The Thing Adam Dunn Was Surprisingly Great At

This morning, David Appelman announced some minor upgrades to the way we calculate WAR, including the addition of a factor for doubles plays grounded into. While the results aren’t dramatic, some players do tend to hit into more double plays than others, and those rally-killing ground balls do have a tangible harm on a team’s offense, so they should be reflected in a metric attempting to assign a single value to a player’s performance. The swing isn’t huge, but the best player at double play avoidance in 2014 — Mike Trout, because of course he was — created an additional three runs above the league average, while the worst player — Casey McGehee — took five runs off the board by hitting into 31 double plays.

These names at the extremes make plenty of logical sense, as Trout as one of the fastest players in baseball, while McGehee is a slow ground ball machine who makes a ton of contact. And if you look at the leaderboard for valued added by double play avoidance since 2002, you’ll find names that make a lot of sense. At the top, there’s Ichiro Suzuki, adding 23 runs above the league average by almost never hitting into double plays. Right behind him is Johnny Damon, another speedy left-handed batter who made his living off his legs.

Now, if I worked for BuzzFeed, I’d have some cliffhanger sentence here, something like this.

“You’ll NEVER BELIEVE who is ALSO at the top of this list!”

But since I already put his name in the headline, you’ve probably already figured out that I’m talking about Adam Dunn. That’s right; when it comes to the best double play avoiders during the years in which we have batted ball data, Adam Dunn has created as much value as any other hitter in baseball.

On the one hand, this seems kind of shocking, because Adam Dunn is not exactly anyone’s idea of a speedster, and we don’t exactly have a lot of embedded memories of him beating out a bang-bang play at first base. On the other hand, though, Dunn is a pretty great reminder that there’s more to double play avoidance than just being fast. For reference, here are the wGDP leaders from 2002 to 2014, plotted against their Speed Score.

There is a correlation between speed score and double play avoidance, but it’s clearly not the only variable impacting things here. Dunn stands out as a bit of an outlier, but you’ll notice there are five other dots on that chart with similar or even lower speed scores than Dunn; Carlos Pena (+16 wGDP), Jim Thome (+11), Jason Giambi (+11), Russell Branyan (+11), and Dan Uggla (+10). The leaderboard is mostly comprised of guys who are too fast to double up, but there are this handful of slow sluggers who also managed to avoid GIDPs. What do they have in common?

Well, besides Uggla, they’re all left-handed, which can’t hurt. If you’re going to be slow, better to start closer to first base so you don’t have to cover as much ground when trying to get down the line than having to start from the opposite batters box. But there are a lot of left-handed batters in baseball, and most of them are faster than guys like Dunn, Giambi, Pena, and Thome, so what else do these guys have in common that would help them add value by avoiding double plays?

You’ve probably guessed the answer by now; strikeouts. Among players with at least 2,500 plate appearances since 2002, no player struck out at a higher rate than Branyan’s 32%. Dunn ranks 7th on that list, Pena 11th, and Thome 17th. These guys are some of the biggest whiffers of the past decade, making a contact-for-power trade-off that allowed them to hit a bunch of home runs and avoid hitting into a bunch of double plays. After all, it’s hard to hit into a double play if you don’t hit the ball in the first place.

This is one of the reasons why statistical types have long argued that strikeouts aren’t demonstrably worse than other types of outs. While they have no value in runner advancement, they also rarely create multiple outs on one play, offsetting some of the negatives associated with swinging and missing. There are absolutely some scenarios where you’d take a flyout over a strikeout, but there are also other scenarios where you’d prefer the whiff rather than a groundball right at an infielder. While there’s a lot of emphasis on the failures of players to put the ball in play when they just need to move a runner over, there isn’t as much of a stigma about adopting an approach that leads to more rally-killing double plays; both skillsets have their pluses and minuses, however.

This is one of the positives of having a high strikeout guy in your line-up. Of the hitters with the 20 highest strikeout rates since 2002, every single one has a positive wGDP. This is basically a collection of lumbering sluggers, as these guys are only in the majors because they can hit a baseball a long way, but their uppercut swings that produce so many Ks also tend to help them not hit many balls on the ground in double play situations. It’s a little thing, but over a long career, you’re looking at as much as a couple of extra wins from this little thing.

Hitting into double plays isn’t a large enough factor that it should change your opinion about a player’s value, but it does matter. While Ichiro and Adam Dunn got there in very different ways, both of them added a little over two wins of value by not hitting into double plays. And I’d bet that this is probably the only category in baseball that Dunn and Ichiro would ever find themselves co-leading.