USATSI_9495819_168381444_lowres

What to make of Chad Green’s high home run rate

Yankees’ rookie Chad Green is starting to get noticed. A week ago, here on BP Bronx, Kenny Ducey wrote about Green and his dominant win over the Blue Jays. Green went seven shutout innings allowing just two hits, while striking out 11 in that August 15 start, and on Sunday Green followed that up with a six-inning, one-run, five-strikeout tough-luck loss to the Angels.

Green now owns a 3.66 ERA, along with a 1.22 WHIP, and maybe most impressively, a 10.30 K/9 rate. Green looks like he’s going to be a staple in the rotation for the remainder of the season, and if he keeps up the good work, could lock down a spot in the 2017 Yankee rotation.

For as good as Green has been, however, there’s one very noticeable number on his stat sheet: home runs allowed.

Green has allowed eight home runs in just 39 1/3 innings this season, a HR/9 rate of 1.83 that would rank fourth-highest in all of baseball if Green were a qualified pitcher. Home runs account for 12 of the 18 runs Green has allowed all year, an absurd rate even in the modern, home run-driven run scoring environment of the league in 2016.

So, is this merely a fluke, or is there a bigger issue at hand? Let’s break it down:

Are the short porches of Yankee Stadium to blame?

Whenever a Yankee pitcher deals with home run problems, the first thought is always going to be whether the the shallow porches down the right and left field lines are the cause.

With Green the answer is pretty straightforward: No.

Green has allowed only one of his eight home runs in Yankee Stadium this season, with the other seven coming while pitching on the road. In fact, Green’s home ERA is a tidy 1.76 in his 15.1 Yankee Stadium innings. The only home run Green has allowed in The (New) House That Ruth Built was a leadoff home run to Curtis Granderson in his August 3 start against the Mets. The ball came off the bat at just 97.1 mph and traveled just 329 feet (per ESPN home run tracker), by far Granderson’s shortest home run of the season, so Yankee Stadium was certainly to blame in that case, but it can hardly take credit for the entirety, or even a decent portion, of Green’s high home run total.

Is this an issue Green dealt with regularly in the minor leagues?

One thing that might worry Yankee fans a bit with Green is that he lacks any prospect pedigree. Never ranked by any sort of prospect publication outside of grabbing the 29th-best prospect in the much-maligned Detroit Tigers minor-league system in 2014 (again, that’s 29th-best in Detroit alone, not all of baseball), Green made his way to the majors very much under-the-radar of most scouts. Now that hardly means Green can’t go on to a successful career, but it’s worth noting.

That being said, Green never had any issues with the long ball in the minor leagues.

In fact, preventing home runs was his biggest strength, as he allowed a mere three home runs in 94.2 Triple-A innings for the RailRiders of Scranton/Wilkes-Barre this season. This was hardly divergent from his minor league career, either, as Green allowed a total of 21 total home runs in 394 minor league innings. That’s a HR/9 rate of 0.48, or less than a third of his current major-league HR/9 rate.

Is Green being victimized on one certain pitch that maybe isn’t up to the big-league level?

Of the eight home runs Green has given up, six have come against his four-seam fastball, and one each came off his sinker and splitter, according to Brooks Baseball. Of the four possible explanations offered here, this is the only one that is actually troubling. Green throws his four-seamer less than an average starter might, relying on the pitch 39.14 percent of the time, but it’s still the pitch he uses most and trusts the most, meaning it will come out when he is behind in the count. With that in mind, the fact that opposing hitters are slugging .581 off Green’s four-seamer in his time in the major leagues is a bit worrisome. Of course that slugging percentage is being driven, hard, by the six home runs, as he has only allowed two other extra-base hits off the fastball, and a .258 batting average overall, both of which are respectable enough for a four-seamer.

So, how much of this can we write off to small sample size?

The three-word phrase most commonly used to explain baseball phenomena – like the fact the nearly one in four fly balls (24.2 percent to be exact) that Chad Green has allowed in 2016 have left the park – strikes again. And with good reason. Not a single qualified pitcher in baseball this season has a HR/FB rate over 20 percent, let alone above 24 percent where Green sits.

Looking at Green’s game log, it becomes clear that one game, and really one inning, was the real cause of this inflated home run rate, as well.

In his third career major-league start, against Cleveland on July 8, Green got smacked for seven runs in 4.1 innings. Six of those runs came via the long ball, as Cleveland tagged Green for four home runs, three of which came in the first inning. Carlos Santana hit a home run on Green’s first pitch of the game, and Jason Kipnis went deep on Green’s third pitch of the evening. That’s 25 percent of his home runs allowed output in the span of three pitches. The four home runs that left Progressive Field that day (the 8th best stadium for home runs in 2016, per ESPN park factors) account for half of all of Green’s home runs allowed at the major league level.

And that’s why we need to be careful judging Green too fast. Those 39 1/3 innings are a drop in the pond, and can easily be inflated by one outing like l’affaire Cleveland.

Of course, we can’t write it off entirely on small sample size, it would be great to see Green start to limit opponent’s success against his four-seamer, for sure. But overall, the prognosis for Green looks very strong. By xFIP, which tries to stabilize home run rate, Green is a well above-average pitcher, coming in at a 3.11 figure. That figure comes with the same small sample size caveat, but is a good sign to see for a Yankee rotation that can use all the good news it can get.

Green’s next outing is going to be a big test again, as he faces the mighty Baltimore Orioles (first in the league in 2016 with 192 home runs) in tiny Yankee Stadium (first in home run inflation in 2016, per ESPN park factors), but his last two outings have been his first two starts of his major-league career in which he has not allowed a home run. It’ll be interesting to see if he can keep that trend going Saturday against Baltimore, and more importantly, the rest of the season as a whole.

Photo: Kevin Kuo/USA Today Sports

Related Articles

Leave a comment

Use your Baseball Prospectus username