What to Make of Matt Kemp, Free Agent

It all started with what I thought was an innocuous tweet.

The Reds released outfielder Matt Kemp on Saturday, and I sent a tweet with a few sabermetric stats — wRC+, WAR, and xwOBA — from his 2019 season. A few hours later, actor Chad Lowe (the brother of Rob) quote-tweeted my original post remarking that, and I’m paraphrasing here, analytics are ruining baseball. (The actual tweet contains profanity, but here it is if you’d like to see it.) My mentions filled up from there, and my original tweet ended up getting ratio’d by baseball fans who do not care for advanced stats. Lowe’s tweet started a new debate over the prevalence of sabermetric stats in mainstream baseball analysis, and it all played out in my notifications tab.

Since Saturday, Lowe and I have found a point of similarity, that being that there are some unquantifiable factors that go into the construction of a winning baseball team. It was a crazy few hours on Saturday night, to say the least.

Of course, I think we all know which side of the “saber v. Traditionalist” debate I fall upon, so this article isn’t going to be a further discussion about that. What I actually want to get into is the topic that prompted this whole debate: Kemp.

As mentioned, the Reds decided to part ways with the 34-year-old outfielder, who has scuffled out of the gate. In 62 plate appearances, Kemp has hit just .200/.210/.283 with one home run, one walk, and 19 strikeouts. Among the 282 batters with at least 60 plate appearances this year, Kemp’s wRC+ of 24 ranks 274th. It, unfortunately, gets worse. The Reds made this move whilst Kemp was already on the Injured List with a broken left rib, an injury he suffered in late-April after colliding with the outfield wall in San Diego. As he succinctly told MLB.com, “The wall won.”

So, after just 20 games, Kemp’s career as a Cincinnati Red is over. It was less than six months ago when the Reds acquired him in a six-player blockbuster trade with the Los Angeles Dodgers, one that sent another currently-struggling outfielder, Yasiel Puig (55 wRC+ in 125 PA), to the midwest. With that said, it’s far too early to judge the results of this trade; Kemp represented just one piece, and he was sent to the Reds mainly as a salary dump for the Dodgers. But I digress.

Let’s move on to talking about Kemp’s cold start. He’s now a free agent, and the Indians and Yankees could make sense as potential landing spots, though no solid suitors have emerged in the rumor mill quite yet. Whichever team does sign him, though, will only be on the hook for the league minimum salary of $550,000, making Kemp a no-risk, potentially-high-reward type of deal for any team in need of an outfielder. After all, this is still the guy who slashed .290/.338/.481 in 506 plate appearances last season, in what appeared to be a renaissance. For crying out loud, Matt Kemp was an All-Star … in 2018!

Is the potential for high reward there? The signals don’t appear to be promising. Kemp’s hard-hit rate of 40.5% is still well above his career-average (36.1%), but, in his 42 batted ball events, he has hit just 12, or just 28.6%, at or above a 95 mph exit velocity. Last year, 136 of his 354 batted ball events left the bat at a speed of at least 95 mph, or 38.4%. That’s nearly a 10 percentage point drop for him.

Clearly, Kemp has struggled to make the same quality of contact so far this year. But what’s even worse is that he’s back to hitting the ball on the ground. In 2018, Kemp’s GB/FB rate — 0.92 — marked the first season since his torrid 2011 that he hit more fly balls than groundballs. But so far this year, we’ve seen Kemp revert to his old habits, with his groundball rate jumping by nearly 8 percentage points, and his GB/FB ratio jumping to 1.13. We can even see this change in his launch angle chart.

First, here’s Kemp in 2018:

Now, here’s Kemp in 2019:

Kemp is hitting the ball directly into the ground, a strategy that we know isn’t conducive to being a successful hitter. You can see this in Kemp’s heightened line at what appears to be -5 degrees. For general context, balls hit at a launch angle anywhere between -4 and -6 degrees have gone for hits just 25.3% of the time this year, with nearly all of those hits going for singles.

Despite this seemingly alarming change in Kemp’s batted ball profile, it doesn’t appear that pitchers have been throwing him any differently this season, potentially serving as a little saving grace here. They’re not throwing more fastballs to him (in fact, they’re throwing slightly fewer), which would indicate that pitchers don’t believe a loss of bat speed is the reason for this poor start. If they did, I’d theorize that they would just try to blow everything by him.

Kemp, in fact, is hitting equally poorly in all three pitch groupings: fastball, offspeed, and breaking. His xwOBA against the fastball (.249) is by far the highest of any of the three, again indicating that he might not be dealing with depleted bat speed, even despite the sudden loss in exit velocity.

Some of this performance, then, may also be attributed to poor plate discipline. Perhaps Kemp is just not correctly assessing which pitches to hit. This theory might have some legs to it given his 19 strikeouts to one walk ratio this year, and can be supported by the fact that Kemp has posted just a 60.8% contact rate, by far the lowest mark of his career. He’s being fooled real bad, exemplified by a 21.2% swinging strike rate. Both of these figures rank as the second-worst in their respective categories in all of baseball (among hitters with at least 60 PA). This season, Kemp is making contact at the same rate as Joey Gallo, but he’s swinging at a 13-percentage point higher rate and isn’t nearly as selective.

Kemp can’t survive in this league as a free-swinger, but this season, that has been his exact approach. And, to go back to my point about pitchers not pitching him differently, the rate at which he’s seeing pitches in the strike zone, 43.7%, is still lower than his career-average and just two percentage points above his 2018 mark.

Was Kemp, then, just pressing during his stint with the Reds? Eno Sarris of The Athletic wrote an interesting article about the phenomenon, and the main characteristic that Kemp has demonstrated this year — swinging more often, especially at pitches outside of the zone — would indeed indicate that he’s pressing. As Sarris wrote, linking to his own FanGraphs piece from 2016, “it looks like there’s good evidence that players joining new teams swing (and reach) more in the first month.” That would certainly apply to Kemp’s situation, and it might explain why he’s not making nearly as much contact. Through swinging at everything, Kemp isn’t effectively distinguishing between good and bad pitches to hit, so when he makes contact, it’s more likely to be on a pitcher’s pitch. This, then, might lead to the results that we’ve seen so far, in both launch angle and exit velocity.

What do we make of all of this then? First, let’s get the easy part out of the way: sabermetrics rule. But, more to the point, I don’t think Matt Kemp is done. For one, it’s been just 62 plate appearances. And it’s rare that we see a hitter’s decline resemble falling off a cliff; generally, it’s more of a gradual loss of ability. And, of course, he might have just pressed his way through his Reds tenure. So, really, if I’m a GM today, I’m getting on the phone with Kemp’s agent. There might be something left in the tank, and if there’s not, he won’t cost you much of anything.