Archive for Dee Gordon

Admittedly, this is a bit of a stupid topic. These distinctions are often thrown around with an air of importance that is far from earned. Nobody ever mentions that Hank Aaron had the most RBIs in the 1960s. You don’t need to talk about arbitrary endpoints with the Hammer. Mentioning that a player holds one of these “records” is a bit like saying a guy you are trying to set a friend up with has a great personality. It’s likely that this is covering up for something else like a hat covers a balding head.

(*before you head to the comments to blast me, yes, RBI is an incredibly useless statistic)

But they are fun! Hank Aaron did lead in RBI in the 1960s, but he finished second to Harmon Killebrew in home runs. Growing up into a baseball fan in the 1990s, one of the bigger surprises in this genre of record was the hit leader of that decade: Mark Grace. I’d imagine every Cub fan knows this. In addition, anyone who knows a chatty Cubs fan probably knows this, too. Looking at the most recent decade, there are a few surprises: Miguel Tejada had the most games played and at-bats. Andy Pettitte edged out Randy Johnson for most wins. Johnson, along with Alex Rodriguez, dominated most of the categories.

Moving to the point of this article, here is a quick rundown of compelling and not so compelling races to have the most X of this decade, with two seasons remaining:

WAR

You, the Fangraphs reader that goes into the depths of the Community Research section, probably know who leads this category, despite spending 2010 in A ball. But it is a bit closer than you might have thought. While Trout could conceivably win the position player award while sitting out the next two seasons (Joey Votto is the only player that might topple him in this scenario, and he is 9.1 WAR behind), this is the one major statistical category in which position players and pitchers compete with each other.

If I just jogged your memory of that, you probably know the name that is coming: Clayton Kershaw. Trout leads with 54.4 WAR. Kershaw has 52.1 WAR on the pitching side, but has also accrued 1.8 WAR as a batter. That should count. So Kershaw, at 53.9 WAR, is directly on Trout’s heals. Trout is still the heavy favorite, but Kershaw has a puncher’s chance, especially if another injury befalls Trout.

Totally made up odds: Trout, 98%; Kershaw, 2%

Hits

Jose Altuve has put up four straight 200-hit seasons, but he is 251 off the pace and in 15^th place. No, this title will most likely go Robinson Cano. Cano leads with 1501, and the only players within sniffing distance are similarly on the downside of their primes. Miguel Cabrera is second at 1416, and then there is a slew of players, including Fangraphs favorite Nick Markakis, in the low to mid 1300s.

Cano should clear 150 hits the next two seasons, and if he does, he will not be passed. Cabrera, as bad as he looked at times last season, would be the likely beneficiary of some unforeseen collapse by Cano. Elvis Andrus is the end of that slew of players behind Cabrera. He has 1329 hits, but recorded 191 last season and is significantly younger than everyone in front of him. I’m going to give him sleeper status for this title.

Totally made up odds: Cano, 93%; Cabrera, 5%; Andrus, 2%

Home Runs

Currently, this is an incredibly close race, with four players within five homers of each other at the top of the list. Jose Bautista is first with 272. Edwin Encarnacion and Nelson Cruz are second and third, and then you get to Giancarlo Stanton in fourth place with 267. Other than Miguel Cabrera and the remnants of Albert Pujols, no one else is close. Stanton has to be the favorite, here, but his status is extremely tenuous. First, let’s just get Buatista out of the way. He’s unemployed and several steps below the other players even if he does try to gut out two more seasons.

Without a doubt, it would be shocking if a healthy Stanton didn’t win this. But a healthy Stanton would be at least a little bit of a shock. The once-oft-injured Cruz and Encarnacion are 37 and 35, respectively, but are still mashing and project for mid-to-high 30-something homers apiece. Cruz has played four straight full seasons and E5 has three straight under his prodigious belt. Stanton is projected by Steamer for a literally—but not really literally—bananas number of 53 home runs. The Fans of Fangraphs are more modest, pegging him with only 48. But Stanton is injury prone. You all know that. There is no argument that he is not. So this is a fairly open race.

Totally made up odds: Stanton, 55%; Encarnacion, 25%; Cruz, 20%

RBI

Again, I do know this is a stupid statistic. But artificial endpoints of decades are pretty stupid, too, so this is fitting. This is Miguel Cabrera’s title to lose, and as long as he plays, he should easily win. And guys making the cash Cabrera is due for the next thousand years generally get every opportunity to play. Sitting behind Cabrera’s 860 RBI are Albert Pujols at 806 and Robinson Cano at 789. The aforementioned Edwin Encarnacion and Nelson Cruz round out the top five with 763 and 756 respectively.

If Cabrera falters, this looks like it would be a wide-open race. Pujols achieved the remarkable 100+ RBI season while losing 2.0 WAR last year. He likely will do much worse, but as long as he is playing, he will continue to accrue a decent number of RBI. E5’s Indians outscored the M’s by 68 runs last year and seem to be a better offensive team, but Cano does have a 26 RBI lead. Honestly, this looks like a virtual toss-up if Cabrera doesn’t win, but the idea of Edwin Encarnacion or Nelson Cruz leading the decade in home runs and RBI is rather delicious.

Totally made up odds: Cabrera, 80%; Cano, 7%; Encarnacion, 6%; Cruz, 4%; Pujols, 3%

Stolen Bases

Be honest, which would you rather be known for: a surprise answer to the question “who stole the most bases in the second decade of the new millennium?” or hitting an epic World Series Game Seven home run… for the losing team. Rajai Davis might say porque no los dos? Davis has the most stolen bases this decade with 301. However, he is actually a longshot to keep this title. Davis just signed a minor league deal with the Indians that includes a non-roster invitation to spring training. He will likely struggle to ever get regular playing time again. He’s 37 years old.

This will likely come down to a race between the two guys behind him. Dee Gordon has 278 stolen bases, had 60 last year, and only turns 30 in April. He has a 35 stolen base lead on 3^rd place, which would seem more insurmountable if that person was not arguably a full tick or two faster. Billy Hamilton has 243 stolen bases since coming into the league in 2013, and has been remarkably consistent, stealing one more base each year than the year before. The fans think he’ll do that again this year, hitting 60 stolen bases. Hamilton is over two years younger than Gordon, and might be faster, but the 35 stolen base edge Gordon enjoys makes him the clear favorite.

Totally made up odds: Gordon, 66%; Hamilton 33%; Davis, 1%

Wins

This is likely a two-person race between Max Scherzer and Clayton Kershaw who have 132 and 131 wins respectively. Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke sit enough off the pace at 123 and 122 to make a comeback very improbable absent an injury, but close enough to make a comeback very possible if both players in front of them miss significant time.

Moving to who I give the edge to: there just isn’t a lot separating these two. Scherzer is older, but Kershaw has had a bit more in the way of nagging injuries lately. If it truly were a push going forward, I could just go with Scherzer since he is one ahead at the moment. But I’m going to give Kershaw the ever-so-slight edge because the Dodgers are almost assuredly going to be one of the best teams in baseball the next two years while the Nationals might only have that status for the next season. Verlander gets the nod as more likely spoiler for a similar reason: the Astros are ballers.

Totally made up odds: Kershaw, 45%; Scherzer 43%; Verlander, 7%; Greinke, 5%

Saves

Craig Kimbrel should put this away by midseason. At 291, he ranks 61 ahead of Kenley Jansen and Fernando Rodney, who are tied for second with 230. Aroldis Chapman sits in 5^th with 204. Kimbrel’s consistency and consistently light usage should ensure that he continues to rack up saves the next two seasons. Even a repeat of his comparatively modest 66 saves over the last two seasons would give him a realistic lock on this honor.

If Kimbrel does fall apart, the 30-year-old Jansen would be the likely beneficiary, as he has a much stronger hold on his 9^th inning role than the 40-year-old Rodney. While Kimbrel might have this decade locked down, he will likely fall short in his quest to surpass Rivera’s total from the last decade. Rivera saved 397 games that decade. It should be noted, however, that Kimbrel barely pitched in the majors in 2010 and recorded only one save. On the other hand, he’s already blown one more save than Mariano did all of last decade.

Totally made up odds: Kimbrel, 97%; Jansen, 2%; Rodney, 1%

Strikeouts

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but this is a two-man battle between Max Sherzer and Clayton Kershaw. Only this time, there is a much clearer favorite. Scherzer leads Kershaw 1909 to 1835. He essentially built that entire lead last season when he recorded 66 more strikeouts than the limited Kershaw. But Kershaw’s innings shortfall was not the only thing at play here. Scherzer struck out 1.63 more batters per nine innings. For the decade, Scherzer has a 74 strikeout lead in only 14 1/3 more innings. The only realistic path for Kershaw to overtake Scherzer is injury. Of course, with pitchers, injury is always a legitimate and significant risk.

Behind Scherzer and Kershaw is Justin Verlander with 1670. No one past Verlander has any legitimate shot barring a mass retirement of the some of the game’s best starting pitchers. At the end of the day, this is really a question about health. But for Kershaw to overtake Scherzer, he’d not only need Scherzer to get hurt, but he’d have to stay healthy himself.

Totally made up odds: Scherzer, 79%; Kershaw, 19%; Verlander 2%

Runs

This has been a very positive article, but let’s get a bit negative for a second. Which pitcher will give up the most runs in this decade? A big factor in this, of course, is that giving up a lot of runs is bad, and playing bad usually leads to not playing. You have to be good enough to get the ball on a regular basis, but bad enough to rack up the runs allowed. Our frontrunners are honestly not terrible pitchers. Rick Porcello leads the way with 789 runs allowed. James Shields is just behind with 778 runs allowed. Porcello is 29, started a playoff game last year, and is owed a lot of money through the end of the decade. He also won the Cy Young Award in 2016 while accruing 5.1 WAR on the mound. He should have opportunities to add to this total. Porcello underperforms his peripherals, but only by a little. He is basically good enough to never get moved out of the rotation, and durable enough to throw over 1500 innings this decade, but has a suddenly-not-great-for-the-era ERA of 4.29 over the last eight seasons.

James Shields is slated to maybe start opening day 2018. Unlike Porcello, Shields has been dreadful the past two seasons. Yeah, the White Sox starting pitching this year might be awful. Shields is owed a lot of money in 2018, but 2019 is an option that will only be picked up if Shields has a dramatic turnaround. Thus, there is a bit of a catch-22 here. If Shields plays well enough to keep getting the ball regularly into 2019, it seems unlikely that he’ll chase down Porcello. Of course, this could also come down to injury. If either player gets hurt, the other will very likely take this notorious (dis)honor.

Ubaldo Jimenez sits in 3^rd with 734 runs allowed. He will thankfully have a hard time adding to that total. If Porcello and Shields find themselves with quick hooks and no jobs, there are a few possible dark horses, including Ervin Santana and Jon Lester, who at the very least should get two full seasons of starts barring injury. For this one, I’m just going to put the field as a third choice rather than trying to single out who might suck, but play.

Totally made up odds: Porcello, 60%; Shields, 30%; Field, 10%

Other Interesting Battles

(My favorites in italics)

Games: Robinson Cano, 1264; Alcides Escobar, 1250 (that would be something)

Runs: Ian Kinsler, 785; Miguel Cabrera, 741; Andrew McCutchen, 740; Robinson Cano, 738

Strikeouts: Chris Davis, 1266; Mark Reynolds, 1250; Justin Upton, 1249

HBP: Shin-Soo Choo, 98; Anthony Rizzo, 98; Chase Utley, 92

Games: Tyler Clippard, 576; Luke Gregerson, 551

Innings Pitched: Justin Verlander, 1705; Max Sherzer, 1670.2; Clayton Kershaw, 1656.1

HBP: Charlie Morton, 82; Justin Masterson, 77 (23 in AAA in 2017)

Balks: Clayton Kershaw, 17; Franklin Morales, 15; Johnny Cueto, 13

Bonus Trout Stuff

You will notice that, apart from WAR, Mike Trout was not mentioned at all in this article. Of course, Trout played zero MLB games in 2010 and only 40 in 2011. But he is also an all-around performer. He doesn’t even show up in the top 10 for most counting categories. So for the lazy, here is where Trout ranks in the decade (if among top 30, must be qualified for rate stats):

Triples: T-8^th (40)

Home Runs: T-16^th (201)

Runs: 8^th (692)

RBI: 30^th (569)

Walks: 7^th (571)

Intentional Walks: T-14^th (61)

HBP: T-27^th (55)

Sac Flies: T-16^th (40)

Stolen Bases: 17^th (165)

Batting Average: 6^th (.306)

OBP: 2^nd (.410) (not close to first, Joey Votto, .438)

Slugging%: 1^st (.566) (biggest threat is probably Giancarlo Stanton, at .554)

Trout is about to play his age 26 and 27 seasons to round out the decade. He’ll be an “old 27” with his August birthday. We don’t know how he’ll age. But it is possible that he plays his whole career, a career of an inner-inner-circle Hall of Famer, and never leads a decade in any traditional counting stat. This on top of his frustratingly low MVP totals. If nothing else does, perhaps that should tell you how stupid this whole exercise is, and how stupid rigid benchmarks for greatness are in general. If Trout were born three years earlier, he could have dominated the counting stat leaderboards of this decade. If he played for a better team, he could have 2-3 more MVP awards.

So what does it all mean? Probably not much. If Albert Pujols squeaks out the most BRI of the decade, will that make it less of a disappointment? Does Nelson Cruz having the most home runs over an arbitrary 10-year period mean that he’ll one day be enshrined in Cooperstown? Well, no. However, I hope you had fun. I know that I did.

Each baseball fan has a set of specific events throughout time they remember fondly. Some exist in said group because of their emotional impact on your fandom. Others remain on the peripheral of importance because of a random characteristic that still stands out.

Those peripheral events, for me, are often those I’ve seen on live television. I don’t think of these events often, nor do I keep a record of them, or have some strict guideline for what sticks in my head, but when a story in the present day sparks my memory, a picture often emerges. My teenage years watching baseball were done one of two ways: sitting on the ground in front of my laptop with MLB.tv fading in-and-out, or scouring local stations for a good matchup. These two primary settings allowed for many one-off memories to accumulate.

When I began to think about Pittsburgh Pirates’ outfielder Starling Marte — due to this offseason’s stagnation — I thought back to the first pitch he saw in his major-league career. Just over five years ago, 23-year-old Starling Marte took the first pitch Dallas Keuchel threw on July 26 out of Minute Maid Park. The rarity of that event — a prospect’s debut, leading off a game, first-pitch home run — forces me to remember that bomb whenever Marte steps into a batter’s box. Because I happened to see it live, that memory has stuck.

For the wider population of fans, what now supersedes that milestone is Marte’s run-in with performance-enhancing drugs.  Suspended for 80 games during the 2017 season, this mistake by Marte will couple itself with any other success he has.

Predicting how Marte would fare upon his return during this layoff in 2017 raised some interesting, PED-related questions. Would his power drop? Would his speed deteriorate? What about his overall durability?

Nestled within all those asks is what exactly the effect of PEDs on an athlete’s body is after stopping use. Much more intriguing is this question: does any use at all matter as much as stopping that use? In other words, do the effects of PED use in the first place help prolong success?

I mention this because Marte joins Dee Gordon as the more prominent speed-first users of prohibited substances in the recent years. The drugs Gordon and Marte took were different from my understanding — nandrolone versus a stacked dose with clostebol — but maybe some intrigue exists in the stats before and after use?

The overall comparison doesn’t show us much. Even in what I highlighted with darkened gridlines — slugging percentage and wRC+ — has more noise within it than signal. Two main questions exist, among many others, that don’t have answers.

• What portion of the “before” PED use window contains tainted statistics?
• What portion of the drop is due specifically to the lack of steroids in the body?

But perhaps our intentions with those questions are incorrect. Think back to the question I asked before showing this dataset: do the effects of PED use in the first place help prolong success?

What if the muscle memory and learning that takes place while a player is under the influence of the drug extends beyond the window where a player can run a positive test?

With some high-level Googling, I found one instance where this idea might be a reasonable rabbit hole to dig into (BBC News). Certainty around this topic, however, is impossible, given all the variables. Some selection bias brings us the average fan to Nelson Cruz and Bartolo Colon as examples of this idea. But assuming two players with demonstrable skills outside of steroid use represent a wider population is not an appropriate assumption. We’re left in limbo regarding how much one positive test early on can affect one’s long-term production.

***

Let’s leave the uncertainty around long-term effects of Marte’s steroid use alone for now and focus on what has happened in Marte’s career.

The attribute his value has been tied to for most of his career, like Dee Gordon, is speed. But for Marte, age-induced deterioration of that attribute may be underway as he heads into his 29-year-old season with the Pirates.

It wasn’t too long ago we were concerned about the viability of McCutchen’s long-term impact, yet speed has a much greater weight on the impact of Marte as a player than McCutchen. I remain perplexed as to how Marte intends to turn around this decline in sprint speed as he starts to fall away from elite towards the 27.0 feet-per-second average the standard MLB player possesses.

Marte can still produce with his bat, but after seeing this decrease in peak sprint speed, I wonder if he becomes less reliant on his wheels to buoy his BABIP and the resulting average he’ll post. The Pirates’ outfielder might need to adjust.

To counteract this potential speed regression, Marte might want to adjust back to his approach from 2015, where he popped 19 home runs.

What we do know from that year presides in his tendency to pull the ball above his career average, which resulted in the majority of his home runs landing somewhere near the corner in a park’s left-field seats. He was also more aggressive than he had ever been in his career in 2015, but since, Marte has reverted to a contact-based approach, raising his zone-contact rate by two percent and overall contact rate by three percent.

With all this said, the form and substance of Marte’s swing has been largely the same since the early days of his career. Each of the four videos embedded within the GIF below are base hits to left field for Marte. Instead of focusing on the moments just before contact — where most hitters look identical — focus on his pre-pitch rhythm and timing.

Marte has a unique pulse when it comes to the timing mechanism in his hands, as his bat moves towards the first-base line twice prior to his load. The speed at which he executes this varies slightly based on the pitch, but his front foot’s inward turn and hip rotation remain unaltered from this selection of swing in our four-year sample.

My worry is that pushing Marte towards the 2015 version of himself, with pull-happy tendencies and a little bit more aggression, may not lead to the power result we want. With his speed possibly deteriorating, the balls he rolls over on with his sights set on the bleachers will turn into hits less often. We might want Marte to trade some of his contact for power, but my inclination is that such a trade, at present, is not one-for-one and would result in a net-negative effect.

This contact approach of Marte’s may be the new normal, and I remain worried about what the ceiling of productivity can be if he doesn’t find a second wind in the speed department. Marte can still be an asset to the Pirates, and isn’t a financial burden, but it might be too late to expect 2015’s power-speed combo that had the chance to nudge Marte towards the elite bracket of outfielders in baseball.

Bill Brink of Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that Marte is making up his lost at-bats in the Dominican Winter League for Leones del Escogido. The results, so far, in a small sample have not been great:

.197/.244/.316 in 76 at-bats, with a 21:3 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

Marte’s evolution as a hitter will become clearer as our post-PED sample size increases. The Pirates’ outfield, once considered the best in baseball with McCutchen, Marte, and Polanco, now finds itself in a pickle, especially if Cutch is traded, Marte’s speed continues to trend south, and Polanco can’t stay healthy.

Dee Gordon is a polarizing player. His all-speed, no-power approach on offense has both fans and projection systems divided on what to make of his bat. Is he an elite offensive second baseman? Is he a one-hit wonder that won’t be able to repeat his numbers from 2015? Reasonable people can really disagree on Gordon’s bat.

Reasonable people can also really disagree on Dee Gordon’s defense, and that’s where I intend to focus my analysis today. Dee Gordon led all second basemen with a 6.4 Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), which means he was worth roughly six runs on defense compared to an average second baseman. That doesn’t sound too unreasonable, right? Here’s where things get interesting. Gordon, despite his obvious athleticism, had previously been considered a below-average defender, coming in with a -3.4 UZR last year at second base. He had been a massively below-average defender at shortstop (where he played a few years ago before moving to second base full-time in 2014), so there are years of data painting him as a minus defender relative to other middle infielders.

In 2015, Gordon’s advanced defensive metrics took a massive jump forward. Dee Gordon improved by exactly 10 runs according to UZR, which is roughly an entire win difference thanks to his defense. Which defender is the real Dee — the one that flailed around in 2014, or the elite defender from 2015?

Let’s find some historical comparisons, and see what they can teach us about the repeatability of Dee Gordon’s defensive statistics.

We know Dee Gordon improved 10 runs defensively at second base to become one of the best defenders in the league at the position. Let’s take a look at the past 10 years, and find all second basemen that improved by at least 10 runs in UZR from year to year and had a UZR of at least 5 in the improved year. There are 16 player seasons that fit this criteria. Excluding those that didn’t play enough innings to qualify at second, 11 player seasons were left fitting the criteria. The numbers are presented below, along with the UZR that the player recorded the season following his improved year.

Among the second basemen in the last 10 years that made a big jump into the elite of the defensive statistics, on average those players lost almost nine runs of UZR the following season after the leap. The group lost about 60% of the improvements they had made the following season, indicating that a big jump in UZR for a second baseman is unlikely to signal a new level of performance. Among the qualifying group, not a single second baseman improved their UZR the following year again and only one member of the group, Placido Polanco in 2009, regressed by less than four runs.

However, there is a slight bright side. Only one member of the group had a UZR that was lower the year after “the leap” than before the improvement, indicating that taking a leap of over 10 runs of UZR means you almost certainly have improved as a defender. It’s just not by nearly as much as you would think from the leap-year UZR, but the players kept about 40% of the improvement they made in their improved year.

What does this mean for the Marlins’ speedy second baseman? While Dee Gordon’s huge jump in UZR this year means he’s almost certainly a better defender than he was two years ago, the improvement to his talent is likely only modest and not nearly what you would hope for after his great 2015 defensively. To those who pointed to Dee Gordon’s greatly improved UZR this season as a reason to believe he’s made big strides as a defender, I’ll sadly have to point out that we can expect Dee Gordon to return much closer to the mediocre defender he was in 2014 than the star he was in 2015.

 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.