At the most basic level it's easy to think of baseball having a dichotomy of high contact/low power and low contact/high power batters. You have your Carlos Pena/Adam Dunn/Mark Reynolds type guys that swing and miss often, but when they make contact the ball is going to go a long ways. The opposite would be the Juan Pierre/Luis Castillo/David Eckstein guys that almost never whiff, but rarely hit for extra bases. It is through this lens that I wanted to take a look at the 2012 Rays offense. We'll look at contact percentage versus two different measures of power, wOBAcon and Iso, for the Rays that have a Major League track record and, also, for a larger pool of players. Additionally, we'll take a deeper look at shortstops with an emphasis on how Reid Brignac has performed in the bigs so far and where he ranks amongst his peers.
First I want to go over some terminology so that you, the reader, will not feel overwhelmed. If you're comfortable using these terms then feel free to skip this section, but if you're relatively new to sabermetrics then it may be a nice crash course.
Contact%: The overall percentage of a batter makes contact with when swinging the bat.
ISO: is a measure of a hitter’s power. Or, to look at it another way, it measures how good a player is at hitting for extra bases. The formula is SLG%-BA, which removes all the singles that are included in SLG% and leaves us with a measure of just a player’s total power numbers.
wOBAcon: uses the linear weights of .9 for a single, 1.24 for a double, 1.56 for a triple, and 1.95 for a home run with all of that numerator divided by the number of balls in play.
The difference between ISO and wOBAcon revolves around strikeouts. I don't feel that strikeouts are much different than making a fielder get you out in the aggregate. ISO includes and punishes for strikeouts as the denominator is at bats while wOBAcon only deals with balls in play. Therefore, the former looks at power per at bat while neutralizing singles while the latter properly values each type of basehit while only looking at balls in play. It's strictly a matter of preference so I've included both.
For this study I looked at batters over the last four years with at least 600 plate appearances. For the entire dataset please follow this LINK. Below I have cherry picked the Rays batters that qualified:
Batter Contact wOBAcon ISO Carlos Pena 69% 0.434 0.251 Evan Longoria 78% 0.428 0.240 Matt Joyce 76% 0.411 0.223 Luke Scott 76% 0.403 0.225 B.J. Upton 77% 0.386 0.158 Ben Zobrist 83% 0.385 0.193 Sean Rodriguez 74% 0.348 0.138 Reid Brignac 78% 0.322 0.094 Jose Molina 77% 0.319 0.105 Jeff Keppinger 93% 0.302 0.102You can see that, for the most part we can see a trend similar to what was first discussed regarding the relationship between contact and power. The following charts show all the players looked at so you can better see this trend across the larger pool. First let's look at contact versus wOBAcon:
Contact% is along the horizontal axis while wOBAcon is along the vertical axis. You'll notice that I've added in dashed lines for league average so that we can see players that are above average at both (Quadrant I) guys that are below average at both (Quadrant III) and players that are better at one at the detriment of the other (Quadrants II & IV). All Rays players are marked as yellow dots while Reid Brignac stands out as a black dot. All other players that received significant time at shortstop over this period are marked as red dots. The solid black line is a linear trend line that shows the overall relationship between the axes. The dashed ovals indicate standard deviations. All players within the smallest oval would be within one standard deviation from the norm and so on.
It bears mentioning that those above (to the right) the solid line can be considered above average while those below (to the left) of the trendline can be considered below average, overall. This allows us to identify guys in quadrants II & IV that have "acceptable" flaws. Carlos Pena may whiff a ton, but at the level of power that he displays then it's worthwhile in the end. Someone like Jeff Keppinger might not hit with much power over the last four years, but his ability to make consistent contact makes him worthwhile. You'll notice that all but Sean Rodriguez, Reid Brignac, and Jose Molina profile as above average. These players may have flaws, outside of Zobrist, but they're good enough at one of the attributes that they can be positive contributors, overall.
In Quadrant I the Rays have only Ben Zobrist above league average at both making contact and hitting for power. Albert Pujols is that lonely dot furthest out from the average. It should be pretty clear just how he's in a class of his own. Kevin Youkilis represents the only other player that is outside of three standard deviations from the mean in the positive. We don't see many shortstops here which should tell you how incredibly valuable a guy like Troy Tulowitzki is as the best hitting shortstop in MLB. Michael Young and Stephen Drew are the other standouts with the former no longer able to man the position everyday due to ability and the latter unable to play everyday due to constant injury concerns.
Quadrant II is where we see the majority of shortstops. These are the slappy hitters that don't really drive the ball often, but when they swing it's usually being put in play. Most of the guys in the third standard deviation are not viable MLB hitters as we see names like Alex Cora, Alberto Gonzalez, Adam Everett, Manny Burriss, etc... Marco Scutaro is a real stand out here as the red dot north of Keppinger. He hits for one of the highest contact rates in MLB, but also hits for more power than the average. Keep in mind that guys in this quadrant that are above the trendline are very useful players. Not everyone in this quadrant should be considered useless, though all those red dots at the bottom better really bring it with the glove as they're most likely bench players there for defense.
Quadrant IV is where we see the majority of the Rays. Evan Longoria is a real stand out as hitting for the highest contact% and the second most power. Matt Joyce and Luke Scott are pretty similar while we see that Pena and Upton are at odds with the Latin King bringing serious power and the waterbug centerfielder coming in much closer to the average. We see a lot of player in this quadrant as this zone features the most outlier players. I think it's safe to say that teams are willing to give a longer leash to batters that demonstrate incredible power at the expense of contact over batter that make a ton of contact, but can barely hit it out of the infield. We see our old friend Kelly Shoppach check in at 64% and .430 wOBAcon as the furthest out below average guy. He's an example of a guy that has incredible power, but doesn't make enough contact for it to be worthwhile. On the other hand, that marker at 68% and .487 wOBAcon is for Mike Stanton. He checks in as the most powerful batter in this study while making just slightly less contact than Carlos Pena. Kid is incredibly fun to watch even if he's able to power that whirlygig at their new park with his wind creation alone.
Finally, Quadrant III feature nearly all below average players. We don't see a ton of shortstops here which makes Reid Brignac (and Khalil Greene and Brandon Wood even further out, respectively) kind of a rarity. Much the way that Casey Kotchman didn't fit the mold thus drawing more ire than he probably deserves we may be seeing the same thing with Brignac. Fans expect shortstops to be slappy guys that don't hit for much power, but Brignac goes against that grain. In fact, over their careers he has provided essentially the same utility as Sean Rodriguez as both are nearly the same distance from the second deviation, though Rodriguez hits with even more power though making even less contact. Jose Molina also brings essentially the same bat as Briggy, though a defense-first catcher can generally get away with that.
I must admit that I've been decidedly anti-Brignac as I think Sean Rodriguez can play a passable SS. Instead of having both of these guys platoon and probably not hit enough to help the team I think it makes sense to pick one of them to start everyday and give the other roster spot to a guy that brings more offensive value. This graph basically says it's a tossup between the two. Jeff Keppinger's spot on the roster should be assured, at least to start the season, which means that Sean Rodriguez won't be needed at 2B. Would the Rays prefer to roll out two bad bats that field pretty well at SS? We won't know the answer to that until after Spring Training, but I think you can make the case that they're a lot closer offensively than most want to give credit.
I won't break down the ISO chart because you should have a good understanding of what we are talking about here, but know that now we're penalizing players twice for being strikeout machines. Low contact rates serve as a proxy for striking out and ISO doubles that penalty which makes high strikeout players appear even less appealing. It's only fair to mention this as ISO is an industry standard statistic whether you like the approach or not:
Subtle shifts are the biggest difference here as we see Upton move in to the barely below average group while Keppinger gets a small boost. Brignac moves even further from the second deviation groupe while Sean Rodriguez climbs just inside. Pena seemingly gains value here which is more a reflection of the fact that he just doesn't hit singles like a normal human being. Zobrist and Longoria move even closer to the elite while Scott and Joyce also are ready to pop out of the second deviation tier. Either chart you prefer the Rays have two above average righties (one brings one of the best skill mixes in the game in Longoria), three above average lefties, and a switch hitter that combines both skills incredibly well.
I know this is a lot to consume, but I feel like these charts provide some insight into batter philosophies that you just won't find anywhere else. With that in mind, I'm looking for feedback here. Postive, negative, it doesn't matter as I like this format and will probably look to use it for other comparisons in the future. Please comment your input here or you can tweet me @sandykazmir Have a great day.
Written by:
