Archive for Brian Dozier

As Brian Dozier began a new month with his new Los Angeles Dodgers, it was apropos that Dozier would hit a single, double, and home run in his first game. For Dozier, the Dodgers, and specifically Yasmani Grandal walking off in the bottom of the 10^th, August 1 was a magical sort of night. The Dodgers broke a three-game skid to overcome the  Brewers 6-4. regarding momentum, an establishment of tone for the month of August. Having just passed the trade deadline and tied with the Arizona Diamondbacks for the National League West, August represents a fresh start amid a long season – the line between exhaustion and giving the remainder of dwindling energy.

Los Angeles now has Manny Machado, Arizona now has Eduardo Escobar; two players who plug glaring holes to add that last substantive energy. Los Angeles, however, also obtained Brian Dozier – a second baseman who has simply regressed in hitting. He is in a season-long lull, hitting .229 with a .415 SLG, and a 95 wRC+ after finishing at .271, .498, and 125 in 2017. He has never relied on the luck of high BABIP and lucky placement, always an extremely successful hitter for the Minnesota Twins on his own merit. He simply fell flat in a flat batting order.

While not an objective point of analysis, Dozier might just need a change of pace in a new town to start finding the ball again. Open comments to the media regarding Minnesota being ‘comfortable’ and Los Angeles being a team in the race ‘rejuvenating me [Dozier] as a player’ provide surface-level follow-up for the ‘new city – new player’ philosophy.

Considering that Dozier is in the last year of his contract makes him only more of an enigma. The ‘contract-year’ is traditionally when batters inflate their statistics on a bad team for a massive contract in their later years. (Tradition in free-agency, being broken and a topic much written about). With Dozier doing the complete opposite, assuming he has the ability to rejuvenate his career, Los Angeles might be able to hide his genius and buy-low in free-agency. They have attempted to trade for Dozier the past two seasons, hence trading for Dozier has given a subtle chess piece to the Los Angeles front office for the 2019 season.

The importance of Dozier in the Los Angeles lineup is not about dazzling power. While chess piece might be a degrading term, for Dozier, it is a complement to its procedural efficiency. Second base has been Los Angeles’ worst position and Dozier will plug what has been a sloppy turnstile in the batting lineup.

On a micro-level, Dozier’s enigma of a collapse is across the board. He is making 11 percent more contact outside and three-percent less inside contact but is still contacting around 82 percent on the fastball. The only difference, a fall to a .259 from a .298 average. Despite making more contact on sinkers, 83.2 to 86 percent and two-percent less swinging-strikes, he is only hitting at a 126 wRC+ from a 171 wRC+. (And, yes, that is still above average, but a fall for Dozier).

The slider, a pitch never hit for average, has seen seven percent less outside-swings (26.6 to 19.9 percent) and a subsequent drop in outside-contact (60 to 51.2 percent). The result has been 52.4 percent in-field fly-balls, up from 22.2 percent. The worst pitch for Dozier this year has been the curveball, seeing a pitiful .054 average and -50 wRC+. This comes even as he is swinging less at the curve (39.6 to 32.2 percent).

The only pitch Dozier has seen an improvement on is the changeup, hitting at a .333 ISO (.128 in 2017) and a 178 wRC+ (120 in 2017). The main emphasis has been him attacking inside the zone five percent more. This is the same strategy which Dozier held in 2016, when he attacked the inside changeup at 69 percent and hit for a .338 ISO.

The subtle change in Dozier, however, is evident in his attack of the changeup. In 2018, Dozier has been attempting to hit opposite field for changeup power, with incredibly precise hits to right field. He also has gotten lucky on three infield hits. In 2017, however, Dozier was comfortable in pulling changeups to the left-field. While this has been a positive trend for the changeup, on a meta-level, Dozier’s fascination with hitting opposite is putting him on pace for more outs.

The following is a side-by-side comparison of balls resulting in outs for Dozier (per Baseball Savant), with 2018 on the left and 2017 on the right. He is avoiding pulling the ball, and as a result, has patterned his hits into a persistent pattern within a strangely linear line. The same comparison done on balls hit into play with no-outs is further evidence of Dozier attempting to hit balls to opposite field. In short terms, he is attempting to create distinct power by aiming the ball instead of just continuing to comfortably pull.

Conjoining the theory that Dozier will be better on a better Los Angeles roster with what can be termed as ‘futile desperation’ in attempts to hit opposite the field leads back to the subtle change within each micro-pitch. While the meta-level comparison is little changed for swinging percentage, very small, but important tweaks, in Dozier swinging outside exist. Hence, he is trying to walk more.

In other terms, Dozier has been on a bad team, and knowing so, has been attempting to take less risks outside so he walks more while also trying to create more emphatic power by targeting opposite field. He has been trying to mitigate Minnesota’s inefficiencies by playing tighter himself. While one game is hardly a good sample size, there may be an underlying psychological shift in Los Angeles which allows Dozier to relax and comfortably attack the ball.

The Twins are one of two teams in baseball competing for a wild-card spot without a qualified hitter inside the top 50 on FanGraphs’ WAR leaderboard. Venturing out beyond this window unveils two players the average baseball guru would guess are Thad Levine and Co.’s most valuable assets: Miguel Sano (injured; 2.5 fWAR) and Brian Dozier (2.7 fWAR). If “Thad Levine and Co.” was the name of an ’80s band — which I can’t confirm or deny — Eddie Rosario would be the rhythm guitarist capable of beautiful harmonies; forgotten, but essential to the end product.

Anytime a player of Rosario’s level comes into relevancy, the radar in my mind starts to tick, hoping to decipher what changed to bring about better results. Naturally, venturing to other outlets helps to answer that question quickly, leaving me satisfied and with one less idea for a future column. Other times, unsatisfied by the results of searching, a new narrative will linger in my mind long enough to expand such thoughts into a column. That’s exactly what took place with my thoughts on Rosario’s recent breakout.

If you’re looking for a deep dive into some of the finer aspects of Rosario’s changes, SB Nation’s Twinkie Town — unrelated to the apocalypse-proof snack — has what you’re looking for. I, however, was stuck on one general concept from a Star Tribune post at the end of April. In an attempt to not rob the outlet of its quote, I’ll paraphrase by citing that Rosario was looking to go up the middle and the other way more, in an effort to help him find comfort at the plate.

The midpoint of that sentence — “… go up the middle and the other way…” — is something I’ve heard so much in baseball circles that I’ve become numb to the concept. Most of the time when I see those words in citation of a change in approach, it’s backed up by said player’s batted-ball distribution. For Rosario, that was initially the case, but then something odd happened.

La Velle E. Neal III’s column for the Tribune — 80-grade name — was written at the end of April and jives with the barebones comparison of Rosario’s batted-ball distribution between 2016 and the first month of action in 2017.

2016 – Pull 36.1% / Middle 39.8% / Oppo 24.1%

2017 – Pull 26.9% / Middle 44.8% / Oppo 28.4%

Whether this created an intersection of adjustment and improvement, in a purely statistical sense, I would be skeptical. Rosario had a wRC+ of 86 in his full season of work from 2016 and April brought with it a discouraging 72 wRC+. He was pushing balls to the middle of the field more, but this dampened production wasn’t intended.

Even more spiteful of any theory linking Rosario’s batted-ball distribution the other way and casual success is breaking down the outfielder’s changes over time in relation to performance. Keep in mind the love for Rosario was spurred off the starting block recently, as the average fantasy owner got tired of struggling vets, and searched for the hot hand (Rob Arthur say what?!).

April 2017 – Pull 26.9% / Middle 44.8% / Oppo 28.4% / wRC+ 72 / 18.6% K

May 2017 – Pull 33.9% / Middle 38.5% / Oppo 27.7% / wRC+ 108 / 18.6% K

June 2017 – Pull 36.7% / Middle 38.3% / Oppo 25.0% / wRC+ 126 / 22.4% K

July 2017 – Pull 36.8% / Middle 35.3% / Oppo 27.9% / wRC+ 126 / 18.5% K

August 2017 – Pull 54.1% / Middle 29.7% / Oppo 16.2% / wRC+ 155 / 15.6% K

Total 2017 – Pull 38.0% / Middle 37.1% / Oppo 24.9% / wRC+ 118 / 18.7% K

Weird indeed. That statement about Rosario going the other way, and that concept leading to results, is a theory that just took a wrench to the gut in the form of this progression in 2017. A progressive tendency to pull the ball, met with better wRC+ numbers, and a fluctuating strikeout rate that — in the aggregate — is substantially lower than 2016.

Intuition took over as I began to formulate ideas on what exactly happened in this particular case of the missing culprit of success. One stuck, and to my dismay, it’s not as groundbreaking as I had hoped.

Seeing Rosario’s strikeout rate plummet this much, I theorized that staying up the middle, or to the other way, doesn’t always mean actually doing so in a way that results in tangible batted-ball changes. It’s all about the approach itself. By Rosario telling himself to approach the ball with anticipation of hitting it to the left-center gap, he was effectively saying see the ball deeper into the zone. This may have helped his ability to recognize pitches and judge the break on an offspeed pitch better, along with a plethora of other nuances that sum to cuts in his swing and miss tendencies of years prior.

But my theory wasn’t enough to inspire confidence in claim, so I went to an individual that I admired the presentation of at Boston’s Saberseminar, and subsequently connected with on the network that is Twitter: Dan Blewett, host of the Dear Baseball Gods podcast and pitching guru.

I asked him whether it made sense that when Rosario says he is going the other way, it may actually be a larger complex of changes taking place. His response was what I wanted to hear…

“Hitters who are dead-pull commit earlier to pitches, because they have to get their barrel farther out in front of the plate in the same amount of reaction time. This limits pull-hitters to only a small grouping of pitches that they can both hit hard and keep fair.

By taking an opposite-field approach to the plate, Rosario is watching pitches in deeper, and thus keeping his barrel in the hitting zone longer. For someone who was an extreme pull-hitter, ‘opposite field’ is somewhat relative, and lining balls up the middle with authority is a sign that his new approach is working, even if it’s not producing true opposite-field hits.

He’s making himself a vastly tougher out, and it’s a sign that he’s growing as a player.”

– Dan Blewett

The interesting thing about Rosario is that he wasn’t much of a dead-pull hitter last year, but still realized that his production lacked punch with the approach he carried. This concept of him staying toward the middle of the field and the other way is a roundabout way of saying what Dan Blewett points out above — Rosario is making himself a vastly tougher out, and growing as a player. He’s not going the other way more, but that middle/oppo approach allows him to see the ball deeper — fewer strikeouts — and recognize which pitches he can pull productively without creating the dead-pull approach that Blewett implies is futile for most.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens going forward with Rosario’s approach, as he has gotten pull-happy in the month of August, but has been unbelievably productive in the process. With hitting’s mental side as important as its mechanical side, I continue to think his April tweaks to take a left-center approach primed him for development as an asset, even as his batted-ball distribution changes like the weather.

Hearing that a player is trying to go up the middle, or the other way, is too general of a statement to capture all that a player is doing. Next time I hear those four words — going the other way — I’ll be a lot more inquisitive as to what else may actually be happening in the player’s approach. Cycles of adjustments are guaranteed in baseball; player analysis is catching those adjustments and hammering out the what and why.

A version of this post can be found on my site, BigThreeSports.com (to be published 8/27/2017).

I also tweet baseball… pretty much all the time — @LanceBrozdow

 2^nd Base hasn’t been a particularly stacked position in the major leagues in the past five years. Entering the 2015 season, the 2^nd base position was headlined by Jose Altuve and Robinson Cano. The second tier arguably consisted of Ben Zobrist, Neil Walker, Dustin Pedroia, and Ian Kinsler, and maybe Brian Dozier. Then the next level housed names like Jason Kipnis, Daniel Murphy, and maybe DJ LeMahieu. I’m here to analyze what has possibly happened to this group of baseball players in the past few months.

According to the Depth Charts pre-season projections, the top eight second basemen ranked by wOBA were Robinson Cano, Neil Walker, Ben Zobrist, Jose Altuve, Dustin Pedroia, Ian Kinsler, Howie Kendrick, and Chase Utley. The projections are usually somewhat accurate, but if you’ve been following baseball at all this season, just by looking at those names, you know that we’ve found an exception to that.

These are the top 10 second baseman thus far in the 2015 season ranked by wOBA:

If I told you in April that Logan Forsythe would be the 3^rd best second baseman in the league, you would think I’m ridiculous. He came absolutely out of nowhere to raise his BABIP nearly 60 points and raise his ISO 55 points! Joe Panik’s beautiful swing has moved him up to be the 4^th best-hitting 2^nd baseman. Jason Kipnis has shut up all the critics. He took his .310 2014 OBP as confidence going into this year, and now has a wOBA over .400. Danny Espinosa, who has been previously known as a ‘defensive’ second baseman, has skyrocketed his offensive production into a player who Matt Williams is comfortable having run onto the field every day. Cardinals 2B Kolten Wong is pulling the ball more and more every season. He’s also upped his LD% from 19% to 25%. Braves utility-infielder Jace Peterson is doing a bit of hitting in his rookie year, after being traded from San Diego (who, it turns out, could really use him) to the Braves in December. Think back to when I mentioned the tiers up top. Where is Robby Cano on the list above? Where’s Altuve? I don’t see Zobrist, Walker, or Kinsler on this list either. It is not an error.

So we talked about the breakouts at 2nd; now lets talk about the guys who haven’t or haven’t yet lived up to expectations.

Lets start with the guy who all of his fantasy owners hate this year. Robinson Cano. Yeah, the six-time All-Star Robinson Cano. The 32-year-old — the guy who has a wRC+ of 76. This is easily, by far, his worst season of his 11-year career. Why? Lets talk about it.

Cano has raised his Hard% and his Pull% over 4% each! What does jump out at you is that he’s making a ton less contact than he did last year. Actually, the least of his whole career. His Contact% has plummeted down almost 5%. Along with a raised K%, his BABIP has jumped down nearly 50 points.

The next guy is Altuve. Altuve hasn’t been that bad this year, but compared to his 2014 campaign, he’s not playing like Jose Altuve. He’s even fighting with a mild hamstring injury, but in his 287 PA’s, every single one of his numbers are down. His wOBA has decreased .363 to .304. BB% is down, strikeouts are up, OBP and SLG are both way down. He’s swinging more, and making less contact which isn’t a combination that pulls you in a positive direction.

Same can be said for Neil Walker. Almost all his numbers are down. One of the positives that I found, though, is that he’s hitting the ball harder. My prediction is that the .303 wOBA will start to show positive regression. Ian Kinsler isn’t having a horrible season. He’s raised his OBP a bit, but he’s becoming more of a singles hitter, dropping his SLG from .420 to .338.

Almost every starting second baseman in the big leagues has totally changed their style of hitting this year. Guys like Forsythe and Panik, who were projected to be replacement level or below, have made their names rise to the top of many leaderboards. Cano and Altuve’s value have fallen. Here’s your homework: Think of all the 2nd baseman in the major leagues. How many of them have close to similar stats from their projections? Comment down below.

Ryan Howard doesn’t like infield shifts. I’m not making this up, or just surmising it. He said so after recording four outs on balls that probably would have gotten through an unshifted infield:

 “No, I don’t like it at all,” said Howard, who has grown accustomed to seeing four infielders on the right side of the infield when he steps to the plate. “That’s four hits. I mean, again, it’s nothing that I’m doing wrong, I’m hitting the ball hard. It’s just right at guys playing shifts. So, all you can do is continue to swing.”

Back in May, Craig Edwards noted that Jason Kipnis had a rotten 2014 (86 wRC+), likely in part due to an oblique injury in April that affected his performance all year. Kipnis’s 2014 was characterized by an increase in grounders, weak contact, and pulled balls. This season, of course, he’s been a monster (164 wRC+ through June 21, fourth in the American League), in part because, with a healthy oblique, he’s pulling less.

Why, fans and sportswriters ask, can’t more hitters do what Jason Kipnis has done by going the other way? Proliferating infield shifts are taking hits away from the likes of Howard, David Ortiz, and Mark Teixeira. So why don’t those players just hit the ball where they ain’t? I’m not talking about bunting. This is just about pull-happy hitters go the other way, guiding batted balls to the opposite field.

I think pretty much everyone reading this knows the answers why. First, infield shifts are effective against grounders and soft liners, and a batter with fly ball tendencies hits the ball over the shifted infielders more often than not. The Indians’ Brandon Moss is a pronounced pull hitter (48% of batted balls hit to right field) who also hits the ball in the air a lot (0.67 ground ball/fly ball ratio, fifth lowest in the majors). So he goes to the plate trying to hit over the shift. Second, and more significantly, I think, hitting, one hears, is hard. Granted, I never played professional baseball like the people on sportstalk radio who insist that Chris Davis would be a much more productive player if he’d just shorten his swing and go with where the ball’s pitched, dumping singles through the vacated space on the left side of the infield. Changing one’s approach to the plate would seem to have a concomitant risk of decreased production.

But players can and do make adjustments. And, as the case of Kipnis illustrates, those adjustments can lead to better outcomes. How often do batters rely less on pulling the ball, and what does it do to their performance?

To answer this, I looked at every batter who was a semi-regular (which I arbitrarily defined as compiling two-thirds the plate appearances necessary to qualify for the batting title) in 2014 and 2015. (My criteria worked out to 334 plate appearances in 2014 and, depending on the team, 140 or so plate appearances in 2015.) There were, through games of June 21, 186 such players. I calculated their “pull tendency” by subtracting the percentage of balls they hit to the opposite field from the percentage they hit to the pull field. Ryan Howard, for example, has a pull tendency of 31.9% this year, having hit 48.8% of batted balls to right field and 16.9% to left. I then subtracted each player’s 2015 pull tendency from his 2014 pull tendency to arrive at the change, i.e. how much more he’s going the other way in 2015. To determine the effect of the change, I calculated the change in the player’s wRC+ from 2014 to 2015 as well. Here are the 15 players who have most dramatically changed from pulling to going the other way in 2015:

Well now. That’s quite a mix. There’s probably the 2015 poster child for going the other way, Mike Moustakas, leading the way with a vast improvement in wRC+. But the median wRC+ change on the list is negative five points–players who are pulling markedly less are having less, not more, success at the plate. Seven of the fifteen players are having a better year in 2015, while the remaining eight aren’t. Of course, as with any list like this, there are caveats. The change for Moustakas is evidence of a well-executed plan. But you can make a pretty good argument that Carlos Ruiz is pulling less because,at 36, he can’t get around on pitches as he used to, and a fairly airtight argument that Victor Martinez is pulling less because he’s been playing hurt. Danny Santana, he of the .405 BABIP in 2014, was at the top of the 2015 regression list regardless of where he’d hit the ball–a lot more of them were bound to find their way into fielders’ gloves. Josh Harrison is coming off a career year. Alcides Escobar, who cares, the guy’s an All-Star Game starter! But if there’s a pattern there of pull less, hit more, I’m not seeing it.

How about players who have done the opposite–in the face of shifts, they’re pulling the ball more now than they did last year? Here’s the list:

Another mixed bag, with a negligible median change in wRC+ (-2 in this case; seven players doing better, eight doing worse). Pulling the ball more certainly hasn’t hurt Todd Frazier (leading all third basemen in wRC+) or the first two second basemen on the list. By the same token, it’s one of many symptoms of the woes of Robinson Cano (discussed in length by Jeff Sullivan here). As with players pulling less, if there’s a pattern here, that pulling more has a systemic impact, I’m not seeing it.

Admittedly, there are limits to this type of analysis. Hitting isn’t just a product of where the ball is hit. It’s affected by whether it’s hit on the ground or in the air, whether it’s hit hard or soft, whether it’s hit by a healthy batter or an injured one, whether it’s hit off a fastball or an off-speed pitch, and whether it’s hit at all or missed. I looked only at the first comparison: pulling the ball vs. going the other way, because that one characteristic has been harped on by fans and some in the media. And the data indicate that changing one’s approach–going from pulling to hitting to the opposite field, or, for that matter, vice-versa–does not appear to have a systemic change in batting outcomes. It works for some players. It doesn’t work for others. For every Mike Moustakas, it seems, there’s a Todd Frazier, or a David Peralta. When Ryan Howard hits four grounders to Kolten Wong in short right field, turning singles to right into 4-3 putouts, it may frustrate him, but that’s not to say that trying to hit the ball to left wouldn’t frustrate him even more.