic increase of ads on this website? It’s to the point where I’m not going to visit. Do I have something set wrong on my computer? I can’t even scroll down smoothly without an ad popping up.
They added a script where, 10-15 seconds after the page loads, an ad appears in between the top paragraph you’re reading and the next paragraph. So if you just clicked on the article and have not scrolled, it will be after the first paragraph. If you did like I do with Carson’s NERD scores and scrolled down to the table immediately, it will load an ad right after the table.
I haven’t encountered this becoming a serial thing – usually just one per page.
BTW: no offense, Cistulli. I love your writeups. But sometimes it’s 6:02PM and I have three minutes to tell MLB.tv what I’m gonna watch.
So what about an actual prediction? Do you think that, going forward, he’ll split the difference between 2015 and 2016 and hit something like .285/.420/.550? To me what was most surprising about last year was the .330 BA. I could see him settling more in the .280-.310 range, but still managing 40+ HR seasons.
From Jeff you want an actual prediction? After his article about Harper last November declared him to be the greatest thing since sliced bread and now he claims he really had serious reservations about Harper all along? Looks from this like Jeff keeps his real predictions secret and only makes predictions about things which have already happened.
Whoops, there we are with the “insulting” and “rude” again. Or at least rude and overly sarcastic. From the November ’15 JABO article you keep referring to, there’s no such statement as “the greatest blablabla”
Jeff wrote about probably the greatest and most extreme BREAKOUT. He didn’t call Bryce the “greatest player” at all.
But from your other comments it’s pretty obvious that you mostly just don’t like and don’t even appreciate Harper, so…
Maybe there’s really not much of a point trying to predict Harper right now, because of what’s happened between April ’15 and this day. He might slump for a long time, he might suddenly start mashing again like it’s 2015. Who knows? Predictions are great, but in cases like his, even experienced guys like Jeff really have their limits as to how to predict what’s gonna happen.
Well it’s kind of funny that the november 2015 article doesn’t mention any of the things he’s now being honest about. For some reason he decided to keep this a secret until now.
Well, he was killing it in April and then he started getting walked all the time. From the data it looks as if he is not swinging as much at pitches in the zone, and like the author says, when he goes out of the zone he is making contact more often.
His LD rate is 15% and his soft contact is double last year. Its not just bad luck. He may have been a bit lucky last year as the data in the article shows, which makes the difference in output more extreme.
May be he has a physical issue, or just a major flaw in his swing, or its all in his head.
All I know now is he is no Mike Trout, and he can kiss that 500 million contract good bye until he shows some consistency year to year
It was obvious last year too that he’s no mike trout.
Great article! This is the kind of thing I support FanGraphs for!
I wonder why nobody was talking about that last year. I’m not accusing you to be follwing the masses, anyone including myself believed in harper and he got compared to mantle etc.
In April this year fangraphs even wrote an article about a new super harper that now doesn’t even strike out. another article said he is catching up to mike trout, most of his Progress was not attributed to luck but to reaching his prime and finally staying healthy.
Again I’m not singling out FG, everone was in on harper but I wonder why no source commented on him like that in the offseason.
maybe we were all a Little blind and biased because we wanted him to be the next Young Superstar so much.
I wrote about that explicitly in response to the november article, as i referred to above. The fangraphs writers didn’t write about this apparently because the don’t have any deeper insight into baseball than do bleachers reports writers.
HOLY SHIT WE GET IT DUDE – YOU SAID SOMETHING IN NOVEMBER. HAVE A COOKIE.
BTW I think harpers swing is not the best. He is getting behind the ball a Little later than for example Pujols who gets on plane with the pitch rather early. that means to get the ball in the air he has to catch it out front on the upswing.
Pujols on the other Hand gets behind/below the ball 3-4 feet before contact and then has a very slight Uppercut through the pitch. harper is probably one of the many guys who were taught to swing down and then having to adjust to swing up.
Harper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPnDNKIo-KM
votto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDX1T-6Wm6g
harper has his low Point around at the front hip and votto behind the back hip
To confirm I would like to see his FB rates by direction? does he lift more pulled balls than average and less oppo balls? of course we know it is actually good to selective pull in the air but if you have to catch it out front it makes Timing more difficult, especially if you are not that good on inside pitches (harper is better middle-away):
http://www.fangraphs.com/zonegrid.aspx?playerid=11579&position=OF&ss=2015-01-01&se=2015-12-01&type=5&hand=all&count=all&blur=1&grid=10&view=bat&pitch=&season=2015
So if you are a Player that is better on pitches out over the plate but your sweet Zone is out front to pull field it means you Need to hook outside pitches to pull field which is tough to do consistently.
I still think harper has elite raw strength but a swing and Approach that is not easy to pull off consistently.
Still I don’t saw that Kind of drop off Happening of course, maybe he can refine his Approach again to make his swing work.
I think part of why we all (including analysts who are humans too) believed that Harper is for real is the hype he got. He was called the next superstar since he was 15 and then when he finally became that at age 23 we said that is the Bryce Harper that he should be.