Archive for Ryan Braun

The player that all Milwaukee Brewers fans, and baseball fans for that matter, should be watching most closely this spring is Eric Thames. Thames, after three incredible seasons in the KBO, signed a three-year, $16-million deal to man first base for the Brewers. The front office likes what they see from the 2015 KBO MVP, but admittedly did not scout him in person while he was playing overseas; instead, they relied on video to make their assessment of his game. I’ll admit, I can’t wait to see Thames play this year; the mystery, concerns, and potential all make for great theater, but there is one question that keeps haunting me at night: How do former MLB payers fare when they play overseas and then return? As much as this post is about Thames, it is also about those few players who have done what he is doing.

I approached this by looking at all the major-league players who have played in both Korea and Japan over the past 10 years. I could have gone further back to the days when Cecil Fielder was playing in Japan, but the game, both in North America and across the Pacific, has changed significantly since then. The argument could be made that the game has changed significantly over the past 10 years — it changes every season — but that is the beauty of baseball.

I wanted to isolate Korea only, but, perhaps not surprisingly, there were too few players to make anything of that. Out of the several hundred total players in both these leagues over the past 10 years, only a total of 11 players who began their career in MLB returned to MLB after an overseas hiatus. That’s 11 between the KBO AND NPB. 11! Four players from the KBO and seven from NPB. Here’s a graph that shows their names and WAR before and after their careers in Japan and Korea:

(Numbers courtesy of baseball-reference.com)

The outcome for these players is, well, not good. A select few players like Lew Ford and Chad Tracy carry the “pre-Japan/Korea WAR” section thanks to longer, successful careers in MLB before they changed leagues. It also seems unfair to compare these players to each other due to their careers, or lack thereof, upon their return. For example, Ford’s 79 plate appearances are incomparable to Wilson Valdez’s 966. But, in every case, the story arch is the same: Begin their professional baseball career in North America, make it to the majors as a 20-something, decline at the major- and minor-league level, go to Japan/Korea, return to North America in a very limited capacity and fail to make an impact with a major-league-affiliated team.

If the careers of these 11 players is a trend, then Eric Thames is in for a lot of trouble.

But there is reason to believe that Thames is the exception to the rule. Will Franta wrote a convincing Community Research article about the reason to believe that Eric Thames will do well. Additionally, various projections believe that Thames could be anywhere from a 1.2 to 2.2 WAR player with mid- to high-20 home-run totals and an above-average wRC+. Dave Cameron wrote an article analyzing the projections for Thames and concluded that he has the potential to be “the steal of the winter,” and for three years and $16 million, that could very well be true.

But there are factors going against Thames. It isn’t all too often professional players find their footing at the major-league level in their 30s (Thames will be 30 on Opening Day). Plus, with several other corner infielders in the form of Hernan Perez, Travis Shaw, Jesus Aguilar and others who could fill in at first if need be such as Ryan Braun and Scooter Gennett, a team in the middle of a rebuild might not completely be opposed to disposing the incumbent starting first baseman if another star emerges. Even comparing career KBO and NPB players to their transitions to MLB, we can see that there are a lot more Tsuyoshi Nishiokas than Jung-ho Kangs, which is why players like Kang, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideo Nomo, and Yu Darvish are lauded when they succeed in the majors.

I believe that Eric Thames will not be like the 11 others who, by and large, failed in their returns. Thames is intriguing and there is a lot to like about him — and a lot to worry about with him. There are pros and cons to his game. I believe that he will be a great addition to a team that, honestly, could afford to wait for him to assimilate completely to the game.

We are reaching the end of the 2016 fantasy-baseball season, which means two things: 1) It’s time to look ahead to next season a bit, and 2) the sample sizes on many metrics are either stabilized or right around the corner from stabilizing.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few of players who are sure to be trendy draft picks in 2017, and see what their potential downfalls might be. This is not to say to avoid these players, but rather to spot a potential weakness so that if you do draft this player, and they start to struggle you can maybe know why, and see if it is a recurring issue, instead of just a bit of bad luck. Let’s meet our contestants:

Rougned Odor

In many ways Rougned Odor has had his coming-out party this season. He has hit 31 home runs through 135 games, adding in 12 steals, to go along with a .282 batting average, and strong production (85 runs and RBI each). He’s been the fifth-best second baseman by the ESPN player rater, and that’s with two players (Daniel Murphy and Jean Segura) with multiple positions above him in the ranks. He even got famous on the national scene with his punch heard round the hot-take tables in May.

However, when looking at his plate discipline, it has somehow got even worse than it was last year. His walk rate has dropped to 3.0 percent (17 walks all season!), while his strikeout rate has climbed above 20 percent (20.9, to be exact). His swing rate on pitches outside the zone is seventh in all of baseball, while his contact on those pitches outside the zone isn’t even in the top 80. That’s a dangerous duo. Talented players who hit the ball as hard as Odor can sustain success while flailing that much for a little while, but in the long haul, it almost always burns you. Odor could certainly make strides to improve his discipline, but coming off the season he is having, why is he going to try to change anything? He may well need a rough season, or at least rough couple of months, to admit he needs to fix the holes in his swing, and you don’t want to deal with that when he does.

Jon Lester

With a record of 16-4 and a 2.51 ERA, Lester is having arguably the best season of his career. He’s a candidate for the Cy Young, and currently trails only Noah Syndergaard and teammate, Kyle Hendricks, in the race for the lowest ERA in all of baseball. There are plenty of signs for regression, though.

For starters, Lester is 32, and while left-handed pitchers seem to age like a fine wine sometimes, that’s only because we forget about the guys who crash and burn and are out of the league by 34. Now Lester is showing no real signs of aging, but he also has signs of regression elsewhere.

His left-on-base rate is currently leading all qualified pitchers, at 85.5 percent. That’s more than 10 percent higher than his career rate, and by far the highest percent of his career. That’s especially amazing considering Lester can’t even throw to first base, meaning runners should be moving around the bases faster on him if anything. He is also one of the FIP-ERA leaders, thanks to a well below-average opponent BABIP (.257).

There’s also the fact that, while not by a huge margin, Lester’s strikeout rate has also dropped this season, while the rest of the league is striking out more batters than ever. If you’re already going to get some regression in terms of ERA and wins, you best not be losing strikeouts, as well.

I don’t think Lester is going to fall off a cliff, but I also don’t think he’ll be repeating his 2016 performance next year.

Michael Fulmer

We’ll start with the most obvious candidate for overdrafting. Fulmer will be a 23-year-old, (likely) coming off an American League Rookie of the Year Award, and pitching for a strong Tigers team. He may well win the AL ERA crown, and will easily have a winning record. Heck, he’s got an outside shot at a Cy Young in what has been a weak year for AL pitchers.

That being said, there are some definite weak spots in his profile, the most obvious being his FIP-ERA. If one were to simply go to the FIP-ERA leaderboard — a good spot to at least start to find potential regression candidates — Fulmer’s name is sitting there in fourth, trailing only Kyle Hendricks (borderline historic ERA), Brandon Finnegan (a guy who would have certainly made this list if he were famous enough), and Ian Kennedy (a professor at Hogwarts in the baseball offseason).

It’s more than just the FIP with Fulmer, though. His left-on-base rate is over 80 percent (81.3, to be exact), and his opponent BABIP is just .251. He allows over 30 percent hard-hit rate and his line-drive rate allowed is nearly 20 percent, which while not terrible, do not portend a Cy Young winner.

With Fulmer, it’s more an accumulation of slights rather than one big one, combined with the fact that he will be an extremely trendy pick. There’s no reason to believe he won’t finish the year 13-8 with a 3.35 ERA and 140 strikeouts, but you’ll have to pay for much better stats than that to land him.

Ryan Braun

Like all of the players on this list, Braun is having one of his best seasons in 2016, which is saying something for the six-time All-Star. Braun is hitting .310 with 27 home runs, both of which are his highest since 2012. He has also stolen 14 bases, and only been caught three times, impressive for a 32-year-old.

But it’s not Braun’s age that is troubling (although it is obviously worth remembering come draft day); it’s his ground-ball rate. Braun is seventh in all of baseball in ground-ball rate, surrounded by names like Jonathan Villar and Cesar Hernandez. He has hit ground balls on 55.6 percent of the balls he has put in play in 2016, and has only hit fly balls on 25.4 percent. Because of that, it’s hard to imagine his home-run totals staying as high as they are right now in 2017.

Braun is currently sporting a HR/FB rate of 28.4 percent, highest in the major leagues. Ask Jose Abreu owners what it is like to own the reigning HR/FB rate champion. Here’s how the last four HR/FB rate champions fared the next season:

2012 Adam Dunn – 41 HRs; 2013 Adam Dunn – 34 HRs

2013 Chris Davis – 53 HRs; 2014 Chris Davis – 26 HRs

2014 Jose Abreu – 36 HRs; 2015 Jose Abreu – 30 HRs

2015 Nelson Cruz 44 HRs; 2016 Nelson Cruz 35 HRs (with 18 games to go)

Only Chris Davis fell off the earth, but none of the four went up. If you’re buying on Braun’s power, you’re basically buying at its highest point, which is never a good idea. Especially with a 32-year-old.

Jose Fernandez

Yes, we are getting a little bit into “snake eating his own tail,” by turning advanced metrics against Jose Fernandez, after spending all of the first couple months using the advanced numbers to show a turnaround was imminent, but it was foolish to ignore Fernandez’s biggest weakness: his line-drive rate allowed.

Opponents are hitting line drives off Fernandez 29.3 percent of the time in 2016, by far the highest percent among qualified pitchers, and a rate that tops even Freddie Freeman, the 2016 league-leader in line-drive rate.

Part of that can be explained by the fact that Fernandez throws so hard, that of course the ball is going to come out faster — that’s just physics. It also isn’t as big a deal to allow such a high line-drive rate, when you also have, by far, the highest strikeout rate in the big leagues this season (34.9 percent). It doesn’t matter how hard you hit it, if you simply can’t hit it.

However, that line-drive rate certainly helps to explain the fact that opponents have a BABIP of .341 off Fernandez this year, a figure that would seem due for some regression in favor of Fernandez if we missed looking at the full picture. Some 2017 drafters may see Fernandez’s .341 BABIP and his 2.27 FIP and assume that his 2017 ERA will drop into the low 2.00s. If Fernandez keeps allowing line drives at the rate he has this season, there’s no reason to think his ERA will drop at all. Now drafting a player with an ERA of 3.00 and the best strikeout rate in baseball is still never a bad idea, but if batters start to elevate their swings against Fernandez, while maintaining that same hard contact, Jose could see his home-run rate jump up quite a bit, even when pitching in pitcher-friendly Marlins Park.

Fernandez allowed just as high a line-drive rate in his 11 starts in 2015, and while some of it may still be noise, it is something to keep an eye on. Especially if you have Fernandez in a long-term keeper league, and he eventually makes a move to somewhere like Fenway where the stadium might be a lot less forgiving than in Miami.

After watching Nelson Cruz this year and all the noise he has been making, on top of a recent report by Buster Olney stating, “The average distance of the fly balls pulled by Ryan Braun this season is down 42 feet, from 302 to 260…”, it inspired me to look up the numbers for players suspended in the Biogenesis case. The big four suspended were Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, Nelson Cruz, and Jhonny Peralta. Other position players involved and suspended were Everth Cabrera, Jesus Montero, Francisco Cervelli, and Jordany Valdespin.

This article will focus on the big four with the exception of A-Rod because he has been suspended all season. Obviously enough this is a small sample size so take heed. I will be making a couple of assumptions, the main one being that these players had been using steroids for at least 3 years (2010-2012) prior to their being caught and suspended. The other assumption being that enough time has passed for the effects of the steroids to have worn off and that their bodies/abilities are back to their more natural state.

The main thing that jumps out at you is that Cruz and Peralta are statistically putting up some of the best numbers of their careers (without a doubt, top 3)! Braun, however, is having his worst season of the 4 above, while Peralta and Cruz both are having their most powerful seasons yet. Their HR/FB rates are each at their highest as well as their ISO numbers, while again Braun’s are at his worst of the 4 seasons. Looking at WRC+ and OFF, Peralta is having his 4th best season ever, Cruz is having his 2nd best ever, and Braun is having the worst season of his career to date (with the possible exception of 2008).

Using ESPN’s hittrackeronline.com I looked up each player’s True Distance on home runs this year as well as the average exit speed velocity of their home runs. Ryan Braun has lost 3 mph which has correlated to a shortage of almost 20 feet on his balls. Nelson Cruz has lost about 2 mph and 20 feet off his home run balls from his peak of the four years. Jhonny Peralta, on the other hand, is showing his best numbers this year.

So what does all this mean? In summary, I believe the main thing we can take away from this is that each player who used steroids should be assessed on a case by case basis. Every player is affected differently. We cannot group all steroid users together. Using the above statistics as proof, after being charged in the Biogenesis case, 2 players are having among the best seasons of their careers while another is having his worst. In addition the best all-around athlete and youngest of the 3 (so therefore closest to his prime) is the one who is struggling most, Ryan Braun! Whether it is the HOF vote, or evaluating future value of perceived steroid users, we can’t lump them all into the same group and assume that they will automatically decline. Yes, using steroids is absolutely cheating, however it doesn’t necessarily mean that those players wouldn’t have been just as productive had they chosen legal supplements or nothing at all.