So, .239/.326/.375. That’s not very good. It might be acceptable for a good defensive middle infielder, or perhaps a catcher. It might look good for an outfielder in 1968, when the league hit worse than that as a whole. That’s the line, however, of a 24-year-old center fielder in the first half of 2009, and it represents one of the more disappointing performances of the season to date. It’s also the first-half line of the player who could well be the best in baseball in the second half.
B.J. Upton, coming off of a fantastic 2008 postseason and subsequent shoulder surgery, was supposed to take a big step forward this season. The raw talent that made him the second overall pick in the 2002 draft was being leavened by experience, not all of it successful. Upton had to fail as a shortstop and as a second baseman and had to flop in his first two major league stints before he broke through in his third season. It was during that season that the Rays made the critical decision to move Upton out of the infield, where he’d been terrible his entire professional life, and into center field. With his great speed and baseball instincts, Upton took to the change. The move turned him from a mediocre player to a very good one in a season when he hit .308/.368/.508 in mostly everyday play.
In 2008, Upton made tremendous strides across the board. He improved his play in center, cut his strikeout rate, improved his walk rate, and stole twice as many bases, albeit without improving his success rate. On May 1, he was batting .294 and slugging .441 when he suffered a debilitating shoulder injury. He played through it the rest of the season, but wasn’t the same hitter, batting .268 and slugging .392 the rest of the way. He hit just six homers in his final 520 plate appearances, a far cry from the power he’d shown in 2007. Even at that, his dramatic improvements in other areas showed him to be a coming star, an MVP candidate in the making.
All of those skills are still present, hidden behind that terrible line. As much as we sometimes infer that player development is a linear process, it’s not. Players, even great ones, bounce around, they get unlucky, they pick up bad habits. In Upton’s case, a look at his season to date shows two notable trends that have affected his performance line, elements that he is likely to correct as we head into the second half.
The first is that Upton is hitting more fly balls than ever before, and it’s not close. Upton hits fly balls in 42.0 percent of his at-bats, versus a career mark below 34 percent coming into this season. Upton has lower rates of ground balls and line drives as a result of this. If you’re wondering where the missing 60 points of batting average are-as Upton was expected to be a .300 hitter-that’s your first culprit. Batting average is lower on fly balls than on other batted-ball types, so Upton’s average on contact has dropped from last year’s .360 to this year’s .340. His batting average on balls in play shows that same drop, from .344 to .317.
Upton has also taken a step backwards in terms of making contact, which was his most dramatic area of improvement in ’08. After pulling his K rate down from 32.5% to 25.2%, it’s back up this year to 29.9%. That’s the rest of the missing batting average. Upton may be striking out more as a side effect of his ever-increasing patience at the plate. He saw 3.7 pitches per plate appearance in 2006, a bit fewer than 4.1 in 2007 and 2008, and is a sliver above 4.1 in 2009. Deeper counts will up your strikeout rate, but should also result in more walks and, for good hitters, more opportunities to hit in good counts. Upton isn’t seeing the benefits yet, however, because despite the deeper counts, he’s not necessarily making better decisions at the plate. He’s swinging at more balls out of the zone than he did last year (up 2.5%) and making less contact when he does (down 14.4%).
There’s a term I probably use too much called “consolidation year.” It’s what happens when a player is integrating learned skills with innate tools, a process that can lead to short-term degradation in performance. Upton has shown most every skill you can ask of a baseball player at one time or another. He’s hit for average and for power, and a healthy shoulder has enabled him to display a bit more of the power we’ve expected from him. He’s drawn walks. He’s stolen bases. He’s shown range in the outfield, and he’s displayed very strong arm. Even in a disappointing season, he’s posted the best stolen-base percentage of his career, and is on pace for a career high in steals.
Whatever wildly optimistic numbers I would have hung on Upton four months ago are obviously out of reach. However, because of his age, his ongoing development, his freakish tool kit, I think he’s going to be that player for the last 10 weeks of the season. Upton is going to hit .330/.400/.530, going to steal at least 20 bases at a high rate of success, going to be a plus defender in center field, going to cut his strikeout rate and hit more line drives.
There’s an element of faith in these statements-after a big June made it look like he’d found himself, he started July by striking out in one of every three plate appearances while batting .175-but I look at Upton’s season to date as I look at Tiger Woods’ 2003-04. Woods was the best player in the world by the end of 2002, but at 27 had to rebuild his swing to become an even better player. For two years, Woods didn’t win a major while changing his game, and came out on the other end as the greatest player ever. Upton hasn’t had the success in baseball Woods had had in golf, but the changes to his game in ’09 reflect a player trying to get better, trying to maximize his skill set. He gets there now, and will be the best player in the American League down the stretch, and then the league MVP in 2010.
(Information from Fangraphs was used extensively in this article.)
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But you're probably right to be skeptical. The thing about the article I didn't like was that there wasn't any real evidence as to WHY Upton would correct the first major flaw. I guess we are supposed to assume that the flyballs will regress back to his normal level, but it's probably dangerous to assume an established baseline for a 24-year old. The point of the article is that at this point in his career Upton is changing his game--why are we supposed to assume the flyball jump isn't a change that sticks? Or maybe we're supposed to jump to the conclusion that the increase in flyballs will lead to power and that will correct his line, but that's a potentially dubious leap to take, and it's never spelled out.
I get the point about the Ks reflecting more patience and how this will turn from a negative to a positive. That makes sense. But I never see any conclusion as to why the first flaw will be fixed.
Also, when did Baseball Prospectus become so reliant on FanGraphs? They pretty rarely mention you guys at this point, but you all seem to crib off their stats and work on a weekly basis. I love BP dearly (Nate Silver and Kevin Goldstein are above awesome), but how in the world are you letting a freebie site come within hailing range of trouncing you?
And look, I get the Sheehan type of columnist. He's the guy who gets to spout off outlandish ideas and prognostications that have very little chance of ever meaning much but really rile up the masses and occasionally get people thinking. That has its place on any major publication, and I can't fault BP for wanting Sheehan to continue. What I can fault them for is not taking defensive metrics and values and the subsequent changing landscape of the overall player valuations a lot more seriously in the past few years. BP is and has been the gold standard of mass sabermetric reading, and I want them to start ponying up for the next level of player evaluations before it's too late.
If you go to the statistics link on the BP homepage, you get categories defined as Offense, General, Pitching and Team. Nowhere on that page does it list individual defense. Nowhere does it go into detail about the most important pitching information to come along in the last few years either (i.e. PitchFX). For a website designed to analyze players statistically, that's darned near a crime. That page should have PitchFX database analysis along with a defensive database (hopefully based off of UZR or some comparable). It's time to upgrade the stats department for the site if you ask me. And for a site that is based almost entirely on statistics, that's a pretty big deal, isn't it?
Also, please give Marc more work to do beyond Fantasy stuff.
As a side note, does anyone know a good source for Plus/Minus?
It's the closest thing I have to a go-to stat for defense; I usually try and look at a few metrics when making evaluations, as well as considering observational/subjective evidence.
I'm also not sure I understand the idea that BP doesn't appreciate defense. No, I'll rephrase that: it's a fictional notion. We resurrected Bill James' DER as a measurement, and James Click took it further with PADE; we were the ones taking grief for criticizing Derek Jeter's defense before anyone came around to that. We've championed players for their defense, pointing out that a run saved is worth slightly more than a run created.
That there are specific holes in our game--such as the lack of a BP-branded defensive metric based on zone data--is a legitimate criticism. Then again, we've also been criticized over the years for NOT acknowledging the work done elsewhere, so to some extent I see this as damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don't. I don't aim at any specific commenter in this thread by saying this, but there's no question that by being the most visible, longest-running active entity in this field, we're a pretty big target.
All I can do is write and talk, backing everything up with evidence and being entertaining in the process. If I hit those marks, whether here, or in SI, or on the radio or TV or at a Pizza Feed, I sleep at night. The rest is out of my control.
And you're quite entertaining and informative. That's why I pay my money annually.
Just looking at their DT cards, Andino has a FRAR/FRAA of 11/3, Rate2 of 108; Izturis is 12/4 by FRAR/FRAA, Rate 2 of 110 - so there you go. Again, MMV as to whether FRAR, FRAA, or Rate2 have any value, but there is some information there.
To me, that was always an unreasonable expectation. Upton always had high strikeout rates, which tend to depress BA. Unless he explodes (which he might well do, being only 24 and having all those raw skills), he'll probably settle in as a .280 hitter with lots of walks, power and speed.