Sunday, August 18, 2019

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.   

5 comments:

  1. These two are holding their own through August.

    Dickerson has dropped to below league average for August and is regressing to his mean.

    Extended hot-streaks are not uncommon in baseball. Look at Gorkys Hernandez from about the middle of 2016 through the middle of 2017. He was still a bad hitter in the end.

    It's going to take time to know of they're hot-streaks or not. I hope they're not. But many a player has had a special season or two in an otherwise undistinguished career.

    Let me put it this way, it took an entire year for me to buy-off on Will Clark.

    As for the season, the abnomal record in one-run games (MLB best by a ridiculous amount) is the only reason people think this fundamentally flawed team is even flirting with a .500 season.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's partly why I didn't bother looking into Dickerson: his numbers were too high to maintain, but I guess I could have at least brought up his xwOBA, which at .361, is considered very good. And his xwOBACON is .431 is much higher as well.

      https://fantasy.fangraphs.com/pitch-type-xwoba-on-contact-xwobacon/

      From the analysis in the link above, MLB mean for wOBA has been roughly in the .317 range the past few years, so Dickerson's xwOBA of .361 in 2019 is very good, and with wOBACON roughly in the .360 range, his .431 is excellent as well.

      I agree that extended hot streaks are not uncommon and misleading. I wrote about Freddy Lewis's two week hot streak that got MCC all hopping mad when he was released mid-season even though his overall batting line still was okay-ish, when I showed that his two week hot streak at the start of the season masked two months of offensive ineptitude that followed and precipitated his release.

      That's why I focused on Yastrzemski and Slater. They have higher stats now, definitely not aligned with how they played before, but they also showed evidence of change, of modifying their way of hitting to bring more power to their hitting approach.

      So I agree with you that it'll take another season or two to confirm that they have progressed and won't regress to their prior mean, but given their changes, regression should not be automatically expected either.

      Delete
    2. While the one-run record is abnormal for all managers, it is not grossly out of the norm for Bochy, who has had made a career of having extreme records in one-run games, of leading the NL in such games numerous times in his career.

      And I've found that 8 games is generally an outlier, so if he can keep it at least 8 this season, it's still four in the 13 with the Giants, but then seven in the last 16, where he led (or was among the leaders) the NL with an outlier result.

      So abnormal, yes, but Bochy has made abnormal one-run results a part of his managerial record. He is 643-563 in one-run games, 80 games over .500, good for a .533 winning percentage, whereas he has a career under .500 winning percentage.

      Delete
  2. Six games left, but with just six games left anything that happens isn't going to change my thoughts.

    1. Even for Bochy that one-run game W/L is abnormal. He's good at one-run games. One of the better ones in MLB history. But it's still abnormal.

    2. Yaz was the best over-all OFer we had in 2019. Pillar owns all the old-fashioned batting stats, but Yaz is so much better in the modern analytics it's not a contest.

    Yaz is better with the leather than Pillar who makes highlight plays out of desperation while Yaz doesn't have to leave his feet to make them. Only Duggar is better, defensively, in the OF.

    Duggar is the best defensive OFer on the team and in the National League. His bat sucks and seems to be fragile. He's at a cross-roads between starter and 5th OFer.

    Slater has picked up his OF game and is getting better jumps on the ball. He was, defensively, the 3rd best OFer this year. He also put up a decent wRC+ line.

    Dickerson is not bad in the field. But he's not 'good' either. In fact, he's pretty much the equivalent of Pillar, but limited to corners. In the end he won't hurt you, but he won't help you like Duggar, Yaz and even Slater do.

    Pillar, over the past two seasons is at -2 DRS. People still think he's Pillar 2015 -- 2017, but he's not. He's getting ready to be Angel Pagan, a well below average fielding CFer (-25 DRS as CF career, -41 DRS as a CF for the Giants) that fans kept thinking was good (hint: he sucked in our OF, he didn't have the range).

    As for hitting, in the end I think it's fair to say that Yaz, at this point, seems to be a better hitter than all of them. Yes, Dickerson came up hot, but his wRC+ is 117 for the season and 112 for his career. Yaz came in at 122 wRC+.

    Of the five OFers that I think we'll be likely to go forward with next year, their wRC+:

    Yaz - 122
    Dick - 117
    Slater - 110
    Pillar - 90
    Duggar - 64

    3. The infield is mostly a mess. There are two positives though:

    Posey is still a great defensive catcher & pitch framer.

    Dubon is good with the glove and has +3 DRS (+2 2B +1 SS) in just 181 combined innings. Dubon is now the best IF we have.

    There is one 'push' as it were:

    Longoria played very good defense and managed to tick his hitting up to 'medicore' from 'putrid.' He's still a below average 3B, just not as bad as last year.

    The bad:

    Crawford isn't doing it at the plate or with the leather. He is 'so done' and has been 'so done' for nearly two years now. They need to eat that contract and move on with Dubon who can handle SS.

    Belt's defense has collapsed and I think he's got a leg problem because he lost his range which is what made it collapse. His hitting isn't as bad as his stats, he's (literally) been the 5th most BABIP victimized player in the majors this year.

    Posey doesn't seem like he's ever going to hit well again. Not uncommon for catchers once they pass 30.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Duggar is the best defensive OFer on the team and in the National League"

      Should have been "one of the best in the National League." Brain thought it. Fingers ignored it. Bad fingers. Baaaaad fingers.

      Delete

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