Don’t Forget About Chris Taylor
With the euphoria that is associated with acquiring a player like Mookie Betts, it’s easy to forget about about a role player who might now be relegated to bench duties, but I’m here to tell you that it’s a mistake to underestimate what Chris Taylor might be capable of doing in 2020. Before digging into what makes Taylor such a unique hitter, and looking at one thing in particular that he should be doing more to extract even more performance at the plate, it’s important to point out that Taylor was tremendous in 2019. Chris Taylor was shockingly bad in April. Seriously, it was hard to imagine him having a worse April, and the results led to fans calling for his DFA which was a bit crazy at the time, but he was pretty much unplayable, and Dodger fans aren’t known for their rationality. Taylor’s April slash line was .162/.250/.243. He put up an almost unheard of 37 wRC+. In hindsight, it was obvious that positive regression was coming, as Taylor ran an uncharacteristically low BABIP (.212). After that dreadful April, Taylor hit .284/.349/.510 with a 122 wRC+ — numbers that were right in line with his breakout 2017. Now that we got that out of the way, it’s time to dig in to his offensive profile a bit deeper to look at what makes him a good hitter, and to see if there’s anything he could do to get even better.
Bat Path Is Everything
If you pulled up Taylor’s Baseball Savant page, you would probably be disappointed with what you see.
Taylor looks like a weak, speedy, utility guy on the surface. That might not necessarily be false, as he certainly doesn’t have the physical prowess of a guy like Cody Bellinger, so he’s never going to run high exit velocity numbers. Still, I think Taylor is a great example as to why looking at exit velocity alone can be a bad barometer for how capable a hitter is. Taylor is elite at one thing — maintaining a proper bat path. Bat path is something that has been hard to quantify for awhile, as it normally has been a saying used by scouts to describe swings, but with new trackman data it has gotten easier to quantify bat path. Bat path, in layman’s terms, is just the hitter’s ability to mitigate miss hits, or in other words, consistently hit the ball at a proper launch angle/exit velocity combination. Having a good bat path allows hitters to minimize the amount of spin that is produced on their batted balls. FiveThirtyEight’s Travis Sawchik had a great article about the benefit of decreasing batted ball spin rate. While batted ball spin rate isn’t publicly available for fans to digest, there are two statistics we do have access to that are positively correlated with a decrease in batted ball spin: Launch Angle Standard Deviation and infield fly ball rate. Launch Angle Standard Deviation just describes the amount of deviation in launch angles for a hitter. The lower the deviation the better, as that means the hitter isn’t swinging under the ball a lot (pop ups) or chopping at the ball (ground balls), but instead is getting close to their ideal launch angle (line drives/barrels). Infield fly ball rate tells us the same thing for the most part, as guys with higher infield fly ball rates likely have bat path issues that lead to a lot of miss hits. Most of the elite hitters in baseball find themselves near the top of the LA SD list — guys like Joey Votto are notorious for having great bat paths.
Getting back a bit on track now, one guy who has had terrific bat path numbers since 2017 is Chris Taylor:
Taylor has also ran elite infield fly ball rates since his breakout, so it’s safe to say he’s one of the better bat paths guys in baseball.
Why this is so important for Taylor is that it allows him to run very high BABIPs without fear of regression. Both LA SD and IFFB% are negatively correlated with BABIP. In other words, as your LA SD and IFFB% go down, your BABIP goes up. A lot of people treat high BABIPs as luck related, but hitters with elite bat paths have the skill to sustain high BABIPs, which is why Taylor rebounded after that poor first month of the season. So Taylor is able to perform in spite of the horrible exit velocity numbers because he makes consistent quality contact due to a terrific bat path (he has the best bat path numbers on the Dodgers, Max Muncy is second).
Pulling the Ball is Good
Taylor is very good for a super utility player, but I can’t help but feel like he’s leaving a little bit of performance in the tank currently.
The average pull rate in the MLB in 2019 was 40.7%. Chris Taylor’s average pull rate in 2019 was 34.9%. To be fair, he has never been a big pull-side hitter, but his highest pull rate was in 2017 — his best season offensively. Before getting into why I think Taylor should look to pull the ball more, it’s important to note that he has very good feel for lifting the baseball. Ever since he changed his swing, he’s ran solid ground ball rates (i.e. lower) and decent fly ball rates. That is good, and it gives him a very good foundation to make a change in terms of launch direction. If a hitter’s swing wasn’t conducive to lift, it would be poor to suggest a more pull-centric approach, as that would likely lead to a lot of ground outs into a shift. In Taylor’s case, he hopefully will be able to hit over the shift if he begins to pull the ball more.
Taylor does good things (like most hitters) when he pulls the ball. As seen in the chart below, the pull-side is by far the most effective batted ball direction for him:
If Taylor was able to replace some of his opposite field batted balls with pulled balls there’s a chance he could tap into more power, and see an increase in results.
Defense
Taylor’s not just a good offensive player, but he’s incredibly versatile defensively as well. In 2019, Taylor played six positions (every position sans first base and catcher), and put up very respectable defensive metrics at every position besides shortstop. Looking at Statcast’s defensive metrics (definitely not infallible, but they tell a story) shows us how good he was defensively in 2019:
Taylor was solid at four positions, and somewhat subpar at two. The good thing for his 2020 prospects is that as things stand it looks like he won’t be needed to play shortstop and second as much, with Corey Seager and Gavin Lux getting the lion’s share of innings at those spots.
Taylor’s fWAR was a bit deflated in my opinion, as the defensive metric they use to calculate fWAR hated him at SS which dropped his total defensive fWAR into the negatives. I don’t agree with UZR’s evaluation of his shortstop defense, but regardless, he’s not going to be asked to play there as much in 2020 hopefully, so his dWAR number should be much higher than it was last year. There’s no real reason for a guy who is able to play 7 positions adequately to have a negative dWAR in my eyes.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, if Taylor does nothing to his game, he’ll likely be a very good player in 2020. He’s going to hit well, and provide defensive versatility all over the diamond. I think he has a solid floor of being a 2 win guy as long as he gets enough PAs (spoiler alert: he will, injuries exist). If Taylor decides to adopt a pull-centric approach, and utilizes his elite bat path to increase his power output, there is a chance he is much more than a 2 win guy, but something much closer to the 5 wins he put up in 2017.
It’s almost unbelievable how all the prospective 2020 Dodger lineups being thrown around on twitter don’t include Taylor, but then you remember how loaded the Dodgers are, and it gets a lot more believable. Enjoy Mookie, Cody, Muncy, etc. but remember not to forget Chris Taylor, as he could end up making a substantial impact next fall.
