Is A.J. Pollock Really This Good?

A.J. Pollock is, at the moment, one of the best fantasy outfielders in major league baseball.  He’s 4th according to the ESPN player rater but since most of you and I don’t REALLY know what that means, let’s say it a different way.  He is one of only four players with at least a .290 AVG, 10 HR, and 15 SB.  Still, whenever I talk with anyone about Pollock’s performance, the consensus opinion on him is more of a resonating question: “Is A.J. Pollock really this good?”  Let’s attempt to answer that.  Dating back to the beginning of 2014,  Pollock has played in 161 games.  We could round that up to 162 games, especially since players rarely play every single game of a season, and call it a full season, but I’m going to go the extra mile here and pull the last game from his 2013 campaign to have a constant 162 games for this exercise.  The stat line he has produced is impressive.

 

G	PA	H	AB	R	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	HBP	SF	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
162	657	181	603	99	37	8	18	67	33	46	103	3	4	.300	.351	.477	.827

Let’s lower the bar a little bit so that we can find more players in THIS search: how many other players over their last 162 games have hit at the very minimum: .290, 90 R, 15 HR, 60 RBI, 25 SB?  The answer is 1, and that man is Starling Marte.

G	PA	H	AB	R	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	HBP	SF	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
162	652	181	596	90	36	3	22	88	33	36	148	16	2	.304	.358	.485	.843

I’m not sure if that makes Marte a fair comparison.  We can compare them, but Marte delivers more line drives and raw power than Pollock does.  Marte, despite having a paltry 19.3% FB rate, has averaged 312 feet on his fly balls this year, 4th best in the majors, allowing him him to post an absurd 29.5% HR/FB rate – and we’re not even ready to get into park factors yet.  Pollock is just a bit more refined than Marte, posting a better BB rate and K rate than Marte has, by, obviously, swinging at better pitches to hit.

2015	BB%	K%	OSWING%	ZSWING%	SWING%	CONTACT%
Pollock	7.4	15.6	31.2	59.1	44.3	82.7
Marte	5.3	24.1	38.9	77.8	56.8	74.5

Pollock, too, has a fine average fly ball distance.  It’s 295 (a number he’s increased each year), which is good for 39th overall, smack dab in between Adam LaRoche to the north and Nolan Arenado to the south.  But Pollock has also been incrementally improving his BB/K ratio over the last three years, bringing it from 0.40 to 0.47 this year.  It could be as simple as that – a good player that has made strides in his approach at the plate, but I can’t just leave it at that.  Despite these improvements, albeit, very small ones, his batted ball profile looks right around league average.

 

2015	LD%	GB%	FB%	IFFB%	HR/FB	IFH%	BUH%	PULL	CENT	OPPO	SOFT	MED
Pollock	19.4	51.4	29.1	12.3	13.5	10.5	100	36.7	36.3	27.0	17.4	50.2
League AVG	20.9	45.4	33.6	9.4	10.7	6.7	24.3	39.0	35.6	25.5	18.6	52.9

Pollock is fast, so hitting a lot of ground balls works in his favor.  He’s been able to have higher than average IFH and BUH percentages in each of the last three years because of his speed.  However, despite being a below average line drive hitter this year, and throughout his career, he is less susceptible to BABIP fluctuations than other high frequency GB hitters like Alcides Escobar, Elvis Andrus, Jean Segura, because Pollock produces a hard hit rate higher than the league average – he is an authoritative hitter.  Curious though, that with his below average LD rate, this is the case.  So his hard hit% is driven by either hard contact on fly balls or ground balls relative to league average.  Since he has an IFFB% above league average I’m going to predict that he’s a high authority GB hitter.  There’s logic in that, right?

 

2015	GB   AVG	HARD  GB	PULL GB	CENT GB	OPPO GB	FB AVG	HARD FB	PULL FB	CENT FB	OPPO FB
Pollock	0.301	23.1	46.9	41.3	11.9	0.234	35.8	19.8	34.6	45.7
League AVG	0.234	17.1	52.9	34.1	13.1	0.223	36.2	22.2	38.0	39.8

He’s right at about league average for hard hit fly balls, but he does seem to have a hard hit ground ball percentage markedly higher than league average.  In fact, his 23.1% hard hit GB rate is 18th best in the league.  The 17 players in front of him have combined for an average line of:

2015	H	AB	R	HR	RBI	SB	AVG	LD%	GB%	FB%	HARD%
Top 17	84	300	41	13	45	3	.280	20.4	44.5	35.1	33.7
Pollock	100	334	58	11	42	19	.299	19.4	51.4	29.1	32.4

The list also includes names like Tulo, Miguel Cabrera, Posey, Pederson, Upton, Donaldson, Trout, Jose Abreu, and Yoenis Cespedes.  It’s guys that we generally perceive to be hard contact hitters, or I guess, more specifically, power hitters.  But he’s 18th on the list and produced a quality hard hit ground ball rate last year, too.

But, he still has a league average hard hit fly ball rate and a below average line drive rate.  These are reflected in his numbers compared to the league.

2015	LD%	LD AVG	GB%	GB AVG	FB%	FB AVG
Pollock	19.4	0.667	51.4	0.301	29.1	0.234
League	20.9	0.684	45.4	0.234	33.6	0.223

Lastly, he plays in Chase Field, which, throughout its history, has been a hitters park.  From 2008-2014 it had an adjusted park factor of +111.  For right handed hitters (and left handed hitters) like A.J. Pollock, it has had only positive affects, but this table is solely for righties:

HR	3B	2B	1B	AVG	OBP	SLG	R
1.09	1.45	1.14	1.00	1.04	1.03	1.07	1.11

Put Pollock in a neutral park and his numbers for the last 162 games would theoretically look like this:

G	PA	H	AB	R	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	HBP	SF	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
162	657	174	603	89	33	6	17	60	31	46	103	3	4	.288	.340	.448	.788

I was kind of hoping to see more signs that Pollock is experiencing more luck.  Not because I don’t like Pollock, I love him as a baseball player and I’m sure he’s a fine person, but because of the questions regarding the sustainability of his play in the first half of the 2015 season by many of my peers.  The answer to, “is he really this good”, is that he is pretty darn close and I can see him performing to any of the projection systems’ expectations the rest of the way (ZiPS, Steamer, or Depth Charts).  He should experience some fluctuation in BABIP because of his GB rate, but so far he really hasn’t – and again that’s partially due to the authority with which he hits them.

In terms of finding a player closest in comparison to Pollock, Marte might be a pretty decent choice.  If I can just brainstorm using the cloud technique, I would probably have, with A.J. Pollock’s name in the middle: Starling Marte, Jason Heyward, Christian Yelich, Charlie Blackmon, Brett Gardner, and Lorenzo Cain as smaller clouds extending off the big, middle cloud.  Here are stats based on the last 162 games played.

 

PLAYER	PA	H	AB	R	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	HBP	SF	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Yelich	709	181	628	91	9	56	22	75	155	4	1	.288	.367	.390	.757
Cain	641	180	592	91	11	66	39	37	128	8	4	.304	.351	.448	.799
Heyward	636	163	576	76	12	60	22	51	96	4	4	.283	.343	.403	.746
Blackmon	698	179	628	87	18	66	36	41	123	19	5	.285	.345	.436	.781
Gardner	707	162	611	108	21	72	22	70	147	6	6	.265	.343	.458	.801
Marte	652	181	596	90	22	88	33	36	148	16	2	.304	.358	.485	.843

 

This group kind of works as a spectrum.  I see the players on the extreme north and south columns least like Pollock and the players in the middle most like Pollock.  There is no one player to compare A.J. Pollock with that is playing currently, although Mitch Webster would be a pretty good historical comparison using his ages 26 – 28 seasons.

Mitch Webster ages 26-28 162 G AVG:

	G	PA	H	AB	R	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	HBP	SF	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
	162	656	165	580	94	15	60	36	62	87	5	5	.283	.354	.441	.795

Probably too high of a walk rate, but that looks pretty good.

The average season of the group above would look like this:

G	PA	H	AB	R	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	HBP	SF	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
162	674	174	605	91	16	68	29	52	133	10	4	.288	.352	.437	.789

A little too high of a K rate, but that also looks pretty good.

And finally A.J. Pollock ages 25-27 162 G AVG

G	PA	H	AB	R	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	HBP	SF	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
162	618	163	567	89	15	57	25	43	101	3	3	.287	.339	.449	.788

In conclusion, A.J. Pollock is very close to this good if he’s not actually THIS GOOD and I think these players are pretty good comparisons.  And hopefully Pollock has more long lasting success than Mitch Webster.  In a time when speed/power combo players are in decline, what Pollock is doing is clearly elite in that sense.  What I really would like to see would be the history of authoritative ground ball hitters with good speed who have played in parks that have buoyed their power numbers.  Unfortunately, I don’t have access to batted ball profiles for hitters throughout history – how many Pollocks does it take to gather that information?