What You Can Say About Matt Davidson

A week ago today, the author of the current post published his own contribution to FanGraphs’ positional power rankings — an examination, specifically, of designated hitters. In the context of the positional rankings, DH occupies a slightly uneasy place. For one, the position (or non-position, as it were) doesn’t actually exist in the National League, which means the pool of players is necessarily smaller. Also, attempting to understand the contributions of a DH in the context of wins presents some difficulties. On the one hand, owing to the absence of any defensive responsibilities, designated hitters are subject to a robust negative adjustment in the calculation of WAR. On the other hand, though, hitters who are deployed in the DH role tend to hit worse than when playing the field — what analysts typically characterize as a “DH penalty.”

While one, duly motivated, could dedicate some time and energy to improving upon the extant methodology for evaluating the position, it’s also true that good hitters, when utilized in a DH capacity, tend to be well acquitted by WAR, poor hitters less so — a point illustrated by the image below.

Here one finds the chart that accompanied the aforementioned power-rankings post. Teams further to the left are projected to produce more wins out of the DH spot in 2018; teams on the left, fewer of them. The Yankees and Red Sox, who employ Giancarlo Stanton and J.D. Martinez, respectively, are expected to fare well this season. The Mariners and Indians (Nelson Cruz, Edwin Encarnacion), too.

It’s the rightmost bar of this chart that probably deserves some attention, because it largely concerns Your 2018 WAR Leader.

The White Sox were forecast, just a week ago, to receive the fewest wins from the DH position of any American League club — and not just the fewest wins, but actually negative wins. Certain current events might serve to cast that projection in a curious light.

Let’s address that momentarily. First, consider the author’s commentary regarding the White Sox’ DH depth chart:

Some may consider the White Sox’ decision to utilize Matt Davidson as the club’s designated hitter to be misguided. “He is not good,” they might contend. “He is bad,” they might contend also, restating their first point with slightly different words.

In terms of matters like “run production,” these criticisms possess a whiff of legitimacy. While Davidson is surely better at hitting than almost the entire rest of the human population, he has typically fared badly relative to major-league ballplayers — which, unfortunately, is the one demographic against which he’s been asked to compete. In strictly baseball terms, the White Sox’ decision to utilize Matt Davidson as the club’s designated hitter might be misguided.

As an attempt to “problematize” language, however, the White Sox might have struck a rich vein here. For those who are unfamiliar, “problematizing” is something graduate students do when they’re not meditating bleakly on their career prospects. To problematize a concept or idea, one ponders a reality in which the opposite of that concept or idea is true. In the case of Davidson, for example, the White Sox appear to be asking what would happen if a designated hitter didn’t hit. A stirring thought! The 2018 season is likely to go some way towards producing the appropriate hard data.

This passage largely concerns White Sox designated hitter Matt Davidson, and it generally offers something less than a “glowing” assessment of that designated hitter’s capacity to aid his club.

What’s a bit awkward about that particular assessment is this:

And this:

And probably best not to neglect this, either:

Matt Davidson hit three home runs on Opening Day. He “created” five runs by himself. He’s been worth a half-win already. If the world were to end today — a not entirely impossible contingency, in light of human behavior — it would end with Matt Davidson as the last, best practitioner of an extinct pastime played by an extinct race.

Whether or not Davidson’s performance is important — or is important in a way that reveals something previously unknown about him as a ballplayer — it certainly seems important. The most recent data about a player ought to be weighted most heavily, but how heavily should this data be weighted. What can we say about Matt Davidson?

First, is this: Davidson’s power has never really been the problem — or, at least, it wasn’t the problem for him last year. Even in a season defined by unprecedented power numbers, Davidson was among the league’s more impressive power hitters. Among batters with 400 or more plate appearances, Davidson recorded an isolated-power figure (.232) in the 75th percentile. He finished 13th of 540 hitters in terms of “barrels” per batted-ball event — ahead of Nelson Cruz (21), for example, and Josh Donaldson (22) and Mike Trout (28). Power on contact wasn’t the problem.

The trouble for Davidson has been making contact in the first place. Among the same group of hitters with at least 400 plate appearances cited above, a sample that includes mroe than 200 players, Davidson recorded the fifth-worst contact rate (65.3%) and sixth-worst swinging-strike rate (16.3%) second-worst strikeout rate (37.2%). At the same time, he walked in fewer than 5% of his plate appearances.

In that sense, Davidson’s performance on Thursday was a success but probably not one from which it’s possible to extract much of meaning. Davidson didn’t swing and miss once against the Royals. He recorded a contact rate of 100%, a swinging-strike rate of 0%. That’s a positive for Davidson but not unprecedented. Last year, he did that on 11 occasions total, in eight of which he was used as a starter (as opposed to a pinch-hitter). That accounts for roughly 10% of the games in which Davidson appeared last year. That makes it somewhat rare but, again, not unprecedented.

On the other hand, the quality of Davidson’s contact on Thursday — already a strength of his skillset — actually was unprecedented. Consider, by way of illustration, the exit-velocity leaderboard of this very young season:

And now consider Matt Davidson’s previous best exit velocities, per Baseball Savant:

According to the data as it currently stands (it’s sometimes recalibrated after the fact), Davidson entered yesterday’s game having never recorded an exit velocity greater than 113 mph. Yesterday alone, he eclipsed the 113-mph threshold three times. That’s very probably not a bad development for Davidson.

Of course, peak velocity alone isn’t the most powerful of indicators. Yes, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge finished first and second, respectively, by that measure last year, but Mike Trout — who produced the fourth-best ISO among qualified hitters and is also the best player in the league — ranked only 29th. Cody Bellinger, who had the fifth-best ISO, was even lower, at 83rd. Achieving a combination of strong exit velocities and ideal launch angles is more amenable to consistent power. And there’s nothing about Thursday that allows one to conclude that Davidson is likely to fair better by those measures. But he had an excellent day and did exhibit heretofore unprecedented power on contact. If he’s able to sustain an acceptable sort of contact rate, he’s likely to make the preseason projections look foolish.