The Buyer’s Guide: Justin Upton

Over the All-Star break, I’ve been thinking a lot about my “go-to statistics” for identifying different skills for both hitters and pitchers. They’re different for everyone, as we all have different preferences in the types of pitchers we like to target for fantasy purposes, but I’ve also been thinking about false positives. That is to say, I’m intrigued by instances where a single statistic could conceivably put a player on a trade-target list but is negated by another statistic that erodes the meaning of the other.

In a way, this is simply an exercise in trying to paint a complete picture of a player when doing analysis, but with the underlying knowledge that being truly “complete” in any analysis is borderline impossible. As an example, though, we often see articles written about a player’s specific pitch and its whiff rate as evidence for its effectiveness, or maybe its whiff rate and ground-ball rate. I’ve probably written plenty of those. However, it’s important to dig deeper and determine how often a guy throws that specific pitch or in which counts. A guy could have a 20 percent whiff rate on a slider, but if he throws it 10 percent of the time and rarely with two strikes, that’s not an indication of an increased strikeout rate in the future.

Like anything, looking at one beautiful piece of a larger, ugly puzzle can cause many problems when it comes to evaluation.

*****

Justin Upton stood amongst the league’s best at the end of May. He was hitting .307/.368/.545 with 12 home runs and 10 stolen bases. In 209 plate appearances, the 27-year-old compiled a .900+ OPS and had people lauding Padres GM A.J. Preller for a masterstroke of business over the winter. It was an early-season performance that drove him to his third All-Star appearance in his nine-year major-league career.

Those pleasant feelings of butterflies in the stomach has been replaced by general nausea in recent weeks. Since the beginning of June, Upton is hitting .176/.281/.244 with two home runs. For fantasy purposes, it’s important to note that he has still swiped seven bags in this time frame, which helps keep him somewhat relevant, but the putrid level of performance has some people jumping ship. In ESPN leagues, he’s down to a 98 percent ownership rate. While not a significant drop in ownership, the fact that anyone is jumping ship on a perennial fantasy stud is notable.

This dramatic nosedive begged for further analysis. One of the first places I look when dealing with a sudden drop in performance is strikeout rate, and Upton’s strikeout rate sits at 28.8 percent since the beginning of June. Not otherworldly but still expected. Isolating the last 30 days, though, it was surprising to see Justin Upton lead the league in not swinging at pitches outside the strike zone.

Upton sits atop a list of quality hitters, for the most part. I generally like to look at O-Swing rates to assess a player’s plate discipline and relate that to a player’s strikeout and walk potential. At times, I’ll fall victim to expanding O-Swing to represent an overall “good hitter” and forego much of the other analysis. This is primarily because it represents a skill that baseball fans want to see: the ability to not swing at bad pitches.

Thus, my immediate reaction was to suggest that Justin Upton hasn’t gotten fundamentally worse at the plate and is suffering from luck issues. Which is true, in a way. His .244 BABIP since the beginning of June is certainly not doing him any favors.

The bigger issue, though, is that Upton hasn’t been a good hitter, despite the wonderful ability to not swing at bad pitches. Although he’s only swinging at pitches inside the zone. he’s compiled an unsightly 13.2 percent swinging-strike rate in the last 30 days. These contact issues must obviously show up within the zone, and this is true. Upton has a 73.1 percent contact rate on pitches within the strike zone, which is second-worst in all of baseball over the past calendar month. Only Shin-Soo Choo has a lower contact rate on what we would consider good pitches.

So while it’s great that Upton is laying off bad pitches—and is one of the reasons why his on-base percentage still hovers close to .300—it hasn’t done him much good. He can’t hit the good pitches that he has seen. He’s particularly had a difficult time making contact with the fastball, which is where he has historically done his damage.

But, then again, Upton has always had trouble with swings-and-misses against fastballs. He had a 12.66 percent whiff rate against fastballs last year, so it’s hardly noteworthy that his whiff rate has jumped above 10 percent in the last two months. That’s oddly been accompanied with improved whiff rates against offspeed and breaking pitches, though that’s probably been a product of not swinging at breaking balls at all—only about a third of the time has he swung at any given breaking pitch in the past two months.

It masks any obvious reason why Upton has struggled to make contact over the past two months, and I’m not good enough at breaking down hitting mechanics to give a solid mechanical reason. That’s better left for someone like Ryan Parker. Even furthermore, it prevents me from feeling comfortable with projecting his contact rate to return to normal. He’s a little over eight percent below his career contact rate within the zone, so if push comes to shove, I’m going to say that this gets better. His rate over the past 30 days would be a career-low by a significant number—and that just feels tough to support staying the same.

It’s probably time to buy low on Justin Upton, because he’s 27 years old and just has too much track record—even this season—to be this bad. The tricky part is realizing that this current poor stretch of form may continue for a bit. There’s no reset button or no set time frame for “regression” or whatever. He’s dealing with significant flaws in his profile. He’s gotten incredibly pull-conscious with his approach in the first couple weeks of July (54.2 percent to the pull side), but as Daniel Rathman pointed out on Twitter, that hasn’t resulted in hard-hit balls to left field. He’s not making good contact and has seemingly tried to counter by not swinging much at all.

Still, quality hitters don’t forget how to hit overnight. Sometimes it’s important to remember that.

BUYER’S ADVICE: BUY

The fact that he already has 17 stolen bases—his highest total since 2012—is a pleasant surprise. For fantasy owners who need help with power and stolen bases in the second half, Upton could be one of the elite options who won’t cost the sun and moon to acquire. If the Upton owner in your league is getting skittish and is ready to cut bait, this represents a great opportunity to pounce. It’s unfortunately one of those moves that feels awful to make, as it always feels better to acquire someone who’s crushing the baseball, but it’s one that could pay significant dividends over the next three months.