Getting Offensive

As the first tenth of the baseball season concludes this week, the annual transition from screams of “small sample size!” to admissions of “that’s a real trend!” begins. Right now, I like to think we’re somewhere in between these two, in a “well, maybe that means something” phase of the season. For analysts, being able to discern actual patterns from early season flukes takes a whole lot of conjecture and a small leap of faith. So I invite you to leap with me as we dissect early offensive trends that might not actually mean anything, but for now deserves our consideration.

Runs are down across baseball.  This statement should come as a shock to nobody, as the decline of offense is pretty well established at this point.  Last year the average lineup scored 4.07 runs per game, the lowest figure for a full season since 1978 (in 2015 so far it’s up a bit to 4.22 per game).

Despite offense declining around the league, the AL East (minus the Rays) continues to be a division associated with scoring a lot of runs.  Part of this is due to the reputation the Rogers Centre, Camden Yards, Fenway Park, and Yankee Stadium each carry for being offense-inflating environments, but the park factor data suggests this argument holds little weight.

The Blue Jays, Orioles, Red Sox, and Yankees have made building dynamic offenses a point of emphasis, often to the detriment of their pitching staffs.  The Blue Jays boast the best offense in baseball so far and start former All-Stars 1-5 in the lineup.  Apart from Chris Tillman, who served as a replacement for Justin Verlander two years ago, the last Orioles starting pitcher selected to the All-Star Game was Mike Mussina in 1999.  This past winter, the Red Sox signed the two most expensive free agent hitters on the market, Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval.  The Yankees are just a few years removed from four straight top-two finishes in runs scored. These four teams play the highest scoring games in all of baseball (runs scored + allowed) and boast top-ten offenses themselves (runs scored). Runs abound in the AL East.

Offense at a Glance

I didn’t expect to be calling the Yankees a top-ten offense at any point this season, much less the second best offense in baseball.  At best, I thought the lineup might be surprisingly competent and five games into the year, competence looked like it might be too lofty a goal. But in the ten-plus games since, they’ve completely rebounded offensively, eliciting flashbacks to Yankee lineups past and dare I say, hope for the remainder of the year? So how have they been doing it? What do we know about the Yankees offense through 1/10 of the season?

Adam Dunn, Jack Cust, and Russell Branyan were famous “Three True Outcomes” (TTO) hitters, for whom nearly half their at-bats ended in strikeouts, walks, or home runs, without involving the defense.  Often these three results go hand in hand, as players who swing hard tend to whiff a lot and players who work deep counts put themselves at risk of striking out.

Right now the Yankees are the Adam Dunn of teams.  They are hitting home runs, striking out, and walking at high rates.  Summing up the SO%, BB%, and HR%, the Yankees rank third in baseball in TTO% at 35%.

With the hitters they have, a high TTO% should come as no surprise.  Chase Headley, Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez, and Brian McCann at this point in their careers fit the profile, prompting Nick Ashbourne to compare Alex Rodriguez to the legend of Adam Dunn earlier this week.

The team has a league-leading fly ball rate, a conscious strategy as a left-handed heavy lineup playing in Yankee stadium.  As a result they are also sporting a below-average BABIP, but if they keep up their bottom-of-the-barrel line drive percentage, the BABIP should not be expected to rise significantly.

Barring any significant injuries, the Yankees will continue to be a “three true outcome” offense for the remainder of the year.

Lineups

Nearly every team in the league relies on platoons now. For some teams that means bullpens featuring multiple LOOGY’s to face power-hitting lefties, or in the case of the Yankees, two almost completely different lineups for left-handed and right-handed starting pitchers.

While the Yankees can’t claim to start three hitters currently as talented as José Bautista, Edwin Encarnación, and Josh Donaldson, they make up for it somewhat in their versatility in handedness. And as a team of hitters past their prime, the Yankees will take whatever advantages they can get.  Brian Cashman’s kink for “aging men who go both ways” allowed the Yankees to field an opening day lineup featuring three switch-hitters in the heart of the order (Beltrán, Teixeira, and Headley). Beltrán promptly forgot how to hit and was appropriately moved down in the order. But the flexibility of three switch-hitters, a few platoons, and a balanced bench gives Joe Girardi a leg up on opposing managers matchup-wise, allowing him to play percentages and outmaneuver managers in the late innings.

Against right-handed pitchers, the lineup features eight left-handed hitters (discounting rest days). This should serve as a pretty significant advantage against most teams, as the majority of pitchers throw right-handed. They also carry right-handed hitter Chris Young on their bench, who I termed earlier this week a platoon weapon, to counter to any left-handed reliever opposing teams call on late in games.

Splitting Hairs

Based on the handedness of the starting lineups alone, the Yankees were expected to hit much better against right-handed pitchers this year.  But then they laid a major beatdown on lefty and former Cy Young award winner David Price and that got me wondering if this was actually the case.

No! In fact it was the exact opposite of what I expected.  The Yankees are wearing out left-handed pitching.  They have an OPS of well over .800 vs. left handed pitchers and despite hitting a modest 3% better than league average vs. righties, the Yankees are hitting a staggering 32% above league average vs. lefties.  And yes, tagging David Price for eight runs in less than three innings this week helped those numbers, but remember the Yankees got to Clay Buchholz, a righty, for a similar line earlier this season.

The immediate counters to this are that the numbers are skewed by (1) small sample size and (2) the left-handed starters are worse pitchers.  For the first, I refer you back to the top of the article, and for the second, the left-handed starters the Yankees faced seem to be similar in quality to the righties.

RHP: Hutchison, Dickey, Kelly, Buchholz, Gonzalez, Norris, Karns, Odorizzi, Andriese, Simon, Sanchez

LHP: Norris, Miley, Chen, Lobstein, Price

The Yankees bats seemed to perk up since starting this road trip in Baltimore and I’d argue that the right-handed starters they’ve faced since were worse than the lefties.

Accepting for the moment that this massive split difference is not a massive fluke, let’s dive deeper.  As an above average hitting team against both lefties and righties we’d expect the Yankees to be taking advantage of their platoons.  Left-handed hitters should be beating up right-handed pitching and the right-handed hitters should be beating up left-handed pitchers.

Once again, I sit on a throne of lies.  So far, the Yankees have been showing some level of reverse splits against both left-handed and right-handed pitchers.  In right-on-right matchups, they are hitting an otherworldly 88% above league average and in left-on-left matchups, they are at a comparatively boring, yet still crazy, 43% above league average.

Enjoying this great success from reverse splits is tremendous, but the issue that arises here is the small sample size.  These RvR or LvL matchups comprise 29% of the plate appearances the Yankees have taken this year, a sign that Joe Girardi has been succeeding in his effort to exploit platoons.  But the runs produced from these at bats are closer to 35%, an unsustainable disparity.

In 2014, the percentage of reverse split runs and percentage of reverse split plate appearances were almost exactly the same (29.0% and 29.7% respectively).  This RvR and LvL success has likely been fueled by flukishly-high BABIP so far, take A-Rod’s .389 BABIP off righties.  So we should see a drop-off in these number in the coming weeks.

While the BABIP gods smite the Yankees in one area, they should boost the production of another key split.  Of the four pitcher/batter permutations, the Yankees have struggled the most so far as left handed hitters facing right handed pitchers.  52% of Yankee plate appearances so far have been of this variety, yet a BABIP of .244 in these matchups has left them with an OPS 23% below league average and an AVG near the Mendoza line.

As the season goes along and the sample size grows, the Yankees offense should produce at a similar rate, but the production will begin coming from the spots we expected it to come from all along.

Photo by Tommy Gilligan/USA Today Sports Images