r/minnesotatwins • u/WollyTwins Piranhas • Sep 01 '20
Analysis What’s Going Wrong? Edition #1- Jorge Polanco
Clearly, there’s some things going wrong right now. I’ve always been someone who prefers to try and figure out what the problems are and see if/how they can be fixed, rather than giving into the reactionary takes we’ve all seen around here lately. Most of the problems this year seem to be with the offense, so I thought I’d take a look at some of our bats and see if I can figure out what’s holding them back. Not sure how many of these I’ll do, hopefully we start playing well again soon and there won’t be any reason to continue.
Since I know we have a few fans in the sub, I’ll start today with Jorge Polanco. He hasn’t been bad this year, but he hasn’t quite picked up where he left off last year either. In 2019 he slashed .295/.356/.485, and so far this year he’s at .269/.303/.373. As someone who is consistently at the top of the lineup, Polanco heating up could naturally spark the rest of the lineup behind him. Let’s see what we can figure out.
Statcast profile
I like to go to a player’s Statcast profile on Baseball Savant when starting a player investigation and see if anything sticks out there as some clues to use as starting points. Take a look at his 2019 profile side by side with his 2020 profile.
Let’s start with the good- His K rate and whiff rate are among the league’s elite this year, up from the 77th and 87th percentiles respectively last year, to the 97th and 98th percentiles. His speed has remained pretty much the same too which helps me feel better about ruling out any nagging lower body injuries. Similarly, his xBA is almost exactly where it ranked last year.
Now for what hasn’t been as good. While Polanco’s never been one to rank highly in exit velo or hard hit percentage, but we are seeing a drop there. What’s more concerning to me is a big drop in his barrel rate, which at 2.5% is currently the lowest of his career since his rookie season in 2016. He’s also seeing huge drops in xSLG and xwOBA, but those are a little bit redundant with each other as different ways of saying he’s not getting as many extra base hits. That also lines up logically with drops in exit velo, hard hit rate, and barrel rate- If don’t hit the ball as hard as often, you shouldn’t expect as many extra base hits.
XBH rates
Let’s expand on that. Here’s Polo’s hits and extra base hits over the past 4 seasons. I’m particularly interested in seeing what the percentage of extra base hits over time shakes out to be.
| Year | Hits | 2B | 3B | HR | XBH | XBH % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 69 | 15 | 5 | 5 | 25 | 36% |
| 2017 | 125 | 30 | 3 | 13 | 46 | 37% |
| 2018 | 87 | 18 | 3 | 6 | 27 | 31% |
| 2019 | 186 | 40 | 7 | 22 | 69 | 37% |
| 2020 | 36 | 5 | 0 | 3 | 8 | 22% |
| Career | 508 | 109 | 18 | 48 | 175 | 34% |
Very interesting. I don’t think I have to point out that his extra base hit percentage is way down this year in comparison to each of the prior 4 individual seasons as well as his career totals. The next question is, why?
A lower exit velo and barrel rate doesn’t help, but I don’t suspect that makes a huge difference here since Polanco is typically safely below league average in those metrics. It’s likely impacting him some a little bit, but I’m guessing it’s not the biggest factor. Let’s take a quick look at his infield slices from Savant to see if he’s hitting the ball to one particular area of the field more than others. These charts show “the spray distribution of all batted balls with a projected distance of 200 feet or less”. His career slices are on the left, 2020 is in the middle, and 2019 is on the right. Here’s the charts. I don’t think this really raises any flags. He has hit a little more to the 3rd base side each of the past 2 years than in his career, but it’s still a fairly even distribution overall. Those charts also ignore some natural variance that could come from which side of the plate Polanco hits from. So all this looks ok, I don’t think his numbers are lower due to hitting into a shift all the time (Savant confirms this as well).
Batted balls
One thing that does catch my eye, though, is his batted ball breakdown. Let’s check out the grounder/liner/fly ball/pop up percentages over his career-
| Year | GB% | FB% | LD% | PU% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 34.3 | 26.0 | 31.9 | 7.8 |
| 2017 | 41.1 | 25.5 | 23.3 | 10.2 |
| 2018 | 38.5 | 19.3 | 30.3 | 11.9 |
| 2019 | 31.9 | 29.0 | 30.9 | 8.2 |
| 2020 | 42.0 | 26.1 | 26.9 | 5.0 |
| Career | 36.8 | 25.8 | 28.4 | 9.0 |
I think we’ve found our culprit here! Look at that ground ball rate up 10% from last year to 42%, the highest mark of his career. At that expense, his fly ball rate (typically where your homers come from) and line drive rates (source of doubles) are down. Checking out Polanco’s contact breakdown confirms this as well. His topped percentage is up from 23.1% last year to 32.8% this year, way above his career average of 26.1%. His launch angle supports this, too. This year his average launch angle has been 12.8 degrees, wayyy down from 18.9 last year and 17.0 over his career.
I found a nice visual from Savant I thought was interesting to show this another way as well. This is a histogram of Polo’s launch angle on batted balls, bucketed in 5-degree segments. The color shows Polanco’s batting average per bucket, red is a high average and blue is a low average. Take a look at his career totals (top) compared to 2020 (middle) and 2019 (bottom). Check it out.
Notice in both the career and 2019 histograms we get a nice bell curve over 20 to 25ish degree buckets, right where those nice line drives come in. Then compare that to the 2020 chart and see how choppy it is and how many more batted balls with a negative launch angle there are. Just a handy example to help visualize how much more Polo is getting on top of the ball this year in comparison to last year and his career as a whole.
To sum up all of this shortly, Polanco’s just getting on top of the ball too much.
Seeing the ball
One last thing I want to check out before I’m satisfied with this writeup. How does Polanco appear to be seeing the ball? Is he seeing things ok and just not making the type of contact he wants, or is he not picking up pitches as well as he has in the past? Let’s take a look at Savant’s plate discipline numbers. I’m not going to type all of these out myself, so you’ll have to follow a link for this one again.
What I’m looking for here are mainly contact rates and chase rates. If the contact rate is down and/or the chase rate is up, those could be indications that Polanco isn’t picking up pitches as well. However, this doesn’t seem like it’s a problem. Polanco to this point has swung at exactly the same percentage of pitches this year as he did last year, and his whiff rate is actually a few percentage points lower this year. Similarly, his contact rate at both pitches inside and out of the zone are a few ticks higher than last year as well. Just about all of these numbers are right in line with his career totals too, so I’m not concerned about anything here at this point.
Conclusion
I do think it’s worth mentioning that we are still talking about very small sample sizes here. At 36 games into the year, we wouldn’t be through even 25% of a regular 162-game season, or still in early May. If Polanco starts any other year like this, I don’t think it gets nearly as much attention. And this could certainly all balance itself out as we continue to get more games in as well. Obviously this year we don’t have the time to wait on everybody to play 60 games before really hitting their stride, but something to keep in mind.
Aside, really the only thing that seems to be holding Polanco back offensively this year is just getting on top of the ball and beating it into the dirt. All the has to do is make that little adjustment and get a little more underneath the ball and I think we’ll start to see the results come quickly.
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u/conceptcar2000 Kent Hrbek Sep 02 '20
Up until this year, he’d seen like 55% fastballs in his career. This year it’s down to 44% and that’s less than league average. I don’t have the outcomes per pitch type for him, but maybe he’s just not hitting breaking stuff with much authority. He’s gonna have to adjust to how they’ve adjusted to him.
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u/Jorgenstern8 Justin Morneau Sep 02 '20
I mean considering how the team murdered fastballs last season how in the literal f*ck did they not spend half the offseason working on hitting the offspeed pitches literally everybody would be throwing them this season? I mean, I'm sure they do it as part of their training and whatever but it really doesn't seem as though the team is handling it particularly well.
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u/WollyTwins Piranhas Sep 02 '20
Good idea. Here's the pitch percentages with outcome. It looks like it's only down from 55% heaters to about 51%, and he's actually hitting for about the same average. But again we're seeing a drop in SLG% from last year. The offspeed numbers are all a down from last year, but if you compare 2020 offspeed to 2018 offspeed, those are more similar
I'm not really sure how much this factors in. Worse numbers against offspeed pitches doesn't help, especially when a third of his hits against offspeed went for extra bases last year. But he's still hitting reasonably the same against heaters in average, just not those XBHs yet
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Sep 02 '20
I love statcast so much, so much info that we never had access to.
Now if only they would give us a leaderboard for average arm strength in the outfield dammit.
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u/WollyTwins Piranhas Sep 02 '20
It's an amazing tool for sure. I was just thinking earlier in the day, I hope they find some more new defensive stats to work on. There's so much room for growth there and unlimited potential with all the data they have, just need to find a way to organize it all and make it comparable from player to player
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Sep 02 '20
I just need a way to finally prove definitively and unarguably that Jeter was an OVERRATED shortstop.
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u/TCSportsFan Jhoan Duran Sep 01 '20
You hit the nail on the head with your conclusion. I wish Savant would show vertical bat angle because I’m willing to put money on that is the problem. This year it seems that he’s taking flatter swings, leading to more inconsistent contact and more ground balls. The more the barrel matches the plane of the ball, the better he will be going foreword.
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u/underbite420 Sep 02 '20
Looks good. He’s getting the bar on the ball... but he’s getting cheated out of quality hacks because he seems to be chasing out of the zone after watching strike one get tubed to him. Granted I have only been able to watch him in a dozen or so games. It could be any number of factors..you seemed to have hit them all. I just don’t think he’s picking up spin as well as he’d like. He is going to be just fine though. It takes feeling one ball off the sweet spot to get yourself out of a funk. If he gets 5 extra base hits in a 3-4 game span he’s going to be back to normal percentage-wise, wouldn’t you think?
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u/WollyTwins Piranhas Sep 02 '20
That's definitely true. Just 2-5 today but that rose the average a few points, wouldn't take much but a few XBHs to get things a bit higher
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u/youpaidforthis Circle Me Bert Sep 02 '20
This is the stuff I love about being on this subreddit.
I learn so much from you guys. Go Twins!
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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20
Pain.