Justin Turner Has One Home Run — Why?
What pitchers are doing to Turner is legit, and the Dodgers need him to respond
Readers of The Unbalanced — it’s good to be back! We took a two week hiatus while we initiate our move to Vocal Media, where we will become a publication. During our hiatus, writers from The Unbalanced took to other platforms to publish their incredible work, such as John Edwards in this article on the FanGraphs Community Section. Edwards wrote that Twins third-baseman Miguel Sano is having a season for the ages, and he is absolutely right. Sano is currently leading all third-basemen in Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+), Weighted On Base Average (wOBA), and Wins Above Replacement (WAR). However, point of this article is to draw your attention to another third-baseman in the midst of a fantastic season. It’s time for a blind player test!
These players are ordered by WAR. Player 2 is Kris Bryant, who won the National League MVP last year. If you read the title of this article, you probably know that Player 1 is Justin Turner. While Sano is pacing all MLB third-basemen in all three of the given categories, Turner is actually second in all three categories. That should not be a particular surprise to anyone, because Turner himself is one of the best all-around third-basemen in the game. However, it’s the route he is taking to his success that makes his season such an anomaly. Here are the third-basemen who have posted a wRC+ of at least 130 and a wOBA of at least .375 this season:
Justin Turner, one of the best offensive performers, has only 1 home run with a quarter of the season in the books. That feat is also dubious because Turner is one of the noted advocates of the fly-ball approach. Although his home runs are down, his overall offensive value is still high, so it isn’t hard to find the year to year differences of his hit distribution (extrapolated over 630 plate appearances)
One of those years is not like the other. Turner is on pace to hit only 3 home runs in 630 plate appearances, but his doubles and singles are way up. This new distribution makes for a slugging percentage (SLG%) that is identical to his previous two seasons.
Trying to find the reason for Turner’s diminishing home run output is not as simple as examining his Average Exit Velocities (aEV) and Average Launch Angle (aLA). In fact, both remain healthy:
His aEV and aLA are down a bit from last year, yes, but there is no way one can pin his results this season on that alone. He’s hitting the ball as hard as he normally does, and his uppercut swing is there too; so the general approach is par for the course. To reinforce that, his fly-ball percentage (FB%) is at 39.7%, which is right in line with his 40% mark in 2016 and 36.2% mark in 2015. In fact, all of his batted ball rates are consistent from the previous two years, with the exception of Home Run to Fly-Ball Ratio (HR/FB). After posting clips around 15% in the past two seasons, Turner’s mark this year is 2.1%. With all of Turner’s “vitals” being in order, one has to believe that the mark is unsustainable and that he is due for some major positive regression. In other words, “the doubles will start to turn into home runs.” It’s conventional wisdom, but I can’t help but notice the batted ball locations of Turner’s hits in 2017 compared to 2016. Consider last year:
And 2017:
Home runs aside, most of his 2017 profile seems to fit in with his 2016 profile, but I smell a rat. The reason Turner has maintained a strong SLG% in 2017 is a steady diet of doubles — doubles that the casual observer assumes will start to go over the fence. Readers, please count the number of doubles (blue marks) from 2016 that were not necessarily deep drives (you will see them along each foul line).
My eye sees about seven or eight of those in 2016. Those doubles were never going to find their way over the fence. To Turner’s credit, he supplemented them with deep drives, many of which did go over the fence.
With that in mind, please look at the 2017 graphic and perform the same exercise. Again, there are seven or eight blue marks that counted as doubles, but never had a chance of going over the fence. Meanwhile, the deep drives that supplemented Turner last year are… not there. This exposes the flaws of SLG%; not all doubles are created equal! Of course, the most disturbing thing to notice is that only a quarter of the 2017 season has been completed. It seems like the majority of Turner’s (many) doubles have no chance of turning into home runs, and he isn’t supplementing them with the deep drives that have made him successful.
Statcast has a metric called “Average Hit Distance (aDST),” which is simply calculated by the sum of all Hit Distances in feet divided by all Batted Ball Events. The four Batted Ball Types tracked by Statcast are classified as: ground-balls, pop-ups, line-drives, and fly-balls. As we know, home runs are going to be either fly-balls or line-drives, so let’s zero in on Turner’s aDST on those to see if the stats back up our eye test:
According to Statcast, they absolutely do. In terms of method and results, Turner has been doing everything he can to maintain the volume of hard line-drives and fly-balls that have made him successful. And yet, somehow, Turner has lost about 15–17 feet on every line-drive and fly-ball he has hit in 2017 in comparison to 2015–2016. Losing 15–17 feet on your most important batted balls is a big deal; many players have risked the integrity of their careers using steroids to add 15 or so feet to their batted balls.
At this point, I wonder if the change happening to Turner’s production is even in his control. We haven’t pinpointed anything in Turner’s approach that can lead us to the conclusion that some adjustment must be made on Turner’s end to rediscover his home run stroke. Now, the conversation shifts to, “what are opposing pitchers doing to curtail the distances of Turner’s line-drives and fly-balls?” One might even ask, “how are pitchers combating fly-ball hitters?” We can start here:
You don’t need to be Nate Silver to notice that there is a trend going on here. Pitchers are progressively throwing more and more fastballs to Turner, and it’s not because they want him to drill them. I discussed in an earlier article for The Unbalanced that pitchers are succeeding at limiting power by throwing fastballs up in the zone. Fastballs, by their very nature, tend to have a higher Average Spin Rate (aSR) than other pitches, and pitchers have been using this to their advantage by throwing fastballs high in the zone, which prevents batters from getting lift on the pitches. This is especially important against a fly-ball hitter like Justin Turner. Thanks to Baseball Savant, we can visualize the location of the fastballs thrown to Turner during his 2015 and 2016 seasons:
The darker areas pinpoint the exact location where fastballs were most concentrated. You can see that location being “middle away.” Turner’s Isolated Slugging (ISO) on fastballs in that zone in 2015–2016? An astounding .304! Because baseball is a game of adjustments, you can predict the change in fastball location pitchers have made this year against Turner:
The fastballs Turner have been facing are higher in the zone from last year. He has only been able to muster two batted ball events on fastballs in that high-and-outside region of the strike zone! There is no way Turner can drive the ball like he was in 2015 and 2016 if he is being pitched this way, and those doubles will not turn into home runs.
Justin Turner is a challenging case study. He is an established, trailblazing fly-ball hitter, performing to his lofty standards this year, but without the home runs that established him as a success. When a player’s profile changes that dramatically, we examine his batted ball tendencies to identify the roots of those changes, particularly looking into whether his fly-ball production has decreased; none of it has. Of course, a low HR/FB ratio seems unsustainable, but we discovered that Turner may not simply be a victim of bad luck.
Turner’s doubles in 2017 are not powerful enough for us to assume that they will eventually begin to turn into home runs (exposing a flaw in considering all doubles equal!), and Statcast verified what our eyes told us with a metric of their own. From there, we identified that Turner’s fly-ball approach is being undermined by pitchers peppering him with high fastballs, and if I’m correct, that makes Justin Turner the first player of the “Fly-Ball Revolution” to hit a wall. Welcome to 2017, where pitchers are already making their due adjustments. Here is to hoping that Justin Turner can respond with some of his own.
