Ryan Schimpf is having the strangest season of all time
While David Schoenfield beat me to it, it’s worth a full breakdown because Padres 3B Ryan Schimpf is having himself a year. Even a passing glance at his slash line will reveal that.
.163/11/21.
Off that, you may be joking to yourself “.163 with 11 bombs? He must have more homers than singles!”
That isn’t a joke. That is reality.
Entering tonight, Schimpf has a total of 22 hits on the year. To go with his 11 home runs, he has nine singles and two doubles. And this isn’t even new to this season. Last year for the Padres, he had 60 hits, the breakdown being 18 singles, 17 doubles, five triples, and 20 home runs.
That was where my dive down the rabbit-hole began. I thought that was as strange as it gets, but the longer I looked at Ryan Schimpf’s stats, the more flabbergasted I became.
When looking at his stats on baseball-reference, my eyes quickly moved to his on-base percentage of .299. Conventionally, that’s very much below average, but for a guy hitting .163, that’s pretty solid. This is because he has walked 26 times.
At first, the thought was ‘ah, 26 walks is actually really good for this time of year,’ and in fact, he is top 20 in the MLB in walks. But as most of you may have figured out by now, he has more walks than hits. He is one of only two qualified players in the MLB this year to have more walks than hits thus far (thank you Matt Joyce).
Let’s go deeper. Schimpf, in 164 PAs, has struck out 54 times, meaning he strikes out about 33% of the time. Add that to his 26 walks and one hit by a pitch once, he has only actually put the ball in play 83 times.
There is actually a batter we can compare Schimpf to this season, and that is Texas Rangers’ left fielder Joey Gallo. Gallo, who also has more home runs than singles, has a slash line of .191/14/31, with an OBP of .301, and 67 strikeouts in 174 PAs. Gallo, with his 21 walks and 3 HBPs added to his strikeouts has only put the ball in play 83 times, the same as Schimpf.
This means that Gallo puts the ball in play just 47.7% of the time, while Schimpf puts the ball in play at a rate of 50.6% of the time. Gallo does have those extra 13 plate appearances, which accounts for some of the difference, but that brings us to the tie-breaker, being BAbip.
BAbip is a player’s batting average on balls put in play and is calculated as such:
(Hits-HRs)/(ABs-Ks-HRs+SF)
According to FanGraphs, the worst hitters in the league usually have a BAbip around .260. Gallo has a BAbip of .211. Schimpf comes in at a mind-blowing .153.
Let’s include home runs as balls in play, changing the formula to this.
(Hits)/(ABs-Ks+SF)
This puts Gallo at .341, while Schimpf is still at just .265.
What was the point of spending 500 words talking about Ryan Schimpf? There’s an easy answer.
This is what baseball is becoming.
In today’s era, there is so much emphasis placed on hitting home runs that players like Schimpf or Gallo still find their way into lineups every day. It helps that Schimpf plays for the worst team in baseball, but even Gallo is on a contender.
These two are not the first players of this style, as Adam Dunn and Chris Carter also come to mind, but Schimpf especially is the gold standard of the three-pronged approach. Even 10 years ago, a stat line like this would find you back in AAA, but now, this is valuable.
Schimpf is projected to finish with 142 games played. In those 142 games, at his current pace, would have 446 ABs and 542 PAs. Schimpf is on pace for 88 walks and 178 strikeouts, with 73 hits, breaking down to 30 singles, seven doubles, and 36 home runs. These numbers would give him a slash of .163/36/69.
This would give him an ending WAR of 2.6, which is in the range of a player that should be starting, according to Baseball-Reference.
This is what baseball is now. Baseball is a lot of home runs, even more strikeouts, and a pretty good walk total. What is one of the strangest seasons ever will probably become more normal as we move on. We’re already seeing it this season with Schimpf and Gallo, and unless there is a philosophical change within the next few years, prepare for a higher influx of Ryan Schimpfs.
