Best and Worst of Baseball — Batting (Part II)

(See Part I if you haven’t read that already)

Picking up where the last post left off, let’s rapid-fire through some quirkier awards.

Most Powerful (Highest ISO):

Career

1. Babe Ruth (0.348)
2. Mark McGwire (0.325)
3. Barry Bonds (0.309)
4. Lou Gehrig (0.292)
5. Hank Greenberg (0.292)

8. Jim Thome (0.278)

9. Manny Ramirez (0.273)

10. Giancarlo Stanton (0.273)

15. David Ortiz (0.265)

16. Albert Pujols (0.261)

Crazy to see how many “modern greats” are on this list — McGwire, Bonds, Thome, Ramirez, Ortiz, Pujols. You could make a case that strength training and modern athleticism are the root cause, and for the active players, this number is likely to tail off towards the end of their careers. But still quite thought-provoking.

If you relax the minimum plate appearances restriction to 250, you can get a glimpse of the next generation of home-run hitters. In their young careers, the following guys have hit for dazzling power:

Ryan Schimpf (0.303)

Gary Sanchez (0.297)

Aaron Judge (0.292)

Trevor Story (0.279) — aided by playing in Coors Field though

If you look at this by season, the top 10 is a combination of Bonds, Ruth, and McGwire. If you expand to the top 15, you get some Sammy Sosa seasons in there too. But you also get Freddie Freeman, the current Braves’ 1B, and Mike Trout’s 2017 seasons. Basically the two of them are on pace for the most powerful seasons since Ruth and/or the ‘Roid Era.

Meekest Bat

One of the best statistics for measuring the style of a batsman is ground ball to fly ball ratio. In the simplest view of batting, you’re either hitting for contact or for power. From conventional wisdom, we’d expect to see a lot of speedy OFs and slick-fielding middle infielders on here — and that’s very much what you end up seeing.

GB/FB Ratio (Career) (Only goes back as far as ball flight data was tracked, so more of a recent history stat from 2002 to present)

1. Joey Gathright 4.47
2. Ben Revere 3.69
3. Luis Castillo 3.51
4. Wilson Valdez 3.49
5. Christian Yelich 3.32

7. Dee Gordon 2.91

10. Derek Jeter 2.73

22. Ichiro Suzuki 2.35

This is a pretty interesting stat. Most of the top guys are kinda fringe major leaguers — Gathright was only in the majors for a few years and had a wRC+ of 71, Revere is a notoriously light-hitting OF with a career ISO of 0.059 (yikes) and a wRC+ of 82, and Luis Castillo is an average hitter (wRC+ of 97) but has no power (0.061 ISO) and is primarily valued for his defense. But then you have the exceptions.

Jeter, for example. In spite of his propensity for ground balls, he has a career wRC+ of 119 and a relatively respectable career SLG of 0.440. In fact, he had 10 seasons with a SLG over 0.450, which is characteristic of a bona-fide slugger. He also, of course, has 3,465 major league hits, and was a lifetime .300+ avg. hitter. His secret is in the type of fly balls he hits — 12% of them went for HRs in his career. Compare that to Gathright’s 0.8%, Revere’s 1.6%, and Castillo’s 3.2%.

Ichiro’s story is a bit different. He has hit for a wonderful average in his career (0.312), but had very little power (0.092 ISO), and has a career wRC+ of 104. He was aided tremendously by his infield hit percentage — 12.3% of his groundballs have become hits (mostly due to his speed and his “head-start” of sorts as his body is often moving down the first base line as he makes contact). This figure is good for 10th best in the last fifteen years. Interestingly, the leaderboard for this stat has some unusual candidates — Mike Trout is #5, and Kris Bryant, the Cubs hard-hitting 3rd baseman, is #6. This is likely due to the velocity of that bat for the two of them — Trout and Bryant both hit the ball “hard” (I don’t know how this is objectively judged) ~38% of the time. Compare that to Ichiro’s 20.1%, Gathright’s 14.8%, and Jeter’s 26.7%.

In fact, the 38% figure is good for 15th best in league since 2002. Notable people ahead of them on the list?

Heaviest Hitters

1. Miguel Sano (43.3%)
2. Ryan Howard (43.0%)
3. Giancarlo Stanton (41.7%)
4. Corey Seager (41.5%)
5. Barry Bonds (41.4%)
6. Paul Goldschmidt (40.9%)
7. Jim Thome (40.6%)
8. David Ortiz (40.5%)
9. Khris Davis (39.8%)
10. Miguel Cabrera (39.4%)

(Note: Aaron Judge is currently at an eye-popping 46.3% early in his career)

Now this list is very interesting. It has one of the all-time greats (Bonds), some HOF shoo-ins (Thome, Ortiz, Cabrera), some young superstars (Stanton, Goldschmidt), and some highly polarizing players (Sano, Howard, Seager, Davis).

Given that the propensity to absolutely crush a baseball seems like a telltale sign for a slugger, what drives this difference? One large component is strike-out percentage.

It makes sense that someone who is swinging hard at the ball would likely be striking out more often — but what happens if someone is very disciplined at the plate (low K%), but also unleashes on the ball when they do swing (high hit hard %)? Check out my hastily-made 2x2 below.

A few main takeaways from this — first, Aaron Judge is out of his mind right now. For how often he strikes out, he’s hitting the ball hard much more often than you’d expect. About 4% of the time more, according to my regression.

Second, it’s crazy that the Yankees currently have three players on this list of the top 20 Hard Hit % players over the last 15 years (Bird, Sanchez, Judge).

Third, I sound like a broken record but Barry Bonds was insane. Steroids and all aside, to hit the ball hard more than 40% of the time and also only strike out 12% of the time is absolutely ridiculous.

And finally — the bottom right hand corner is the danger zone here. Do you recognize any of those names except Jim Thome? The moral of the story — if you’re going to be swinging hard, you gotta be at least a little discerning. Joey Gallo and Miguel Sano are two of the most interesting young players to watch moving forward — players tend to move down and left as their careers move on (i.e. they lose power but improve their eye). If the power loss is sharper than the improvement in discipline, they’re headed to Randal Grischuk/Tommy Pham-land. If they keep the power and fine-tune their eye — we could be looking at some of the next Stantons, Goldschmidts, or Ortizes.

And Aaron Judge? Who fucking knows. He might be really something special.

Best and Worst Eye

Speaking of a batter’s eye, who has been the best and worst at it? One way to dig a little deeper into is to use pitch-by-pitch data. Instead of looking at walks, for example, we can look at how well batters judged individual pitches. To do so, I took the weighted average of the percentage of the time a batter swung at a pitch in the zone and the percentage of the time a batter left a pitch outside the zone. In simpler terms, it nets to the percentage of the time a batter made the right decision about whether or not to swing at a pitch.

Best Eye

1. Moises Alou (Correct decision on 80.0% of pitches faced)
2. Jeff Bagwell (78.9%)
3. John Mabry (78.9%)
4. Nomar Garciaparra (78.8%)
5. Fred McGriff (78.54%)
6. Chipper Jones (78.1%)

12. Barry Bonds (77.6%)

What struck me about this list was that it’s a list of players that we know were superstars, but aren’t sure exactly why. For example, Moises Alou — I knew he was a great OF, and he’s inextricably linked to the Steve Bartman incident, but I didn’t realize that a big driver of his success was his world-class eye. Same with Nomar or Chipper. And, again, steroids didn’t help Barry here — to pair that level of plate discipline with that power is just criminal.

Worst Eye

1. Jose Iglesias (59.9%)
2. Salvador Perez (62.2%)
3. Kevin Pillar (62.6%)
4. Joaquin Arias (62.7%)
5. Alberto Gonzalez (63.0%)

8. Dee Gordon (63.5%)

12. Pablo Sandoval (64.0%)

17. Xander Bogaerts (64.3%)

It’s very interesting to look into what’s driving the relative success or lack thereof on this metric. Moises Alou was great because made the right call about 80% of the time on balls and strikes both. Nomar, on the other hand, was actually pretty average at laying off balls (swung at 26.4% of balls). He was world class, however, at not looking at strikes — he only looked at 16.6% of pitches in the zone. Jeff Bagwell looked at a bunch of strikes (looked at 25.7% of pitches in the zone), but almost never swung at a bad pitch (16.7% of the time).

On the flip side, Jose Iglesias is actually okay at laying off bad pitches. But he only swings at strikes 55% of the time.

Pablo Sandoval is the opposite. He’s great at swinging at strikes (swings at 79.4% of strikes). But he’s wayyy swing-happy on balls too — 44.8% of balls thrown to him draw a misguided swing. Come on, Pablo.

Win Probability Added (WPA)

One of my favorite stats that Fangraphs keeps is WPA. It is a somewhat simple thing to keep in practice — for each at-bat, there is a win probability before and after the at-bat. You can sum up the incremental win probability added (or subtracted) for a player over a season, career, whatever. While it’s not a particularly predictive statistic, it’s very apt to tell the story of how much a player actually contributed to a team’s fate in a season.

For example — we all remember the amazing 2011 World Series Game 5 between the Cardinals and Rangers. In the bottom of the 9th, the Cardinals were down 7–5, and put runners on first and second with 1 out. David Freese came up to the plate and tripled home both runs to tie it up 7–7 and send it to extras. Then, in the top of the 10th, Josh Hamilton hit a two-run homer to give the Rangers a 9–7 lead. The Cardinals scrapped back two runs in the bottom of the 10th to claw back to 9–9, and then won on a leadoff, walk-off home run from David Freese. The win-probability graph looked like this:

If you were to sum up the incremental win probability from each at-bat and attribute them to the pitcher and batter at the time, the box score would look something like this — the pitchers did everything they could to lose this game, and Freese, Hamilton, and Berkman did everything they could to win it.

Just an illustrative example, but imagine we could do this over full seasons and careers. It’s not a particularly predictive stat — it’s highly influenced by the context a player finds themselves in. If the rest of your team sucks, no matter how many doubles you hit, you may never bring a run home. On the other hand, a walk-off infield single, while not a particularly impressive athletic feat, could score you massive WPA points.

So who leads the league in offensive WPA? (Only goes back to 1974)

1. Barry Bonds (126.8 wins)
2. Albert Pujols (76.4)
3. Rickey Henderson (67.9)
4. Chipper Jones (63.2)
5. Gary Sheffield (61.6)

That is a mind-bending gap between Bonds and everyone else. More than 1.5x second place.

One way to adjust the stat is to take the WPA and divide it by the average “leverage index” of those at-bats. Leverage index is just a fancy calculation for how much influence over the win probability a given at-bat has. So dividing by that should even the playing field between players that disproportionatey came to the plate in important situations versus those that came up a lot when they were down 10 runs in the bottom of the 9th.

Top players by WPA/LI:

1. Barry Bonds (131.4)
2. Albert Pujols (75.9)
3. Alex Rodriguez (68.3)
4. Frank Thomas (68.2)
5. Chipper Jones (67.8)
6. Gary Sheffield (64.8)

So clearly the big winner here is A-Rod. His unadjusted WPA is only 58.4, but accounting for the fact that he somehow came up in a lot of inconsequential scenarios, he was quite valuable to his teams in making the most of his opportunities.

One thing to note here is that total WPA is an additive stat over time, so this clearly is biased to players who played for longer (why this list looks different than the others above).

The way to adjust for the longevity point is to look at the best and worst seasons here — take a look at the top seasons by offensive WPA:

1. Barry Bonds 2004–13.1
2. Barry Bonds 2001–11.6
3. Barry Bonds 2002–10.5
4. Albert Pujols 2006–9.6
5. Mark McGwire 1998–9.3

Now one interesting thing you can do with this is turn it into the player’s dollar value for that season. Fangraphs’ analysis would say that an MLB team in the modern age is willing to pay roughly $7.7M for each WPA. So that same top 5 in terms of “fair market value” is:

1. Barry Bonds 2004–$100.9M
2. Barry Bonds 2001–$89.6M
3. Barry Bonds 2002–$80.9M
4. Albert Pujols 2006–$73.9M
5. Mark McGwire 1998–$71.6M

These numbers are crazy relative to what these players were paid for those seasons. Bonds was $15–18M a year over that period, Pujols was $14M, and McGwire was $9M. Another significant gap was Mike Trout’s 2014 season of 7.2 WPA. He should have made $55M, and instead made $1M on his rookie contract.

Another way to think of the salary conversion is in lifetime earnings. For Barry Bonds, this would mean he should have been paid $976.4M over his career for his win contributions. Let that sink in.

The final piece of the WPA calculations is Fangraphs’ “Clutch” score. It’s a measure of how much better a player was in high leverage situations than he was over all situations. It’s not super informative over time — players’ clutch score tends to fluctuate pretty substantially over their careers because its a small n calculation. But, on a season-by-season basis, it’s useful for identifying who had the most memorable game-altering moments.

Top Clutch Season Ratings

1. David Ortiz 2005–3.31
2. Albert Pujols 2006–3.26
3. Troy O’Leary 1996–3.23
4. Tony Gwynn 1984–3.13 (also the all-time leader in “clutch,” for what it’s worth)
5. Dante Bichette 1996–3.03

That 2005 David Ortiz season was a thing of beauty. As Boston.com described it:

In a sport where failure is the expectation, there have been months when Ortiz coming through with the game on the line almost seemed automatic. One such stretch came back in September 2005, when the Sox were fighting to get back to the playoffs and defend their championship. In a span of 23 days, he hit a walk-off homer, a game-winning 11th-inning homer, a go-ahead eighth-inning homer, and a walk-off ninth-inning single. In that last game, by the way, he’d previously tied things by going deep an inning earlier.

Hope you enjoyed these forays into the nerdiness of baseball. And if not, let me make it up to you with some highlights of Big Papi’s sweet swing — see below.

Sources:

Bill Bergen’s Awesome Record of Baseball Futility

Branded for life with ‘The Mendoza Line’

Mendoza Line — Wikipedia

13 moments when David Ortiz defined clutch

Bryce Harper Should Have Made $73 Million More