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Season in Review: Curtis Granderson

Posted by Matt Imbrogno at 11:00 am No Responses »
Dec 092010

We’re going to play the over/under game with Curtis Granderson, whom the Yankees acquired a year ago yesterday. I’ll look at what Curtis did in 2010 and see if it went over or under his career mark. Using the FanGraphs Dashboard we’ll go left to right.

BB%
2010: 10.0%
Career: 9.6%
Result: Over

K%
2010: 24.9%
Career: 24.1%
Result: Over

IsoP
2010: .221
Career: .213
Result: Over

BABIP
2010: .277
Career: .314
Result: Under

AVG/OBP/SLG
2010: .247/.324/.468
Career: .268/.341/.481
Result: Under/Under/Under

IsoD (not on FG)
2010: .077
Career: .073
Result: Over

wOBA
2010: .346
Career: .357
Result: Under

wRC+
2010: 115
Career: 118
Result: Under

So there’s an interesting dichotomy here. Looking at his peripherals–IsoP, IsoD, BB%–we would assume that Curtis had a fantastic season. They were all above his career norms. To a certain extent, Curtis Granderson did have a successful 2010 (he racked up 3.6 fWAR). But, the triple slash looks a bit disappointing and considering the IsoP/D, we probably could’ve expected a higher wOBA and wRC+. The good peripherals represented by the walks and the power didn’t translate into the triple slash. The one culprit we can see here is BABIP. But, man cannot analyze on one BABIP alone, so let’s contextualize a bit.

Granderson’s career BABIP is .314, but in 2010 it was .277. How much differently did he hit the ball in 2010 than in the rest of his career?

The first batted ball number we look at for BABIP is always LD%. Granderson’s got a 20.6% career line drive rate, which is solid. In 2010, it wasn’t far off from that at 19.9%. That change is more or less minimal. Next, let’s go to GB and FB rates. Here is where we see some spikes for Curtis.

Despite an IFFB% of 7.2–under his carer mark of 7.8%–Granderson’s overall fly ball rate was up to 47.2%, almost 4% up from his career rate of 43.6. Here it’s worth noting that Granderson’s HR/FB%, 14.5%, was actually the second highest of his career. So it seems like fly balls weren’t much of an issue for Curtis. He was hitting them out of the infield and hitting them hard. What about grounders?

When I first saw his 33% GB mark for 2010 up against his 29.5% mark in 2009, I thought “Okay, that could be to blame.” However, that’s still below his career mark of 35.8%. Is it possible that we can just blame this one on poor BABIP luck overall?

I don’t love doing that, but there are really no wild swings apparent in the 2010 version of Granderson. He had really low lows and really high highs, but the overall picture suggests nothing crazy in his batted ball profile.

The increased strikeout rate likely comes from a 25% OOZ, which is the highest of Granderson’s career. This comes with the lowest percentage (44) of pitches seen in the zone for Curtis. It appears that pitchers are willing to make Granderson get himself out. If he can bring his OOZ back to his career norms while maintaining a similar contact profile–as well as the ability to draw walks at a 9%+ rate–he’ll have an even more successful 2011.

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Season in Review: Alex Rodriguez

Posted by Matt Imbrogno at 11:00 am 2 Responses »
Nov 162010

Continuing my series, here’s my season in review for Alex Rodriguez.

It’s worth noting, though, that as of now, FanGraphs has taken down its 2010 projections. Luckily, I had the first round of 2010 ZiPS projections book marked, so I’ll be able to see one projection system and what A-Rod did.

2010 ZiPS Projection:

.281/.382/.526, 30 HR, 93 RBI, 141 OPS+ in 128 G

2010 Actual:

.270/.341/.506, 30 HR, 125 RBI, 123 OPS+ in 137 G

All in all, that’s not a bad season. Hell, a career line like that could get you very far. But, this is Alex Rodriguez we’re talking about; that’s a rather pedestrian season for him. Alex beat his games played projection which was good.

Perhaps the most disappointing part was that Alex had only a .071 IsoD when he was projected for a .101 IsoD (career .084). His walk rate dipped significantly this year, though. That was due to a four percent jump from 2009′s O-Swing% (21.1% in ’09, 25.3% in ’10).

Moving from swing data to contact data, we see a trend of generally weaker contact from Rodriguez in 2010. A-Rod’s line drive percentage plummeted to 13.8% (!!). His mark in 2009 was 20.0 and his career mark is 17.8. This led to a BABIP of just .274 (career .318). If you want to know why Alex didn’t hit for a high average, there’s your answer. Weak contact, low BABIP, “bad” batting average.

His IFFB% was 8.6, which was below his career average of around 10%, so that goes against my weak-contact hypothesis. His fly ball percentage, 40.2, was actually above his career average (40.0), again poking a bit of a hole in my theory. BUT, we need to note his HR/FB%. For his career, Alex has powered 23.1% of his fly balls over the fences and into the people. His previous career low was 19.3% in 2004. This year, it was all the way down at 17.1%

For some reason, Alex Rodriguez was just not getting much power behind his swings. If I were a doctor and/or hitting coach, I’d explain how and why Alex’s hip was sapping his power. But, since I’m just a blogger, I’ll only allow myself to venture a guess that Mr. Rodriguez’s hip was the culprit for his low line drive and HR/FB percentages.

2010 was not horribly kind to Alex. He put up career lows (for full seasons) in just about every category you could think of. In 2011, let’s hope he’s more healthy and can stay in the lineup more often. A healthy A-Rod is a good A-Rod. A good A-Rod is incredibly valuable to the Yankees. I have full faith in him bouncing back. You can only keep that talent down for so long.

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Season in Review: Mark Teixeira

Posted by Matt Imbrogno at 1:00 pm No Responses »
Nov 012010

This is the second in a series comparing the player’s projections to his results. I’m going to try to vary the format each time so this doesn’t get too stale.

1. Jorge Posada

2010 was a down year for Mark Teixeira. His slow start went a little longer than we normally expected and his year wasn’t quite the “back of the baseball card” year we’ve come to expect from Tex, though he did end up with a .367 wOBA and 3.5 fWAR.

BA: Projected: .280 low, .300 high. Actual: .256.
BABIP: Projected: .303 low, .320 high. Actual: .268.
OBP: Projected: .369 low, .395 high. Actual: .365.
IsoD: Projected: .088 low, .095 high. Actual: .099.
SLG: Projected: .505 low, .565 high. Actual: .481.
IsoP: Projected: .225 low, .268 high. Actual: .225.
wOBA: Projected: .381 low, .406 high. Actual: .367.
HR: Projected: 29 low, 36 high. Actual: 33.

Basically, Tex fell short of everything except his peripherals and his home runs. Like Posada to a certain extent, we can see BABIP as a bit of a culprit here, but again, it’s also mostly the player’s fault.

What’s to blame in Tex’s big BABIP drop (career .303) is the infield flyball. Tex’s IFFB% was a crazy high 13.6%, the 14th highest in the American League. Tex also saw his HR/FB% drop to a career low 15% (18.3 average, 17.8 in ’09, 15.9% previous career low in 2006).

Two month long periods–April and September/October–really killed Tex’s season. In April, he had a .559 OPS. In Sept/Oct, it was .694. In May-August, it was .944.

2010 was a year that, despite being good for most players, was sub-standard by Mark Teixeira standards. I’d be willing to be that 2011 will see Tex at his normal career levels.

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Season in Review: Jorge Posada

Posted by Matt Imbrogno at 11:00 am 2 Responses »
Oct 282010

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll do about players and how they fared, compared to their various projections. Luckily, FanGraphs stores projections so it will be an easy comparison to make. Let’s start at one of the most important positions on the field: behind the plate.

Jorge Posada had a vaguely healthy year, playing in 120 games. He came up to the plate 451 times, the most for him since 2007 (589). When he did play, Jorge did hit pretty well. The average wasn’t pretty at .248, but his OBP was good at .357 (13.1% walk rate) he hit for good power, a .454 SLG and a .206 IsoP. His wRC+ was 122, just off his career mark of 127. He wOBA’d .357. So how did Jorge do against his projections?

Batting Average: Jorge fell short of all five projections–Bill James, CHONE, Marcel, ZiPS, and Fans in terms of batting average. His high projection was .281 by Marcel and his low projection was .256 by ZiPS. Before moving on to the other rate stats, it’s worth noting that none of the five systems expected Jorge to play as much as he did. The highest PA projection for him was the fans at 426. That Jorge was able to out play those projections is pleasing.

On Base Percentage: Jorge beat CHONE (.349) and ZiPS (.336) in terms of OBP and fell short of the others, which were .361, .363, and .372. Jorge’s IsoD of .109, however, beat each system’s projection which means he really did out perform his projections.

Slugging Percentage/IsoP: Posada beat ZiPS (.430) and CHONE (.453) while falling short of the rest. There is, though, a caveat: Jorge’s strong .206 IsoP beat each projection system by at least 11 points.

wOBA: This is where the systems really nailed it with Posada. All the projections were in the .340-.365 range and Posada was just about in the middle of that–more towards the high end–with a .357 wOBA. As for the ones Jorge fell short of (this goes for BA as well), we could easily attribute that to some batted ball differences between the projections and what actually happened.

Jorge’s BABIP was just .287 this year (.318 career). No projection system had him lower than .307 for his 2010 BABIP. Despite a drop in IFFB% which would indicate better contact, Posada’s line drive rate fell to 18.5% (21.3 in ’09, 20.2 career), so some of the poor BABIP could be blamed on Posada and a bit of weak contact. If he was able to reach his projected BABIP numbers, he could’ve met/exceeded more of his projections.

Jorge Posada stayed more healthy in 2010 than we thought he would, after playing in just 162 games in ’08 and ’09 combined. He may not have met everything the five systems set out for him, but he was never wildly below them (or above them). I’m not exactly doing this all justice because I’m not taking into account standard deviations, but I’d be willing to say with (some) confidence that Posada’s numbers are not many standard deviations away from the average projection. I’m very happy with Posada’s offensive year. Any time you can get an IsoD over .100 and and IsoP over .200 from a catcher, your offense is in pretty good shape.

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