Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 936: Make Bryce Harper Fun Again

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

Ben talks to FanGraphs writer Jeff Sullivan and FiveThirtyEight writer Rob Arthur about Bryce Harper’s extended slump and their surprising (and somewhat dismaying) findings about his great 2015.

The conversation ends and the drums start to fade On the Palm Desert Strip, Martians parade And they will attack, and we'll laugh It's alright, it's okay, it don't matter today It's all easy, everything's cool It's okay, it's alright, it's all that or tonight It's okay, easy Good morning and welcome to episode 936 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast with Baseball Perspectives

presented by our supporters on Patreon and the Baseball Reference Play Index. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by Sam Miller, my usual co-host who had a conflict at our recording time today, but I am joined by two capable Sam Miller substitutes, Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs and Rob Arthur of FiveThirtyEight. This is an episode about Bryce Harper and a little backstory here. I was thinking of writing something about Bryce Harper. Everyone's writing their Bryce Harper post because Bryce Harper is having a hard time hitting these days. And then yesterday I saw, somewhat to my dismay, that both Rob and Jeff had written about Bryce Harper, which means that I will not be writing about Bryce Harper. On the bright side, the Bryce Harper post could not be in better hands than Jeff's and Rob's.

And I was hoping that when I clicked on their articles, I would see some good news. I'd find out that Bryce Harper was coming out of the slump, that there was no reason to worry, that we'd soon see the Bryce Harper we marveled at in 2015. Turns out, not so much. So Jeff, Rob, para real downers, welcome back to the podcast. Hello. Hey. So had you guys been planning to write about Bryce Harper for a while

and you just happened to write about Bryce Harper on the same day? Was it just in the air that Bryce Harper had to be written about? Yes. I don't really. Okay. That's one yes. Yeah, no, I don't really plan in advance. Just kind of, it's like a daily scramble to find the topics to write about. And the daily scramble this time included Cam Bedrosian and a higher profile player, one Bryce Harper. So, yeah, seeing Rob's was, well, I guess for you, it's more demoralizing for you because you were going to write. Yeah, I was on top of this a week ago. Yeah, well, you had written about Bryce Harper once before, like in May when there was a very brief Bryce Harper slump and you looked at how you get a

very brief Bryce Harper slump and you seem to conclude at the time that it's probably was not something that was going to continue. And that seemed like a fairly safe assumption at the time, but, uh, about two and a half months went by or almost three months went by and then you get another Bryce Harper post out of the Bryce Harper slump. So this has all worked out really well for you. He's having sort of one of those Joey Votto slumps where it's like he's doing really bad, but he's getting on base 38% of the time. Yeah. So if you go back and for a while, everyone was sort of setting the arbitrary Harper start point in that series in early May when he played the Cubs and Joe Maddon walked him a bunch. And we were all kind of connecting that to why Bryce Harper wasn't hitting and maybe pitchers were pitching around him.

And so if you go back to that series, he has a exactly 100 weighted runs created plus in just a little bit Over 300 plate appearances So he has been exactly a league Average hitter since then If you go back to the All-Star break Which is not nearly so long It's just 74 plate appearances He has been a truly terrible hitter Over that span

And he's hitting 131, 270, 213 In that sample That's not good So you kind of both touched on similar things in your articles, but from slightly different angles. Rob, do you want to start with what you looked at initially? Yeah, I started with the stack-ass numbers. And in particular, I looked at his exit velocity and his launch angle. And the interesting thing that Jeff touched on in his post as well is that Harper really outperformed his exit velocity and launch angle combination last year to a tremendous degree.

Granted, he had this really transcendent season that was the best since Barry Bonds, essentially. But this year, instead of outperforming his underlying numbers, he's underperforming them. And at the same time, those numbers have gone down quite a bit. So his exit velocity has dropped, I think, a mile and a half per hour, and even more in the last few hundred bad at balls. And his launch angle has gone up. So he's hitting a lot of pop ups. And that's explaining some of his bad at the problems. And you put it all together, combined with him underperforming those statistics. And that's how you get Bryce Harper to be the average. And were you guys both going into this thinking that this was going to be a pitcher related problem, that this was something where pitchers had adjusted and they were doing something

different and Harper was not counter adjusting? And maybe it kind of is to a certain extent. But Rob, you kind of looked at whether pitchers had changed their approach. And Jeff, you looked at that in your initial post about Harper in May. So were you both kind of thinking that this is as simple as pitchers are pitching around him and he is maybe swinging at some bad pitches and thus he's worse and that's all there is to the story? For sure, I was. I definitely thought that like we've seen this a lot with mike trout i think jeff you might have written about this last year but mike trot's had problems where you know pitchers change their approach to him and it takes him you know a month to adjust and then he's back to being mike mike trout again jeff has written a book i think that's actually

all i wrote about last year which is convenient i didn't want to misattribute it to you. Yeah, so I went in thinking for sure that's what happened here, and maybe Harper's going to figure it out, and he's going to respond to whatever the new tactic is against him, and found that that really wasn't the case. Pitchers seem to have not varied their location much against him. It comes down to something intrinsic about Harper that has changed. Did you find that too, Jeff? Or you kind of looked at like, you know, the

percentage of balls in play that Harper's had this year and last year that were in the strike zone, as opposed to outside of the strike zone. And there is a difference there. Yeah. So if you, if you just eyeball like the Bryce Harper's fangraphs page or whatever, you can scroll down, you see, okay, his rate of contact on pitches out of the zone is up. So then that makes you wonder, well, maybe he's putting more balls out of the zone in play. And as you can imagine, fairly intuitively, if you're doing that, then you're going to have more bad batted balls mixed in with the strikes that you put in play. with the strikes that you put in play. And sure enough, Bryce Harper has put a greater rate of his batted balls. They've come against pitches that are not good pitches to hit. So you figure that's some kind of factor. And there could be a mental issue where he's going on where he's seeing so few strikes in the zone because pitchers are so afraid of him that maybe he's just kind of caught in between and he's trying to force it. So like Rob observed, his average exit velocities, especially on air balls, have gone down a little bit. But I think what was most

compelling about what I structured my post around and the important thing about my methodology is that it was like Rob's but much worse. But it was also easier to do on the fly. So you can just look at slugging percentage on balls hit in the air. So all fly balls, line drives, pop ups, just fold in pop ups, because whatever. So you can get slugging percentage on those. And then you can just get the average exit velocity on balls hit in the air. And it turns out there's a really healthy, strong relationship between those two numbers, probably not a surprise. And like Rob found, I saw that Harper way outperformed what you'd expect last year, like by far more than anybody else. I think the difference between what he did on those air balls and what you would have expected him to do,

the difference between those for him was greater than the next closest difference. And I know this sounds weird and stupid, but there was a difference of 90 points between Bryce Harper and second place by that slugging percentage difference. And then I looked at the same numbers this year, and his difference is basically zero. He's basically doing exactly what you would expect. So it's definitely a problem that he's hitting the ball a little worse, it seems. But something I sort of stumbled across and didn't mention is Mike Trout is also hitting air balls a little less hard this year on average, and it doesn't seem to have been a problem for him. That's the truly depressing part of both of these posts is that not only is Harper worse

this year, and you have confirmed that and documented the ways in which he has actually been kind of bad this year, but you have also retroactively taken away how awesome he was last year. That's the really, really sad part of this post. It turns out that not only is he not that good this year, he was actually not quite as great as we thought. It's just taking away old Christmas gifts along with not providing future ones. And you had noticed this, right, Jeff? You kind of like, I don't know if you kept it to yourself or you were afraid to bring it up or you just didn't want to acknowledge it even to yourself, but you had noticed that his exit velocity wasn't off the charts whereas his actual production was yeah i think a few people noticed

this and i saw it was also commented on a few times on fangraph some people would sort of play devil's advocate and we would throw up our our happy harper posts before and i think anyone who would have messed around with the sadcast stuff in any level of detail would have sort of thought, well, something doesn't add up here. But of course, after last year, it was kind of too soon to know what to make of things. And somewhat importantly, I think there's not a real receptive audience on the Internet to trying to bring players down. And I think maybe there was like 10 years ago. People used to love that the the heady days of sabermetric analysis but i think that when you have a young player who finally takes the step

that harper looked like you made you're not you don't really want to be the guy who tries to pull the rug out from underneath them because you could look really stupid and so i think i and i'm sure other people were kind of thinking all right something seems weird but let's just let this play out because we don't want to we don't want to spoil the party just yet before we really know what we're doing. Yeah, and you and I and everyone else got a bunch of posts out of Harper last year too and all the ways in which he was different and he was more selective and he was hitting balls in different directions and he was hitting outside pitches which he hadn't done before and there were all these weaknesses it had seemed like he had in the past and suddenly he just closed all of them up and became just this impossible perfect player and I guess I don't want to overstate maybe Rob do you have a sense of like how good he should have been I mean his actual numbers last year were the best since Barry Bonds.

So he was like twice as good as the league average hitter. So roughly how good would he have been if he hadn't had this sort of outperformance on air balls and, you know, if they had done as well as they should have done based on how hard they were hit and what direction they were hitting? Yeah, I don't, I didn't actually calculate that in terms of WRC+, but I remember he fell to the 30th or 40th best hitter, so it was a pretty big drop-off. Wow, that's huge. I was not expecting that. So yeah, and I will cop to, I noticed this as well earlier this season actually when I was writing a post about like the best and worst hitters and who we could expect to improve based on their underlying exit velocity statistics.

I noticed that Harper had this really outlier-ish last season. And I was like, you know, I think I'm just going to keep this to myself because that was at the time when he was still like in prime beast mode Harper state. And I was was really confused. I thought maybe there was something that I just didn't understand about the exit velocity or something like that. And it turns out maybe I should have said something at that moment. Would have looked much smarter. Yeah, where were you on that one, Rod? My bad. It's easy now that Bryce Harper is's hitting 130 you can come out and say

that it's just it's so hard to think about what this over performance looks like because you know you watch clips from Bryce Harper last year and you think yeah of course there's an amazing hitter of course it all came together and so it even now it's difficult to reconcile the numbers because we all saw it but I mean the numbers are very compelling nobody else really did what he did in terms of that over performance so as an analyst i don't know any other takeaway but to say okay the burden of proof is on him not us yeah because i mean he hit some home runs that went a really long way and they looked like very legitimate home runs by someone who was the best hitter in baseball and And so is the best assumption that he just,

what, he happened to hit enough of, like what we used to call just enough home runs back in the hit tracker days when that was the best we had. And, you know, we'd look at guys whose home runs just scraped over the wall, or are we talking about just balls falling in, just in the gaps or on the line or something.

And just it happened more often for him than anyone else. I guess that's basically what it comes down to. It's really hard to see. I don't know whether you've gone back and looked for lucky Bryce Harper hits or anything. It just didn't really seem at the time as if that was happening in that normal amount. And maybe, I mean, quality of contact comes down to millimeters on the bat. seem at the time as if that was happening in that normal amount and maybe i mean quality contact comes down to millimeters on the bat so maybe he just got i hate this word but maybe he got quote-unquote lucky just in where on the bat he hit i mean the difference between a really good

year and a really and a mediocre year for him would be like what 15 or 20 swings if you're taking home runs turning them into something else and if he if he sort of mishit pitches but still got the exit velocity but hit the ball a few millimeters too high or a few millimeters too low or in or out or whatever then then that could make a big difference too that no one would ever notice so uh it's just another way of thinking about it because i don't remember uh seeing a bunch of those those just enough home runs and i I get the sense that luck is a little more complicated than that. But I mean, at this point, we're digging in really, really deep to something we still only sort of understand. Yeah. How would you diagnose or if you had to play internet hitting coach or

something with Bryce Harper right now, would you, you know, I mean, maybe there's just a certain inevitable amount of regression going on because of that overperformance last year. But based on what's happened this year, are you thinking it's just, oh, it's mechanics? Is it just kind of a blanket mechanics or swing is messed up sort of situation? Or is it just approach? He should not be swinging at these pitches. Is there any way to diagnose? Did you do one of your patented

comparisons of leg lifts and swing angles to see whether there's any difference it seems like based on on some clips that i've watched and based on what the what some of the announcers have been talking about harper has been pulling off a lot he's a guy who i think a year ago maybe before maybe before that he was talking to Eno on one of those Fangrest interviews, and he was talking about how much he wants to hit the ball to the opposite field. And he's demonstrated before he's a really good opposite field power hitter. And then he kind of started pulling the ball for power a lot more. And he's done some of this pulling off stuff this year. Now, as you know, with these mechanical analyses, you can never know how often he's doing

it versus how often he used to do it. It definitely seems like maybe it's not a stretch to say that just kind of given what we think we understand about bryce harper maybe sometimes he lets his emotions get the best of him perhaps and maybe that gets into his approach which would not be uncommon for someone his age but relative to what he used to be he does make more contact in the zone he does have a good eye i think that i would still he at bryce harper at peak power we've we can see this in stack cast his peak power level is uh not jean carlos stanton level but it's it's very high he had he does have probably 70 grade stat cast power rob what do you think does that make sense yes definitely at the same time though i would say although he does have this incredible peak power i do think it's gone down

a little bit this year and so i think that points to something maybe more messed up in his swing or potentially an injury some kind of cryptic injury i zoomed in on a particular basically the heart of the strike zone and i looked at how hitters generally do in that zone. And last year, Harper was a good five miles per hour of exit velocity up on the average hitter in the heart of the strike zone on the balls that he hit. This year, he's pretty much at the average. So to me, that points to something like even when he gets those pitches right down the center and he swings at them and he makes contact he's still not quite muscling it up in the way that he did last year so that that suggests that something is is uh physically wrong with his swing what exactly that is i don't know if you if you draw a super

weird arbitrary threshold let's say 111 miles per hour bryce harper last year had 11 battered balls tracked harder than that. This year he has just two. So it does seem like there's something weird going on. Last year, he touched 116 miles per hour with a double off Robbie De La Rosa. And this year he's topped out at a little under 113 miles per hour. Now, the sample is still small enough. It's not like we have a true representation of Bryce Harper's battered ball distributions, but it does seem like there's something that is sapping him just a little bit of strength. And yeah, I don't know if that's illness, injury, a different bat, if he's just, you know, over it, just generally speaking,

that's probably not what it is. I don't know why I said that, but you know, you never know. He's young, he could be having a crisis. All theories are valid here. Bryce Harper's over it. I like it. So right now the Nationals with weird not hitting Bryce Harper are seven games up in the East. And a year ago today they were in second place in the East, even though they had just historic Bryce Harper hitting and maybe overperforming. And now, of course, they are led by the dynamic duo of Daniel Murphy and Wilson Ramos which is you know just the way that we all saw this happening nothing makes sense in baseball again I guess I should just ask the the question of how good is Bryce Harper because we ask this question every few months or so and the answer completely changes and I guess it was in mid-April and the kind of the

tantalizing thing is that Bryce Harper started this season looking even better than he was last year, which is just extra cruel that that happened. So for the first month or so of the season, he was the best hitter in baseball and he looked great. And we thought he was maybe better than Mike Trout, certainly a better hitter than Mike Trout, at least. That seemed like something that seemed fairly safe to say. And now it's four months later, and we don't know what to make of him. So given that Rob is saying that even Bryce Harper, at thus far the peak of his powers last year, should not have been the best hitter since Barry Bonds, he maybe should have only been in you know, in the top 30 or

something, which is a depressing thought. How good is Bryce Harper? Is he anywhere near the, do we just have to completely exclude him from the Harper and Trout discussion now? Is that just a silly thing to say? Or do you have any idea of where you expect him to settle in eventually i don't think he's i don't think this is my uh personal opinion but when i looked at his uh his stats i entered this uh writing this piece kind of intending to compare him to trout and one of the things that's so staggering about trout is how consistently amazing he's been over the past uh you know, whatever it is, five, six years now. And like, I was just looking at a stat line. Trout has had WRC pluses of 167 in three of the past five years. 167 exactly.

Yeah. And that, granted, I mean, that's like, you know, top of the league, right? And he's done that, just that exact number. And he's done it in different ways. And, you know, he's provided different combinations of value from his bat and his base running and his defense. To me, Harper had this one transcendent offensive explosion. And he's probably, you know, an incredible hitter. And maybe when he's at his best, he's a better hitter than Mike Trout. But I do think that this year and the past couple of years have shown that he's lacking that crucial trait of consistency that is going to make Mike Trout one of the best of all time. Crucial trait of always being the best player in baseball by far. Yeah, exactly.

The fun thing about Trout and the 167s is that in 2013, he took a 167 and then just flipped the last two numbers. So he's really set on the one, the six and the seven. And then even in 2015, he was a 172 so we kept two anyway i think with his this is one of those cases where stack cast really comes in handy because without it without that information i think uh we would look at harper and think okay well he just did what he did last year and he did that as a 22 year old and that's amazing clearly that is his his ceiling of a performance and it's not like it's something he didn't do but now that we have this information i think it's easier to be reasonably skeptical of that performance and so with that in mind clearly his like his batting average in balls in play is

like laughable it's almost pujo territory that's going to come up he's not that bad he's probably a 300 310 maybe sort of guy so he's he's better at hitting than he's looked this year but i think i am very comfortable in saying that as a player he is a level below trout as a hitter he's probably it's a narrower difference because the trout of course trout has all those other advantages but i think harper is still a worse hitter than trout he is decent at making contact he's you know roughly average and he does have a good eye but i just haven't seen enough really uh yet to think that he's more than maybe a six win player and i mean that's incredible for a 23 year old we don't need to lose sight of that the fact that he's gonna lose like four or five wins as a 23 year old is uh it's funny when you think about how

good he still is because he's on track i think for still 4.2 war or something this year with a terrible batting average in balls in play yeah but yeah i i think that had it not been for stat cast it probably wouldn't have been hasty to put harper up there with trout but now that we have this information it turns out it was hasty and we just all sat on it because we didn't want to be the guy who said this is being too hasty yeah pretty much so are we better off in this world or would you prefer that we could go back to the old world where ignorance was bliss and we could continue to believe that bryce harper was as good as we thought he was a year ago better off i like this i still want to figure out i still want to figure out how Mike Trout is Mike Trout.

I mean, in some ways, this just accentuates the mystery of Mike Trout. Like, normally players go up and down because, you know, they get injured or something happens to them. But that doesn't happen to Trout. Why doesn't that happen, you know? No, no. He has a head cold. He's out of game.

He's out of action on Thursday because he has a cold. Fair enough. Mike Trout, not immune to disease. I don't know if Zach Gass will be able to help us with head colds, but maybe. Mike Trout, yeah, he has his slumps, but I think last year he had a slump for like two weeks because he hurt his wrist and then he was fine. And then I think the year before, or maybe it was the year before that,

he had a slump in September because pitchers were like, here come high fastballs. And Trout was like, oh no. And then he showed up the next year and then it turns out now he's really really really good against high fastballs so it's it's what i love about the the amount of detail we have access to now is we can go into all these different ways where mike trout is still the best just across the board where before it would have been like oh he's really good at batting average and slugging and on base or whatever but now it's you can break it down by so many things turns out this year uh you might remember that sam has written before about trout never swinging at first pitch curveballs

and then i followed sam's lead and i wrote something again like last year about trout never swinging at first pitch curveballs well it turns out now he's swinging the first pitch curveballs and he's hitting them really well it's he just he's baffling in every single way he's become more aggressive but he's also more patient i he's he's the best and what is he 24 still 24 years old yeah yeah 24 years old ah actually mike trout will turn 25 on sunday so happy early birthday to mike trout yeah well i don't want to go back because we have all this new information new ways of saying yeah mike tried to sell the best player in baseball yeah it's i guess it's made us better at our jobs eventually, but it's also made the jobs more complicated, maybe. Or maybe it's made it easier. I can't tell. Because in the past,

we would have just written our Bryce Harper post and said, as you said, we would have just kind of shrugged at the end and said, he was really great last year and not so good this year. So he'll probably just be more like he was last year eventually. And that would have kind of been the end of the post. It wouldn't have really told you anything. It wouldn't have been that helpful, but we could have just published it and been done. But now we have to dive into all these numbers and it doesn't, it's not even sufficient to look at a Fangrass page, which has Just an incredible array of Information on it but even that Alone at least the way that a fangrass

Page is currently configured and maybe Soon it'll have this information too But for now you could look at all of that And still not understand What was going on with Bryce Harper At all so now you have to Find another even deeper Layer of meaning and statistics

And dive into that which uh i guess it's good i guess it gives us a reason to make money for this and you know next time we uh because of the harper case we'll see how he finishes the year but i think based on this we've all maybe now learned a lesson about being more open when we see things like hey these numbers don't match up. So like, I don't know what Rob found. I don't know if he did league wide analysis, but like the guy who's sticking out this year is a big overachiever that I came across as Jake Lamb. And now I'm not so afraid to be like, yeah, it looks like Jake Lamb is kind of doing what Harper did last year in this way. And that's probably not going to be real moving forward, which is kind of neat. Even if

Harper had to be the one to, I guess he didn't suffer because we didn't write those articles but we could have yeah right well because in the past we would have said jake lamb has a 591 slugging percentage and he has a 310 isolated power you can't fake that that can't be a fluke and i mean people were writing the why is jake lamb better articles earlier this year there were plenty of those too and there seemed to be real reasons why he might be better and yet now we still have a reason to cast doubt. Yeah I think he's a he is meaningfully better if you look at the underlying numbers and yet I think people aren't comfortable saying that someone's been better and still lucky at the same time because people just want to think of one dimension of player movement and such.

So I think that Jake Lamb is definitely better, and you want to write that, but he seems to be above his true talent level, or we still have no idea what we're doing with these stack-ass numbers. All right. Well, I wish we had better news to leave people with, but unfortunately the news is that Bryce Harper's terrible and everything is awful. Baseball's no fun anymore. Unless you're a pitcher facing Bryce Harper. Yeah, sure. Right. And there's a lot more of those than there are Bryce Harper's.

All right. Jeff, Rob, thanks, I guess. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. You can find Jeff's writing at Fangraphs. Rob's writing at FiveThirtyEight. Jeff's on Twitter at BasedBall. That's Based underscore Ball. Rob is on Twitter at NoLittlePlans with underscores between those words.

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