I’m sure last season didn’t feature more statistically puzzling performances than any other season, but I did notice them more. One of my resolutions heading into this fantasy baseball season was to not lose track of those seemingly fluky performances, but rather to track the players in question to see if they could do the improbable for yet another season.
Perhaps no player is more enigmatic than Didi Gregorius. For reasons I will explain shortly, his power output from 2016 — his first season with the Yankees — seemed utterly unsustainable. So last season, all Gregorius did was hit five more home runs in 27 fewer plate appearances and increase is home run-to-flyball ratio (HR/FB) by nearly two percentage points. Heading into this season, I doubled down on my disbelief. So naturally, Gregorius has dominated the first week-and-a-half of play. Heading into Monday’s slate of games, he ranked third among all players in Roto value (per ESPN’s Player Rater) and second in fantasy points using CBS’ default settings.
After 2016, I dismissed Gregorius’ 20-homer status as an artifact of playing home games at Yankee Stadium, but he reversed his home/road splits in 2017, posting a higher Iso and HR/FB in away games than in his own park. And if you go the next step, as I did, and figure that Gregorius fattened up his road stats at hitter-friendly AL East parks in Toronto and Baltimore, then you, too, have taken a wrong turn. For one thing, Rogers Center was not as amenable to homers last season as it has been in recent years. Also, Gregorius posted a 10.7 percent HR/FB ratio at Rogers Center and Oriole Park at Camden Yards last year, which paled in comparison with his 12.1 percent ratio for the entire season.
While park factors fail as an explanation for Gregorius’ power output, his batted-ball profile is equally unhelpful as a source of clues. Over 2016 and 2017, there were 131 qualified batters, and only four of them had a hard contact rate lower than Gregorius’ 23.8 percent. It’s not as if he excelled at avoiding soft contact, either. Among the same pool of hitters, Gregorius’ soft contact rate of 22.0 percent was the 13th-highest, placing him in the top 10 percent. Of the 225 hitters who had at least 500 batted balls over those two seasons, only 16 hit with a lower average exit velocity.
Perhaps Gregorius gets significant mileage out of his flyball tendencies, given that he sported a healthy 42.0 percent flyball rate over the last two years. Gregorius was one of just 46 players to launch more than 200 flyballs between 2016 and 2017, but he ranked last among this group in average flyball distance.
Just maybe the nether reaches of this leaderboard can help us solve the mystery of Gregorius’ power. Though the third-year Yankee averaged just 303 feet per flyball, during the same period, Mookie Betts, Anthony Rendon and Jose Ramirez all averaged 311 feet or fewer. However, each of those three have benefited from pulled flyball rates that were well above the major league average of 23.1 percent. Betts clocked in with a 29.0 percent rate, while Rendon and Ramirez followed with rates of 28.5 percent and 27.5 percent, respectively. Gregorius’ pull tendencies were less pronounced, as he compiled a 26.3 percent rate. Despite this, his HR/FB ratio of 1o.3 percent was higher than either Betts’ (10.2 percent) or Ramirez’ (9.8 percent).
So to summarize, Gregorius doesn’t make much hard contact or avoid soft contact, and while he hits a lot of flyballs, he doesn’t hit them far. Over the last two seasons, he has hit more home runs than any shortstop other than Corey Seager and Francisco Lindor. Yet in terms of his batted-ball profile, he has far more in common with Jorge Polanco, who hit just 13 home runs in 133 games last season. xStats seems to agree with the comparison, as it estimates that Gregorius should have had 15.2 home runs in 570 plate appearances, while Polanco should have had 13.6 homers over 544 plate appearances. Over 2016 and 2017 combined. Gregorius’ total xHR is 27.1 — or nearly 18 fewer than he actually hit.
Gregorius defied the odds of staving off regression last season, even though he was basically the same type of hitter as he was the year before. In his small sample of 10 games so far in 2018, he is outdoing himself, though he is now looking like a different hitter. Gregorius has been far more disciplined, swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone at a respectable 32.1 percent rate, after he had exceeded a 40 percent rate in his first two years in pinstripes. He is also hitting flies at a 48.3 percent rate and making hard contact far more frequently (37.9 percent rate).
Then again, there are currently 58 qualified hitters who have hard contact rates of at least 40 percent, which is a good reminder to not take the extremes of small samples too seriously. The longer track record suggests that Gregorius is headed for a fall, yet it also suggests that he is somehow able to produce power despite the lack of a power hitter’s profile.
It seems unlikely that he will sustain such a high hard-contact rate, and over time, he may revert to his typical flyball rate. For those reasons, it’s not a bad time to put Gregorius on the market. Yet despite all indications suggesting otherwise, I’m not completely convinced he won’t reach the 25-homer threshold again. I don’t know how he did it last year, but I’ll be watching Gregorius closely this year in the event that he defies the odds for a third straight season. If he does, I’ll be determined to figure out exactly how he does it.
I’ll be undergoing the same exercise for several other players, and I’ll be introducing them and their strange statistical feats in this space in the weeks to come.
Streaming Starting Pitcher Update
As I mentioned in a column last week, I will also be tracking my weekly streaming decisions for starting pitchers in the Tout Wars mixed auction league and in my TGFBI league. For now, I will have to give myself an incomplete grade on last week’s FAAB pickups of Ben Lively and Jake Junis. I targeted both as two-start pitchers, and both lost their second starts due to rotation changes forced by weather-related postponements.
I started Lively in place of Tyler Anderson in Tout Wars and in place of Marco Estrada in TGFBI, and in both cases, it wound up being a swap of one-start pitchers. The move was a clear net loss in TGFBI, as Estrada picked up a win (and Lively didn’t), recorded two more strikeouts and would have provided a lower ERA and WHIP. The trade-off in Tout Wars was a little murkier, as Anderson did not get a win and notched one less strikeout than Lively. While the Phillies’ righty turned in a decent outing, Anderson’s six scoreless innings would have looked nice on my active roster.
Here is how all three pitchers stacked up last week.
Lively L, 5.2 IP, 6 H, 2 ER, 1 BB, 5 K, 3.18 ERA, 1.24 WHIP at NYM
Anderson ND, 6 IP, 4 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 4 K, 0.00 ERA, 0.67 WHIP at SD
Estrada W, 6 IP, 5 H, 1 ER, 1 BB, 7 K, 1.50 ERA, 1.00 WHIP at TEX
On the other hand, starting Junis over Mike Foltynewicz in TGFBI looks like a solid move in retrospect. In his lone start, Junis outperformed Foltynewicz in ERA and WHIP, and both pitchers earned a win. Foltynewicz’ only edge was getting two more strikeouts.
Junis W, 7 IP, 3 H, 0 ER, 1 BB, 6 K, 0.00 ERA, 0.57 WHIP at DET
Foltynewicz W, 5.1 IP, 4 H, 1 ER 2 BB, 8 K, 1.69 ERA, 1.13 WHIP vs. WAS
I did not add any starting pitchers via FAAB in this week’s bidding, but I am starting Lively and Junis once again, as they are projected to make two starts in Week 3. In TGFBI, it will be a Junis vs. Foltynewicz battle again, as the latter will ride the pine for me. Lively is starting in place of reliever Jose Alvarado, who I just acquired with a FAAB bid. In Tout Wars, Lively took the rotation spot of Sal Romano, who is scheduled to make one start against the Cardinals. After a rough outing against the Reds on Monday, Lively may need a strong rebound at the Rays this Sunday in order to make my decision to start him pay off. Junis has given himself some breathing room with his seven scoreless innings against the Mariners to start off his week.
Statistical credits: FanGraphs, Baseball Savant.