Archive for Player Analysis

About a month ago, I wrote an unintentionally controversial article about some puzzling patterns in Derek Jeter’s early season numbers.

There were two main contradictions within his statistics: that he was on pace for the best power numbers of his career while posting his highest ground ball rate ever, and that he was posting a career-low strikeout rate while swinging at a dramatically larger proportion of pitches thrown outside of the strike zone.

My critics claimed that I was reading too much into the stats too early in the season. Under normal circumstances I would have agreed, but it was more than the numbers themselves that were puzzling. When a person hits more home runs on fewer fly balls and makes better contact with worse pitch selectiveness, the results contradict the logic, no matter how small the sample size.

Four weeks later, I think it’s appropriate to revisit the situation and see how things are shaping up.

Overall, the discrepancies have become less dramatic, but the contradictory trends are still in place.

As I predicted, his power numbers have come back down to earth. He’s now on pace for 16 homers (down from 26 at last writing) and 98 RBI (down from 130). Neither would be a career high, but both would be above his norm.

But Jeter’s unprecedented groundball tendencies haven’t abated. Over two-thirds of balls off his bat (67 percent) have been on the ground—by far the highest such figure in the American League. While that’s a slight decline from the 71 percent mark he posted last month, it’s by far the highest of his career and a full 10 points above what he posted from 2002-09.

Meanwhile, his 16 percent HR/FB rate is the highest it’s been since 2005. Coincidentally, the 2005 season was the only other time in his career that his groundball rate hit 60 percent. So basically, the more he puts the ball on the ground, the more likely it is that each fly ball he hits will clear the fences. I’m not sure if that’s really a contradiction, but it’s certainly an odd correlation.

One thing is clear: this isn’t a common trend. This year, Jeter is the only player in the AL who has both a groundball rate over 50 percent and a HR/FB rate over nine percent.

But the more dramatic (and interesting) statistical oddity stems from the collapse of Jeter’s plate discipline.

Over his career, Jeter has been one of the most selective hitters in baseball, hacking at less than 20 percent of balls out of the strike zone. This year, that number has ballooned to 31.3 percent. Simply put, he’s chasing bad pitches. That’s not an insult or a criticism—that’s an indisputable, objective fact.

The sample size isn’t too small to start drawing conclusions. Jeter has seen 288 pitches outside the zone and swung at 90 of them.

As one might expect, this trigger-happy approach has had a negative effect on his walk rate, which, at five percent, is a career low. It’s less than half of the walk rate he posted last year.

Similarly, you’d expect his strikeout rate to shoot up into the stratosphere, right?

Wrong.

While Jeter’s 14 percent whiff rate is a sizable increase from last month’s nine percent figure, it’s still inexplicably lower than it ought to be, given Jeter’s history and his newfound aggressiveness.  How is that possible?

My first thought upon revisiting these numbers was that, in addition to swinging at more pitches off the plate, Jeter was starting to be less discriminatory with pitches thrown in the zone. That made sense, and I was embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it a month ago.

But it turns out that’s not right either—in fact, it’s actually the opposite. This year, Jeter has chased a career-low 69 percent of balls in the zone, compared to 74 percent for his career. Simply put, Jeter is swinging at more bad pitches and fewer good ones.

I plugged in the numbers and found that, while 80 percent of the pitches he’s swung at since 2002 were good, just 69 percent of balls he’s chased in 2010 would have been called strikes.

And yet, Jeter’s 86 percent contact rate is the best of his career.

This just doesn’t make sense.

Ichiro Suzuki is a singular talent. He is fast, seeming to fly all over the outfield. He steals bases with great success — 45 while being caught only twice in 2006. He has a legendary cannon for a right arm. And he hits like a machine. He racked up over 2,000 hits in his first nine major league seasons, and was the second fastest to that milestone (to Al Simmons, who reached it in 12 fewer games). He does not hit many home runs or a particularly impressive number of doubles or triples. He piles up his hits by putting the ball on the ground and running to first base. Joe Posnanski recently explored Ichiro’s hitting prowess, coming to the conclusion that he is one of the few truly unique players in history.

What if Ichiro were slow? What type of player would he be if he were not able to knock out so many ground ball hits? For one possible answer to this question, I compared the rate at which Ichiro reached base on ground balls to the American League average. Baseball Reference lists batting average splits by hit trajectory, and I compiled the league numbers from 2003 through 2009. The league statistics for the first two years of Ichiro’s career, 2001 and 2002, differ significantly from the next seven, possibly due to different methods of categorizing ground balls. I omitted those two years, as well as this season’s small sample. During the seven seasons from 2003-2009, American League players consistently reached base at a .240-.245 average on grounders. Ichiro beat the average in every year, with a high of .368 on ground balls in 2007.

To get an idea of what type of player Ichiro would look like without all those extra hits, I normalized his ground ball hit rate to the league average for each season and recalculated his batting totals. This adjustment cost him 42 hits in 2007 and 44 in 2004, and no less than 14 in any of the seven seasons. For simplicity, I removed only singles from his batting line. I then searched for a player with career statistics similar to Ichiro’s adjusted totals and came up with an interesting candidate. The following table displays Ichiro’s statistics over the past seven years (again, discarding 2001 and 2002) without his extra ground ball hits, side by side with Curt Flood’s career averages.

This adjusted version of Ichiro is a near statistical clone of Flood, who played center field in the 1960s for the Cardinals. Flood was also a great fielder, winning gold gloves in each of his last seven full seasons. He is most famous, however, for starting a chain reaction that led to the free agency system when he refused a trade to the Phillies after the 1969 season. It marked the effective end of his career at just 31, as he played only 13 games in a comeback attempt in 1971. Despite now being inextricably linked with baseball labor history and not often mentioned for his playing ability, Flood was actually a surprisingly valuable hitter. He played in the offensively-challenged 1960s and was significantly above average with the bat for most of his career. Ichiro’s adjusted stats, in today’s era of power and on-base percentage, would be far less impressive.

Of course, this is all merely a thought experiment. Ichiro probably does have some control over where he hits the ball, as his New York Times profile explains. FanGraphs’s Jack Moore also explored Ichiro’s propensity to hit grounders to the opposite side of the infield at an abnormal rate. Thus, simply removing some of Ichiro’s hits does not show us the player he would actually be if he were not so fast. If he could not get on base so often on this type of batted ball, it is likely he would adjust his approach and that his numbers would reach a different equilibrium. What removing all of the extra singles does show us is just how much value those ground ball hits supply. Without them, Ichiro’s numbers look fairly pedestrian, especially in the era in which he has played. With them, Ichiro is Ichiro, and he will go down as one of the greatest and most dynamic hitters in baseball history.

This article originally ran at Ball Your Base.

Brian Matusz entered the 2010 season considered one of the top rookie pitchers in the game. Marc Hulet of Fangraphs recently wrote that he thinks Matusz will win the AL Rookie of the Year. Things haven’t been so rosy for the Baltimore lefty in the last month, however.

Matusz hasn’t pitched excellently in 2010 according to his peripherals. He’s better than his 5.8 ERA, but he’s worse than 3.8 FIP on account of an unsustainable 6.2% HR/FB. His xFIP of 4.6 looks a lot more like the pitcher that he is. He’s striking out a lot of hitters (7.4 per 9), but his fly-ball tendencies are extreme (46.5% over 446 batters faced) and his control looks spotty: 3.3 BB/9 this season.

It’s the last part I want to take a look at, because a (career) 3.1BB/9 is going to wreck a fly-ball pitcher like Matusz unless he can develop swing-and-miss stuff that will get him a strike out per inning. But here’s the thing: Matusz control has been impeccable through his major league career.

54.3% of his pitches have hit the zone since he first took the mound in 2009. For comparison’s sake, just four pitchers managed to throw that percentage of pitches (or more) in the zone last season: Ted Lilly, Cliff Lee, Johan Santana and Roy Oswalt (who tied Matusz’s 54.3%). Just below that are Justin Verlander and Scott Baker. Matusz has allowed 7.6% of hitters a free pass since his arrival. Of those six comparisons, the highest walk percentage was 6.5% (Santana), the lowest 4.4% (Lee) and the average was 5.6%. Somehow Brian Matusz manages to walk 35% more batters than the average of this group of similar pitchers.

It gets even stranger. Matusz throws pitches in the zone, but he’s not exactly a pitch-to-contact guy. His contact rate on pitches in the zone (=83.3%) is about 4% below major league average (~=88%). He does tend to allow contact on pitches out of the zone, but the net result is an average contact rate, and his swinging strike rate of 9.3% is 1% better than the major league average. He’s not throwing pitches in the zone because he gets behind in the count: his 62.0% F-strike rate place him around the top 15% of starters with 60 or more IP last season.

If we adjust his walk rate to reflect what pitchers with a similar rate of pitches in the zone do, Matusz would have just 15 walks this season and a 3.0K/BB ratio. That’s good enough to produce a 4.2 xFIP and 3.6 FIP. ( I calculated the expected walk rate at 6% of batters faced. I calculate expected HR for xFIP as 6.5% of line drives plus flyballs, i.e., balls in the air, rather than as proportion of fly balls to account for inconsistencies in LD and FB scoring.)

While it’s difficult to tell a lot about a pitcher from his plate discipline stats, two things do stand out: swinging strikes get Ks and pitches in the zone prevent walks. The correlation coefficent between BB/BFP and zone% was -.43 for 78 qualified starting pitchers in 2009, which is a pretty strong correlation for baseball.

It would be really cool if I had an explanation of Brian Matusz high walk rate, but it confounds me, and I’m completely open to suggestions. His walks look like an anomaly.

At age 23, Carlos Marmol made his major league début with the Cubs as a starter.  He was mostly dreadful in 2006, finishing with an ERA over 6.00.  Since then, he’s settled in as the setup man and now the closer for the Cubs and for the most part has been very good.  Since 2007, he’s averaged over 11 strikeouts per nine innings in each season, finishing in the top ten each season; this year, his strikeout numbers have been absolutely stupid.  Here’s a summary of Marmol’s rate statistics for his career, followed by his totals:

Marmol has always had issues throwing strikes, particularly in 2009.  He got away with it (mostly) by not allowing home runs and being a little lucky.  What really strikes me though is that with such high strikeout and walk rates, there is a lot of walking at the end of plate appearances against Marmol (either to first base or back to the dugout).

A couple of weeks ago, Dave A. noted that Brandon Morrow, Clayton Kershaw, and Rich Harden lead starting pitchers in keeping the ball out of play via walks, strikeouts, and hit batters.  They had “Ball-Not-In-Play” percentages in the lows 40s.  Check out Marmol’s career, and in particular, his start to 2010:

This year he’s moving away from his fastball and moved toward his slider more and more.  He’s also throwing harder (almost a full mile per hour faster than any previous season) and batters are not making contact with anything.  Hitters are hitting only 60% of the pitches they swing at, 20% below the major league average; he also leads the league by almost 5%.

It’s easy to see from his Pitchf/x data that Marmol might not have any idea where the ball is going when he throws it.  It’s almost impossible to keep up what he’s doing, but after watching him walk a Ranger and strike three out in the 9th inning during Sunday’s game, it sure seemed to me that some good major league hitters simply don’t have much of a chance against him right now.

This article was originally published on Knuckleballs.

I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that Adam Jones has been a big disappointment at the plate so far in 2010. He came into Saturday’s game batting just .254/.283/.384, and instead of taking a step forward from his .277/.335/.457 line in 2009 he’s taken a step (or two) back. What might be going on?

It’s not exactly news to say that Adam’s not the most disciplined hitter, but that’s actually gotten worse this year:

Jones is swinging about as often he has in recent years, though that’s still a much higher mark than your average batter. He is chasing pitches out of the strike-zone more than he used to, and even the mid 30s rates were high. He started out last season getting that rate down a little, but his slump coincided in part with starting to chase balls close to that 40% rate he’s continued into this season. Adam’s swing at strikes less though, which means the percent of pitches that he swings at that are better to hit – in the zone (the last column) – has gone down. For the average batter, somewhere around 70% of the pitches they swing at are in the strike-zone. For Jones this year, that’s down to just 61%. So even if he’s going to be making contact – which he isn’t exactly great at anyway – it’s not going to be on as good of a pitch to hit.

Now, one might think that Jones is chasing more balls because pitches are throwing him a bunch of sliders and curveballs out of the zone. I think we all have that mental image of Adam waving at a slider down and away. That’s not exactly the case though:

In his first full season pitchers tried to get him to chase, but now they seem to be challenging him more. I don’t think that’s a good sign. How often does he swing at each pitch?

Very consistent on the heaters each season. He’s taking more change-ups and – in 2010 at least – curveballs as well. That slider continues to be his nemesis, as even though he’s seeing fewer of them he is swinging more often at the ones he does see. The percent of total pitches that Adam has thrown to him that fall into the “swinging at a slider” group has fallen though, from over 10% in ‘08 and ‘09 to about 7.4% in ‘10. Even when you add in the fact that his contact rate against the pitch has gotten worse, the percent of all pitches that end up as sliders that have been swung on and missed has gone down.

Breaking out the pitch types by in the zone versus out of the zone was inexact, but it looks like a much higher percentage of the fastballs thrown to Jones are in the strike-zone while a much lower percent of sliders and (especially) change-ups.

So summarizing the best I can by pitch type:

Fastball: Seeing more of them, principally in the strike-zone; swinging at them as much as he used to, and also making contact more often when he swings.

Change-up: Seeing more of them, and more of them out of the zone; swinging at them less, but making less contact when he does swing.

Slider: Seeing a lot less of them, but more frequently out of the zone; still chasing a lot, with slightly higher whiff rate.

Curveball: Seeing less of them, with about the same frequency in the zone; chasing it less, and still whiffing a whole lot on it.

It looks to me like Adam is taking pitches early in the count a little more often – getting fastballs in the zone to fall behind (he went to an 0-1 count over 55% of the time, and was getting a first-pitch fastball much more often – almost 70% of the time – which explains more than the entire increase in fastball usage overall) – and then chasing pitches out of the zone later in the count. He’s maybe trying to work the count, but doesn’t have the pitch recognition or the ability to tell a ball from a strike that’s needed to carry through on it.

Jones is striking out more and walking much less this year, and given his swing rates, those marks (~3% and ~21% respectively) aren’t out of line. If that doesn’t change – especially the first number – then it’s going to be very hard for him to be even an average hitter. ZiPS still thinks it’ll get better though, projecting a line from here to the rest of the season of .273/.327/.461. I don’t want to overreact to 40 games, but it certainly is concerning (and swing rates are the first things to stabilize). Also – it should be noted – it wouldn’t matter so much if Jones was playing plus defense in center.

Article originally posted at Camden Crazies.

Delmon Young, a former #1 pick in the ’03 draft, is viewed as failed prospect, but might he be ready to live up to some of that hype that once surrounded him? Perhaps.

His walk rate was 5.6% in ’08 and 2.9% in ’09. This season it has jumped up to 8%. Just in terms of raw numbers, Young has 10 walks this season in 112 at-bats. He had 12 in 395 at-bats all of last season. With the walks have come a decrease in strikeouts. Young posted an 18.3% strikeout rate in ’08 and a 23.3% in ’09. This season, however, he has cut that ’09 strikeout rate in half almost, with a 12.5% strikeout rate.

In terms of power, Young is also starting to find his stride. His isolated power is .188, a career high, this season. That places him in front of Carlos Pena and Kendry Morales and just behind Austin Kearns and Carl Crawford in the category. If you’re just looking at home runs, he’s hit 4 this season. That’s not too amazing, but the most he’s ever hit in one season is 13, so he could be in for a career year. His .438 slugging percentage is also a career high. His previous high was .425 in ’09.

What’s hurting Young right now is a .247 BABIP, which is helping drive his .250 batting average. In ’07, ’08, and ’09 he posted a .338 BABIP and his career BABIP, over almost 2,000 at-bats, is .334, so we have a decent idea of what his BABIP could rebound to. Once Young, a career .288 hitter, sees his BABIP rebound, he could see his some of his progress start to pay off.

We also have to keep in mind that Young was drafted straight out of high school. He’s 24 years old now; if he had gone to college for three years and then gone to the minors, we might just now be seeing his first year at the major league level, not his fourth. Either way, Young may be primed for a breakout season.

Coming out of Seton Hall Prep in 2007, Rick Porcello was an ace in the making.  When scouts combined his age, velocity, and dominance (103Ks in 63 IP as a Senior); they saw a front-of-the-line major league starter. After being draft 27th overall, Detroit wasted no time showcasing their young ace. In order to ensure Porcello developed his other pitches, the Tigers insisted that Porcello stop relying on his curve. With his new approach, Porcello only managed 5.18 K/9 in his brief stint in the minor leagues.  Two seasons later, the strikeouts and the curveball have almost disappeared completely. While it’s still extremely early in his career, is it possible that the Tigers may have ruined Rick Porcello?

Here’s what Keith Law wrote about Porcello in 2009:

He doesn’t miss a lot of bats with the new approach, but generating ground balls keeps the pitch count down, and pitchers who throw strikes and don’t give up home runs can be very successful. But bear in mind that Porcello has the raw stuff to be more of a strikeout pitcher, and when he reaches the majors, he could blend the two approaches and be one of the top pitchers in the game.

That last sentence sums up the main cause for concern with Porcello. While scouts believe Porcello has the ability to dominate, his K/9 rate in the majors is a dismal 4.70. Even more disturbing is Porcello’s disappearing curveball. After throwing his curve 8.1% of the time in 2009, Porcello is only throwing his curveball .2% of the time in 2010.  Unless Detroit is still enforcing the “no-curve rules,” it might be time to start worrying whether his approach has been permanently impacted. It is interesting that the curve was Porcello’s worst pitch in 2009 according to the pitch type values. His reluctance to throw it in 2010, could mean that he has lost confidence in the pitch. The big question is, whether Porcello can be an ace without his curve?

Then again, Porcello is still only 21 years old and has already experienced success in the majors. It’s certainly possible that a) the Tigers are still enforcing the “no-curve rules,” or b) Porcello continues to develop into an ace while in the majors. Porcello did not spend a lot of time in the minors, and he is exceptionally young for his level. Typically, only the most promising players reach the majors at Porcello’s age. However, it is disturbing that his current approach has not produced “ace” results. Just for reference, Mark Buehrle has a higher career K/9 rate than Porcello’s current K/9. As Keith Law stated in his 2009 top prospect list, pitchers that get ground balls and prevent home runs have a lot of value, but Porcello was drafted as an ace and not an innings-eater. Yes, it’s still incredibly early in his career, but there is already some evidence to suggest Detroit may have mishandled their prized pitcher.

*This article was originally written on Foulpole2Foulpole.com

We are a quarter of the way through the 2010 season and David Wright has appeared to put the ghosts of 2009 behind him.  After hitting only 10 HR all of last year, he has already hit 8 this year, helping him to post a wOBA just over .390 through the early part of the season. None of this is really surprising (his career wOBA sits at .392) and it appears to be business as usual for the talented third basemen.  The catch is that he has been able to post these numbers while striking out an alarming rate. 

As of this post, he was the unfortunate owner of a 38% strikeout rate, 2nd overall to Kyle Blanks and 6.7% higher than the next closest hitter with a wOBA over .390.  So what is causing this jump in strikeouts?  His strikeout rates spiked last year as well, but they are starting to spiral out of control this year.  A quick look at his numbers offers two possible solutions. First, though his Zone Swing/Contact rates appear normal, his O-Swing% has jumped up 4.5% while his O-Contact% has fallen 9.5%.  Swinging at more pitches outside the zone and making less contact is a quick and easy recipe for disaster. The second cause for concern can be seen in his pitch type linear weights.  He is mashing fastballs at a career high rate (wFB/C of 3.19), but this comes at the cost of looking downright foolish against the curveball (wCB/C of -2.01) and sliders (wSL/C of -2.58).  Apparently, opposing pitchers have noticed this weakness in David’s approach and have reacted accordingly, offering him 4.4% more sliders/curveballs and 8.4% less fastballs than last year.

Another (albeit small) contributing factor might be related to his platoon splits. David sports a career L/R split of .439/.370 for wOBA and 14.4%/22.9% K-rate. The wOBA has been even more extreme this year (.608/.339 andthe strikeouts have jumped to 19.2%/42.3%. This is even more troubling as Wright has so far faced even more RHP than usual. This year he has faced RHP 80% of the time, up 78% in 2009 and 74% in 2004-2008.  His platoon splits are well known, and he is presumably facing more RHP later in games. This decision was easier for opposing coaches last year, as he no longer had the left handed power of Delgado (or any power, really) batting behind him.  With the only lefties in the lineup being the unproven Chris Carter and Ike Davis, David will contine to face a lot of right-handed relievers.

The extra appearances against RHP does not explain why his strikeout rate against them has doubled though. It is early in the season, so it could just be bad luck on his part, and his strikeouts should regress towards his career line of 20.8%, or at least his line of 26.2% last year. Even if they don’t, he will remain a premier 3B if he can maintain his power, walk rates, and high BABIP.  Still, if David wants to approach his MVP caliber numbers of 2007, he should take strides to lay off pitches outside the zone and adjust better to the breaking balls.

Entering the 2010 season, the Mariners starting pitching was a question mark. After Cliff Lee was sidelined early in Spring Training with an abdominal strain, the bottom half of the rotation came under further scrutiny. As the Mariners evaluated questionable candidates for the bottom half of the rotation, fans and the front office could at least rest easy thatFelix Hernandez and Ryan Rowland-Smith were healthy and prepared to start. 

What a difference forty days can make. Doug Fister and Jason Vargas have been among the few pleasant surprises in Seattle this season, while RRS has seemingly lost the confidence of the coaching staff. Last night, RRS gave up two more long balls and he was removed in the bottom of the third inning. It was his second start in a row he did not record an out in the third inning. 

It isn’t difficult to see that Rowland-Smith has been struggling. He hasn’t pitched into the seventh inning since April 17th, and hasn’t made it to the sixth in three starts. He’s allowed ten home runs in thirty-nine innings while walking more men than he’s struck out (17-16.) All of this leads to a gruesome 7.15 FIP and a troublesome 5.91 xFIP. Furthermore, 25% of balls put in play against Rowland-Smith have been line drives, leading to a9.10 tRA. 

He’s also having a problem generating swinging strikes. It isn’t that he is having control issues; he’s throwing strikes at virtually the same percentage this year as he was last season. His problem is generating swinging strikes, particularly on pitches out of the strike zone. Last year, hitters made contact on 69.3% of pitches they swung at outside of the strike zone. This year, that number has climbed all the way to 78%. This would explain his inability to strike people out, as he can’t lure batters to swing at good pitches out of the zone. 

Considering the high xFIP, tRA, and contact rate on balls outside of the strike zone, one has to wonder if there is some hidden problem in his game. My best guess would be that something is wrong with his fastball. Last year his heater was 4.4 runs above average. This season, his fastball has been worth -6.6 runs below an average offering. Let’s look a little deeper.

In 2009, Rowland-Smith worked almost exclusively with a four seam fastball (when throwing fastballs of course.) This year, all of his fastballs have been two-seamers. Perhaps the adjustment from four-seamers to two-seamers has been part of the problem. Though his fastball velocity down only a tick, hitters are really teeing off against it. 

I’ve pored through his pitch F/x data, looking for some differences between his pitches this year and last year. The most striking difference between the two years I can find is his struggle to find a consistent release point this year. Take a look at the difference between 2010 and last season. (Pitch f/x data is courtesy of Texas Leaguers.)

RRS has particularly had trouble with consistently releasing his two seam fastball. I’m not sure if an inconsistent release point is responsible for his struggles this year, but this is something to monitor over his next couple of outings. He’s releasing his two-seamer closer to the strike zone than the other two pitches, which could explain why hitters, and lefties in particular, are seeing the ball better than they did last year. His two-seamer doesn’t have much movement, and perhaps the lack of movement, slightly reduced velocity, and limited horizontal movement have turned his heater into a poor pitch. 

I can’t be sure that RRS’s release point issues are the cause of his poor performance to date in 2010. At the same time, I would like to see him become more consistent with his release point. If he corrects that flaw and is still struggling, we can re-examine his case. Until then, I’m assuming that he’s releasing his fast-ball on a more over the top plane than his other pitches, and that is either causing it to break less or is tipping off hitters.

Nick Markakis has just two home runs thus far this season, and is on pace to hit just 9 on the year. I think it’s relatively clear now that Nick isn’t really a power hitter – he’ll get his share of homers but is more of a doubles hitter who is content taking outside pitches to left-field. “His share” though, has been quite low in 2010. I’m not saying I’m worried yet – the season is long and the ZiPS updated projections still has him finishing with 17 homers (only one less than last year) – but it is a bit curious.

One of the more obvious aspects of home run hitting is that it’s much easier when you pull the ball. Here’s a nice graph from an article by Mike Fast at The Hardball Times:

So where is Nick hitting the ball? Here’s all balls in play by year and field:

He’s always been a guy who uses the whole field, but so far this year he’s not turning on as many pitches. And just the flyballs:

Last year Nick hit a much higher proportion of flyballs to right-field, which helps explain why almost all of his home runs (14 of 18) were to right. This year, not only is Markakis not pulling flyballs but he’s also not hitting as many to the opposite field. Center-field is the deepest part of any park, and a full half of Nick’s flyballs are going out there. No wonder they’re not finding seats.

I’m not really sure why that’s happening – likely mostly normal variation – but Nick is getting a lot more fastballs and he’s done a pretty terrible job of getting around on that the pitch so far.

Compare these three spray charts on fastballs going back the last three years (courtesy of Texas Leaguers):

2008:

2009:

2010:

Right-field on that last one is pretty barren. I thought that maybe Nick hasn’t been able to catch up to a good fastball, but his contact rate against heaters at 94 mph or above has actually gone up the last three years; from 71% to 85% to 93%. Perhaps he’s more content to just make contact than to try to drive the ball. The spray charts for all pitches tell a similar tail; not all that many balls being driven to the “warning track”, or to right-field.

Nick’s 5% HR/FB rate is well below his career mark of 10.6%, as well as last year’s career low of 8.6%. I’m not might sure exactly how much we can expect that rate to go up this season, but I do think it’s clear that if Markakis doesn’t start pulling the ball in the air at least a little more often his power numbers won’t be particularly impressive at the end of the year.