Devon Travis is having a rough start to the 2017 season. As I’m writing this, he has “hit” .148/.207/.222, good for a wRC+ of 16 and WAR of -0.5. Fans are openly wondering if he should be sent back to triple-A. But all is not lost! If you look past the surface stats, there is hope for the young Blue Jay. Let’s explore.
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I often read articles that say strikeouts are bad if you don’t have power. Inspired by the success of K%-BB% with pitchers I tried to do something similar with hitters to generate a stat that gets predictable with a smaller sample size than wRC+ due to the elimination of BABIP. This could be useful for prospect analysis or also early-season stats.

The rationale basically was to take something bad (Ks) and subtract good things (ISO, BB). To do this, I first scaled BB and K from percent to decimal dividing it by 100. So instead of 22% Ks I would use .22 to get it to the same scale as ISO. You could also scale ISO to percent, but it does not really matter.

Doing that, I found out that most good hitters were below zero. I looked at players that had at least 1000 PA from 2014 to April 2017.

Here is the complete document.

The worst K-BB-ISO was a positive .133 by Chris Johnson (75 wRC+) while the best was a negative .256 by David Ortiz. The average was a negative .05. The 25th percentile was negative .012 (Rajai Davis, 95 wRC+) while the 75th percentile was a negative .09 (Charlie Blackmon, 110 wRC+). Based on this, I conclude that good values are something like negative .1 or better, while values that approach zero are bad and positive values are atrocious.

Overall, the Pearson Coefficient between wRC+ and K-BB-ISO was a negative .75. A negative correlation is expected because the good values are below zero, and the correlation is significant.

The top 20 in K-BB-ISO all have a wRC+ above or equal to 120 and are ranked in the top 50 in wRC+. In the bottom 20 there are three hitters with a wRC+ slightly above 100 but most are near the bottom of the leaderboard.

Now BABIP is not random and there is a skill that is related to contact quality, but then again ISO is also related to contact quality — the guys who hit the ball hard and at decent angles usually also have good ISOs, while the put-everything-in-play-weakly guys usually have bad ISOs (and often bad BB%).

So here is what I look at in a prospect:

excellent: <-0.15 (expect 120 or better wRC+)

good: -0.08 to -0.14 (expect 105 to 120 wRC+)

OK: -0.03 to -0.07 (expect 90 to 105 wRC+)

red flag: above -0.03

Now there is a disclaimer to this: The K-BB-ISO might underrate ground-ball-heavy hard hitters who have lower ISOs but generally solid contact quality. For example, Christian Yelich is just 146th out of 246 in K-BB-ISO over that time frame but 45th in wRC+. It might also overrate fly-ball-heavy pull hitters with high pop-up rates. Examples of this are Brian Dozier (68th wRC+, 29th K-BB-ISO) or Jose Bautista (17th wRC+, 3rd K-BB-ISO).

Also you have to consider park and league factors as there are some very hitter-friendly leagues and parks in the minors (for example the PCL) and HR/FB luck also needs to be considered.

But overall, the leaderboards look quite similar and K-BB-ISO might be a good indicator for success if you want to eliminate BABIP from the equation. Basically this is pretty simple — if you don’t walk or slug a lot, you better not strike out. And if you strike out a lot, you better have something to make up for it.

My analytical background is not the best, though, and maybe somebody who has a little more skill in that field could look at the data and see if I’m onto something.

Eddie Butler has been a different pitcher in 2017. Through four starts with the Iowa Cubs, he is sporting a shiny 1.46 ERA, a far cry from his career 6.50 ERA after years of turmoil in the Rockies organization. The story here is an easy one to latch on to: top-shelf pitching prospect gets devoured by an offense-heavy ballpark, gets traded to the Cubs, becomes a bona fide ace. It’s the same backstory as Jake Arrieta’s, and the early returns are pointing to the same conclusion.

I am here to disagree. The further I looked into his underlying stats, the more I realized that Eddie Butler still needs to make a serious change if he wants to have any big-league success. In 2017, the “new” Eddie Butler is really the same old Eddie Butler masked by some small-sample good fortune.

Butler has never been a big strikeout guy, so he has to limit walks to survive. While his 2017 walk rate is below his career average, his strikeout rate has dipped as well, leading to a K-BB% of 3.0%. That is not good, and unfortunately, it is right in line with his career mark of 3.3%. The most recent qualified starting pitcher to post a lower K-BB% was 2012 Ricky Romero who had a K-BB% of 2.3%…which was accompanied by a 5.77 ERA. Pitchers with this profile don’t accrue very many innings, and when they do, the results show why.

If you are walking guys without striking them out, you better keep the ball in the ballpark, and Eddie Butler has definitely done that this season. He has yet to give up a single home run in his time with Iowa. David Laurila recently chatted with the right-hander about his new approach, which involves driving the ball downhill and getting back to his two-seamer, while the Rockies always prioritized his four-seamer. This new approach sounds like a recipe for a successful ground-ball pitcher, and it would explain the new ability to limit home runs. But, hold on, Butler’s career FB% is 28%, and his 2017 rate has skyrocketed to 41%, which doesn’t fit the rest of the narrative. Allowing this many fly balls is not a good sign for Butler, who has always had a bit of a home-run problem, as his career HR/FB rate sits at 18% (and no, that’s not just Coors Field – since the installation of the humidor, Rockies pitchers have posted a HR/FB rate of 11.6%). When I look at Butler, I don’t see a guy who found success with a new approach; I see a guy who is prone to home runs with a massive spike in fly-ball rate.

Butler’s success at limiting home runs thus far has allowed him to strand runners at a rate that is screaming for regression: his LOB% of 86.7% would be the highest mark for a qualified starter since Dwight Gooden in 1985. Opposing teams haven’t been able to string hits together against Butler, but that tends to even out over time, especially considering the fact that Butler’s career LOB% is below league average. When you don’t strike guys out, the ground balls eventually find holes, the fly balls eventually leave the yard, and the walks start to come around to score.

To be fair, I have not seen footage of Eddie Butler pitching this year. He might be making guys look foolish, and he might be on the path to becoming the next king of soft contact; if you have watched him pitch first-hand this year, please feel free to share your observations. He does still have the pedigree and he seems to have the work ethic to go with it, and it would make an incredible story if he could put it all together.

After all, Eddie Butler is a professional baseball player, and I’m just a guy with some spreadsheets. But right now, the spreadsheets are telling me to seriously pump the brakes on the Arrieta comps – underneath the ERA, this still looks like the same Eddie Butler.

A little over two weeks ago, Dave Cameron suggested here that the Astros might need a new first baseman. Last summer, they transitioned newly-signed Cuban prospect Yulieski Gurriel from third to first in hopes he would solve the Astros’ continual first-base issues. Gurriel did not live up to expectations, to say the least. In short, he displayed poor plate discipline as an extremely aggressive hitter, but did not hit the ball with enough authority to overcome his plate approach deficiencies (You can get the more detailed version in Cameron’s article).

However, since the exact day the article was released on April 11, Gurriel has been on a tear. He has accumulated 23 hits in 54 plate appearances, including five doubles and two long balls, to go along with eight runs scored and seven RBI. So, what has Gurriel changed recently?

In his 165 plate appearances in 2016 and up until April 11th, Gurriel posted an absurd 42% O-Swing%. The MLB average is just 29%. He paired that with a 76% Z-Swing%, nine percentage points above average. Gurriel was swinging at anything and everything thrown his way. Since then, he has lowered his O-Swing% to 34% and his Z-Swing% to 68%. Gurriel is showing much improved plate discipline, something he was vaunted for while playing in Cuba. It has not resulted in walks, as Gurriel has drawn only one walk since April 11th, but there is evidence as to why. Let’s look at this rolling average graph of Gurriel’s O-Swing% and Zone% across his career. As Gurriel has continually swung less at pitches out of the strike zone, the number of pitches he is seeing in the strike zone has grown. With more pitches in the zone, he has had less opportunity for walks.

Gurriel has taken advantage of the increase of strikes thrown his way. On his swings at pitches in the zone since April 11th, Gurriel has made contact 97% of the time. The MLB average for Hard% of batted balls from 2016-17 has been roughly 31%. Pre-April 11th, only 27% of Gurriel’s batted balls were hit hard. Post April 11, that number has skyrocketed to 44%. Gurriel is picking his spots now, and when he does decide to swing, he’s making contact. And hard contact.

Previously, pitchers were attacking outside of the zone, knowing Gurriel would swing and produce weak contact. With his decrease in aggression, pitchers have been forced to throw over the plate. Gurriel is sitting on good pitches to hit now, allowing him to make hard contact. The walks have not come yet, but if he continues to play like this, pitchers will learn not to throw in the zone to him. We are dealing with a relatively microscopic sample size here, but players don’t dramatically decrease their aggression just by chance. Gurriel’s current hitting is clearly unsustainable, as he is running a 253 wRC+ since April 11th, but if he continues to show the patience he is playing with right now, don’t expect him to revert back to pre-April 11th Yulieski Gurriel.

So, in summary, what has Gurriel changed?

Not a ton, it appears. He has simply just hit with more patience, which has trickled down into the rest of his game. Gurriel always had the ability to barrel up balls, but he was not showing it because he was not swinging at the right pitches. If Gurriel keeps doing what he’s doing, the Astros definitely won’t need a first baseman.