Your 2019 Giants: Yas, I Want Some More

A point made about the Giants great July is that there is regression due, because the players were not projected to do that well.  So I thought I would dig into that notion.

ogc big picture thoughts

And, looking at the players who have been helping the team, from Mike Yastrzemski to Alex Dickerson to Donovan Solano to Stephen Vogt, to even Evan Longoria and Austin Slater, I can see that as valid point.

Looking at StatCast's xwOBA vs. wOBA, though, I see as many players at .020+ as I do players at -.020-.  Dickerson was a huge outlier, for sure, but Vogt, Slater, and Yastrzemski are in the positive 20's, while guys who had significant AB's were in the negative 20's, Crawford, Panik, Austin, Longoria, Belt, plus Posey was at negative 15 (or -0.015).  The players playing above their heads seem to be balanced against players who are hitting worse than what would be expected.  So while, yes, regression is to be expected (especially for Dickerson, no way any player can keep that up for an extended period), progression is to be expected for many of the hitters as well (though Panik and Auston are now gone)

But projections are just that, educated guesses that makes one projection more right than another more times than not.  So I thought I would look into a player or two, see what I can find.

Yastrzemski

As much as people chant "Dick, Dick, Dick", it is Mike Yaztremski who was there first to signal hope for the 2019 Giants offense.  He did not start off great, and was going to be sent back down, but got hot, I think in the Colorado series.  Per StatCast, he ranks as good in xSLG and Hard Hit%, but below median in Exit Velocity (oddly, he's ranked low, but is still has velocity greater than the mean), which seems to mean that he makes a lot of good contact when he connects with the ball, but is really bad when he just makes contact.  Where he really shines is his xwOBACON of .418 which is much better than the MLB mean of .371, more than 10% better.

The negative is that his career minor league numbers did not signal that he would be this good in the majors.  Looking at his stats, he never hit all that great until AAA with the Giants, but the juiced ball helped a lot of hitters.  His only obvious hitting skill was his ability to take walks in the minors, he might have struck out a lot, but he was usually around 10% BB/PA or higher as a professional, particularly in the upper levels.  It shows that he has a good feel for the strike zone, but was not able to do a lot with the strikes, for whatever reason, in the minors.

However, given that his Hard Hit% was so high in the majors, and his xSLG is also better than the median and mean in the majors, he seems to have figured something out, at least so far.  Since his low point on June 13th, he has hit .296/.341/.614/.955 in the 55 games he has played since, with 15 homers in 189 AB.  His .318 BABIP in that period is not that high that regression there is expected.  His 16.0% HR/FB is on the high side, though (10.0% is roughly the mean for the majors), and given his inability to hit homers previously in his career, is thus considered high.

However, this article by Alex Pavlovic, detailing some of the changes Yastrzemski made due to this new era in baseball, plus other advice he got (similar to what Austin Slater's advice that he got from Barry Bonds, as noted in another article), provides rationale for why Yaz is hitting for so much more power than he has before.  Many hitters have taken on this change (like Hunter Pence), and experienced a blossoming of power relative to just before. 

Slater

Austin had shown good on-base skills for an unproven player, he had a .335 OBP in 2017-18 in 352 PA, so he has some interesting hitting skills previously, but no power to speak of, with a 79 ISO.  But he took on the challenge of changing his swing, and he's hitting .293/.407/.515/.922, with a elite 222 ISO.  He also took Barry Bonds' advice, as noted in this Pavlovic article, to swing only at pitches that he can hit out (as Barry noted), and probably modified it to swinging at pitches that he can do something with.  This led to more power, as well as more walks, giving him an elite .407 OBP. 

StatCast did not rank Slater in the majors, other than sprint speed (great), and per their expected calculations, he should suffer regression in BA, OBP, SLG, wOBA, but his xwOBA of .366 is still very good, and his wOBACON is .459, which is way above the .371 for the majors.  His Hard Hit% is 53.8%, up from 34.4% in 2018 (average is 34.4% in majors in 2019), and his walk rate is up to 14.4%, from 8.9% last season (major league average is 8.3%).

Overall

So, yeah, some regression is probably expected, at least for these two players (if I had more time, I would do others), but even with regression, they would still be good players based on the expected stats given their StatCast stats.  And there is evidence supporting why they should be hitting better, they took on the challenge of changing everything they were taught about hitting and using modern (and I hate saying that because Ted Williams had been talking about this for over 50 years now via his book, but too many coaches ruin hitter's swings by teaching them to hit grounders) hitting techniques.  And good hitters in the lineup is what makes a lineup better.