The Rangers, Small Sample Sizes and You

I mentioned some information about sample sizes in an Elvis conversation a while ago, but I wanted to take a look at some of the peripherals on the team which have already hit or are close to hitting the point of reliability on the season.

For reference, go here for a list of when rates tend to stabilize and go here for the nitty gritty explanation.

POSITION PLAYERS

I'm mostly doing this because, at some point while I was gone, most of the starters hit the stabilizing point for contact rate, which is ~100 PA. Four more players will probably be hitting the stability point for strike out rate, line drive rate and pitches seen per plate appearance over the next week (~150 PA). So I'll be concentrating on these.

Michael Young (144 PA): MY, as usual, is getting the most plate appearances, and is already pretty close to 150. There is some cause for concern with him, though less than there was earlier in the year and there's not yet reason for panic. His 79.8% contact rate is the lowest of his career, but less than a full percentage point behind last season. And he was good last season. His K% is also right in line with his last few years. His LD% is also the lowest of his career, though not too far behind his last couple years. As far as getting to pitches, putting them in play and hitting them hard, MY is about who he's been recently. As has been pointed out by others, the big changes are a lot more ground balls, a lot fewer fly balls and a HR/FB rate that is not far from '07 and '08 but pretty far below '09. He's around 50+ PA from GB% stabilizing, about 100+ from FB% stabilizing and about 150+ from his HR/FB rate becoming reliable. Another big difference is his awfully low BABIP, which, if he's hitting the same otherwise, is probably largely bad luck. That .312 wOBA is pretty sad, but he's gotten back to what we'd expect in some areas, and in the rest he's got plenty of time to still get there. It's doubtful MY will repeat last season, but I'll bet he's still able to get to the two seasons prior, and that's probably what we should have expected this year, anyway.

Josh Hamilton (133 PA): Josh is actually not making better contact than he has in the past, and his 70.7% rate is the worst of his career. But, he's swinging less often and his 23.3% line drive rate is the best he's ever put up. It may surprise you to know, but his 24.4% strike out rate is also the worst of his career so far. He's also walking the most he has in his career, and while these all seem like small differences from last year when you look at them individually, the total package of being a little more selective, hitting the ball a little harder and working walks a little more often combine as a big difference, namely a jump from a .321 wOBA in 2009 to a .371 in 2010. There are still some concerns that this may be smoke and mirrors, but there's also at least as much reason to hope this improved approach will lead to even more improvement as other samples become more stable.

Elvis Andrus (131 PA): Considerable time has already been spent discussing Elvis's improved approach. His contact rate at one point was far below last season's 87.3%, but it climbed over the course of his first 100 PAs and now sits at 84.7%. His line drive rate (25.7%, 15th in baseball) has climbed up almost 4% from last season. He's 22nd in the AL seeing 4.07 P/PA. In short, he's become dramatically more selective and he's hitting the ball harder. We all know this from watching, but isn't it a nice feeling to read it put down as hard evidence? Now what's most fascinating is the walk rate. All year, most of us have been saying "of course, the walks will come down." But, they've actually gone up, and he's a third of the way from that walk rate being stable. That's a 16% walk rate, by the way; 15th in all of baseball. It's quickly getting closer and closer to the point where you can comfortably call Elvis one of the most patient hitters in baseball and stop chalking a bunch of it up to SSS. He is a bad, bad man. His in-season ZiPS projection, by the way, puts him at a .362 OBP with 62 walks at season's end. In case you've forgotten, this is a 21 year old shortstop with elite defensive skills.

Vladimir Guerrero (128 PA): I think Vlad's LD% is the most interesting. Again, this is pretty close to the point of stability, and he's hitting them 21.3% of the time. That's sizably better than all but his first full season in the Majors (which still falls just short). It's just one measure of power, but it does suggest he hasn't lost his power, like we worried earlier in the year. The contact rate is right in line with his career; in fact, currently, exactly the same as last season. The K rate is also the lowest of his career thus far. The BABIP isn't too high for him, and some of this is obviously the ballpark, but, right now, Vlad is putting up a .390 wOBA. That's just below his career rate and his best in three years. There's good reason right now to think Vlad is not merely going to be an improvement at DH and an improvement over his last season, but rather the elite-caliber hitter he has been for most of his career. This is an admittedly cursory glance, but I'm not seeing anything right now that jumps out as unsustainable, everything is right in line with his career and/or not really attributable to SSS.

Ian Kinsler (44 PA): I mention Kinsler just because of his swing rate. He's swinging at 36.2% of the pitches he's seen so far. That's a peripheral that tends to stabilize at only 50 PAs. This is nearly 9% better than his career rate, nearly 10% better than last season and the lowest rate of his career by far. Is Ian planning on being a lot more patient this season?

Julio Borbon (101 PA): The only other Ranger over 100 PAs is Julio Borbon, so that's the last player who's hit a benchmark beyond swing rate. Borbon's 83.4% contact rate is down from last year a bit, though still above average. of course, getting wood on the ball isn't the concern with him. Similarly, his 15.5% K rate is good, though a couple weeks or so from being reliable. The issue is that he is not hitting the ball with authority. Yes, he's also been extremely unlucky, he's certainly better than a .244 BABIP, but he wouldn't be doing too well even with neutral luck, probably. His (park-adjusted) wOBAr is just .245, only about 20 points better than what he's actually putting up and still very, very bad. His 13.2% line drive rate is bad, down more than 5% from last year, and it's getting very close to the point where you don't have much hope for that to improve over more time in the Majors. The walk rate is at a putrid 1% and half way to stabilizing, but I don't think, with options, I'd give him time to bring that up if the line drive rates don't improve. Unlike some, I'm not ready to sell Borbon's chances of being an average MLB center fielder in the future, but it's pretty close to the point where they've got to look elsewhere for help this season and have Julio work on his future at an easier level. And if the Rangers decide that point is tomorrow, there probably shouldn't be any outcry. I haven't been keeping track, but when is Endy Chavez supposed to be ready?

Nelson Cruz (74 PA): It's kind of sad Cruz has missed so much time for the sake of this post. There is some interesting stuff going on with him. To start, Cruz does not make contact well. His 71.7% rate is 14th worst in baseball with 70+ PAs, and pretty close to his career rate (though slightly better than last season). But he also just doesn't swing much. His ability to lay off on pitches out the zone was talked about last year, and it's been even better this season (and, again, swing rates stabilize around 50 PAs, so Nellie is past that point). He only swings at 20.4% of pitches out the zone, which is one of the better rates in baseball 7% better than average and more than 7% better than last season. He doesn't swing often in the zone, either. Nellie doesn't seem to have great contact skills but good patience and plate discipline; he waits for something he can hit and uses his immense power to make something of it, or he just takes a walk. It's a skill set I'm very much in love with. I think it may also explain some of why he's been a late bloomer on the MLB level. His line drive rate is higher than last season and a ways from stabilizing, and his HR/FB rate even more so, but, really, if he comes back healthy, Nellie can regress quite a bit and still be an MVP candidate. What he was doing before the injury was nutty, and sustaining it would have been the best season in MLB history. We can be certain he won't do that, but we can be certain (unless he loses something to injury) that he's shown plenty of the skills that could make him one of the best player's this year.

Matt Treanor (71 PA): Not much to say about Treanor, but so far, his peripherals are regressing pretty reliably to where he's been over his career. His BABIP has been a bit low, so you can probably expect him to get back near his career .283 wOBA. Which is nothing special, but it's better than we thought we were getting at catcher before he started playing.

Justin Smoak (66 PA): Smoak has been swinging at 41% of the pitches he sees, which is lower than average. Shocking, but he's patient. As an interesting aside, the 27.2% of the pitches he swings at out of the zone is exactly average. Do you know what his wOBAr (expected wOBA) has been so far this year? .396. He's been absurdly unlucky so far. Do not allow those slash stats to curb your enthusiasm (yet) folks.

PITCHERS

Pitching stabilizes at higher totals than hitting. K/PA rates, GB rates and LD rates all hit reliability ~150 batters faced. FB and GB/FB rates stabilize at about 200. Nothing else stabilizes for another 300 BF. So, in other words, pitching performance is a small sample size for a while, and (quality) scouting and past performances carry a lot more weight in future expectations for most of the season.

I'm looking at K/9 rates because K/PA isn't available at FanGraphs, and it seems to be those should roughly normalize at the same point, right?

C.J. Wilson (170 BF): This is the exciting one. Ceej's K/9 of 6.26 is actually below average (that, of course, includes relievers), is near the bottom among AL starters who have pitched at least 40 innings, and is actually below what I expected coming in to the year. His 16% LD% is among the best in baseball, as is his (11th best) 55.5% ground ball rate, so there's really a good chance he'll keep his BABIP lower than average, but it's not going to stay at .259 and he's not striking guys out at a high rate. Of course, he's also not walking anyone and has not yet allowed a home run. There's some cause for concern, and there's plenty of time for the BB and HR rates to absolutely bomb, but, at the same time, even some regression won't necessarily make him a sucky pitcher. Ceej probably isn't nearly as good a starter as his shiny ERA suggests, but he's still pitching better than I expected and there's no reason to think he can't continue to be a solid member of the rotation.

Scott Feldman (170 BF): Feldman's strike out rate this year has been about the same, so that's not the issue (of course, it wasn't very good to being with). He's actually allowing fewer line drives, dropping from 20.5% to 17.8%, so that's not the problem. It's that he's getting ground balls 8% less often, though he's still among the best in the AL there. Worse, his FB% (about 30 BF from stabilizing) has jumped more than 10%. I really don't know at want point you stop expecting Feldman to turn it around, but there's not much reason to expect Feldman's going to get the ball on the ground any more often than he has been, and when he doesn't strike people out, that's an issue. The walks have a chance to come down, and the BABIP probably won't stay at .332, so the ERA will probably get better, and his FIP is only at 4.60 (4.31 last year), but he's probably not going to come close to reproducing his face-value stats this year.

Rich Harden (161 BF): I'm not sure we need to be worrying about Harden as much as we had been. Though the velocity is down, there's still time for improvement. That 6.31 BB% is way out of whack from his career and far from the stabilizing point. His K rate is one of the best in baseball and not too far from most of his AL career. His LD% is way down and his GB% isn't too far from his last few seasons. Unfortunately the fly ball rate is way up, which sucks for Arlington. I'm really not sure what to make of him, and the scouting information on his stuff will tell you a lot more than this, but I do think there's room for him to be at least an average pitcher.

Colby Lewis (159 BF): Colby's striking out 10.24 batters for every nine innings. That's the 6th best in baseball, within a strike of third place, and about what you can probably expect him to do this year. That's, just. . . so awesome. He's got a 16.5 LD% and a 40.2 GB%. Those are both good, and he can probably keep a below-average BABIP, but that .274 probably is going up, but, well, he's a really good pitcher even if it does. He could stand to get his walks down, but, for the most part, the walks have trended downward and there's plenty of time for that improvement to continue. In short, all the excitement about Lewis is pretty much warranted. That strike out rate is just mind bogglingly, and not really a SSS thing at this point: he's going to strike a lot of guys out. Colbyashi is the ace of this staff, he's probably one of the best pitchers in baseball this year and it looks like a pretty good chance he'll meet those lofty CHONE projections.

Matt Harrison (154 BF): I didn't realize Harrison was giving up all his runs while rocking a .274 BABIP. That's some kind of sad. He did up his K/9 to 5.03, which is not good but it's better than he has been. Of course, he's never been good. Everything else was right in with his career norms, save the walk rate, which could definitely be a sample small sample size issue. And, actually, the velocity of his pitches didn't change much, so I'm wondering how much of his improved "stuff" was just the aberration of a small sample size in exhibition performances. I still think he has a future in the Majors, I'm just not buying in to him being a dramatically better pitcher right now than he has been the last couple years.

I'm going to still do Harrison, but it might not be tonight due to a personal situation.