You know what they say: in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death, taxes, and baseball being really weird, pretty much all the time.
As of right now, the 2016 Braves are the worst team in baseball. But, like Tolstoy would have said had he known that baseball existed, every really bad baseball team is woeful in its own manner. But also, weird in its own manner. So, here’s a completely unrelated collection of not-particularly-intense but still interesting (maybe?) stats about the 2016 Braves through their first 100 games.
Nick Markakis and the weirdly empty slash line
Now, I bet you think you know what’s going to be in this section. It’s going to be about how Nick Markakis doesn’t hit for power anymore, right? Wrong! Instead, it’s going to be about something even weirder. To wit: Nick Markakis has 24 doubles this season. That has him tied for Top 20 in baseball in doubles. Doubles are good. Not as good as homers, but good. The league leader in doubles, David Ortiz (35), has a 177 wRC+. Daniel Murphy and Manny Machado are second (30), and have wRC+s of 162 and 139, respectively. The average wRC+ for a player with 25+ doubles this season is 143.
Nick Markakis has a wRC+ of 91. The average wRC+ for the other seven players with 24 doubles is 129. It’s really apparently really hard to hit a lot of doubles and still be a below-average hitter, but somehow, Nick Markakis has accomplished that feat. There have been 33 players since 2000 to have 38+ doubles (that’s what Markakis is on pace for) and produce runs at a below average-rate, though none since 2013 and just six total including 2010 through 2015. Markakis may be the most recent player to achieve that feat (assuming he hits 14 more doubles without much of an improvement in his batting line).
For what it’s worth, 2004 Orlando Cabrera and 2008 Bobby Crosby both somehow managed to hit around 40 doubles with a wRC+ of 74. That’s even weirder.
Freddie Freeman is currently tied for third in the majors with six triples
There’s not really much to add here. Just like Evan Gattis had that amazing run of triples last year, Freddie Freeman has taken the three-bagger world by storm this season. 43 percent of his career triples have come in the first four months of this season. In fact, all six of his triples this season have come in June or July, so really he’s hit nearly half of his career triples in just two months of his career. Also, he hit triples in back-to-back games this season, and two other triples came within two games of one another. Before this season, the closest he’d ever hit two triples was a span of 20 days. (For those keeping track at home, he apparently managed to hit said triples with a cracked rib!)
Freddie Freeman hit zero triples in 2015.
Also weird: Jay Bruce, who moves in the outfield like a cement truck encased in cement, likewise has six triples this season.
At the moment, you can’t pick any two players, add their home run totals, and come up with a number greater than the Braves’ homer total
But doing so with three players is easy. Mercifully, the Braves are no longer in that early-season period where individual players had more homers than the whole team. Still, the Braves have only hit 62 dingers (as in, homers, not times they punched that Colorado Rockies mascot who feeds on nightmares), and Mark Trumbo plus Todd Frazier have hit 59.
Multiple teams have three players with more combined homers than the Braves. Only one Brave has double-digit homers, and if you cloned Freddie Freeman and then added said clone’s pre-cloning stats to the team ledger, they’d still have fewer than the next-lowest team on the list.
Tyler Flowers’ mantra has been “swing hard in case you hit it”
Normally applicable to pitchers taking their turn at bat, those are apparently words to live by for Flowers. Here are his percentile ranks (among all players with 150+ PAs in 2016) in some key stats:
K%: 7th (as in, 93 percent of players are better at avoiding strikeouts than him)
HR/FB%: 63rd
Soft%: 90th (as in, top 10 percent in avoiding soft contact)
Hard%: 99th (as in, third-best hard% among any player this season)
Swing%: 55th
Contact%: 13th
Basically, Flowers doesn’t really swing all that much more than average. But, his bat appears to give the impression of having holes in it, which is bad. But, when he does make contact, he does so really hard, which is good. Per this handy dandy Statcast leaderboard, Flowers is seventh in overall exit velocity, even though his exit velocity on grounders or non-grounders doesn’t tend to be near the top (basically it means he hits everything pretty hard, but not remarkably so by batted ball type, as opposed to some players who hit really hard flies/grounders but make relatively weak contact otherwise).
There’s probably no real reason to expect Flowers to continue being a 111 wRC+ guy going forward (though it’d be nice if it somehow happens anyway), but his approach has been kind of remarkable in that it’s worked so far. Hopefully his hand injury doesn’t take away our ability to enjoy that bit of uniqueness going forward.
Jace Peterson has yet to hit an infield pop-up this year
There are only 14 players left with 150+ PAs that have managed to avoid it. Joey Votto is of course one of them, as is Ben Revere, who seriously appears to actually use a downward swing plane at times.
On the flip side, Ender Inciarte has hit around 17 percent of his fly balls straight up (and down) into the infield this year. The last defensive wizard under team control who featured similar unfavorables was moved — will Inciarte remain a Brave into August?
Four of the bottom 15 players in HR/FB% are Braves
Ender Inciarte, AJ Pierzynski, Erick Aybar, and Chase d’Arnaud all have HR/FB% of 2.1% or below. Now, you could say that none of those guys should really be trying to hit the ball in the air or out of the park anyway, but it’s incredible not only that they’ve all managed to do so poorly on fly balls, but also that they’re all on the same team. By the way, two other former Braves (Andrelton Simmons, Gregor Blanco) are right there with this group in terms of fly ball futility.
This is not a post about Gordon Beckham but it should be
Gordon Beckham, in and of himself, has had a 2016 season that is statistically weirder than the fact that Pokemon Go is so popular they apparently had to remove its functionality inside the Fukushima nuclear disaster zone. The crux of Beckham’s weirdness is that he’s basically not hitting line drives this season, yet his batting line is still reasonable. (The whole Beckham situation has actually rectified itself a lot since he came off his second disabled list stint, but its remnants remain.)
Still, Beckham is one of only seven players who has yet to rack up an infield hit. Five of them are really slow (Matt Joyce, David Ortiz, Joey Votto, Brian McCann, and Carlos Ruiz). One is Chris Coghlan, the other is Gordon Beckham. Given that Beckham mostly hits grounders, and is reasonably fast, you’d think he’d at least reach on one, but no dice so far.
The Braves, as a team, rarely pull the ball
Only about a third of the team’s batted balls (34.3 percent) are pulled; 30 percent are hit the other way. That’s the second-lowest and highest total since 2010 for those stats on a team basis, respectively. If you go all the way back to 2002 (when batted ball data started being tracked with regularity), only nine teams have hit it the other way more than the Braves, and only that one team (2015 Marlins) have pulled it less.
This helps to explain the team-wide lack of power, though the cast of characters isn’t really right for the team to be trying to pull the ball into the seats the entire time (except for Tyler Flowers, who’s going to try to do that anyway).
Ender Inciarte, Nick Markakis, and Adonis Garcia are the real driving forces behind the lack of pulling. Similarly, Inciarte, Freddie Freeman, Markakis, and Mallex Smith all go the other way a lot. Freeman also helps torque these stats in that he hasn’t hit it back up the box much this season.
Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh
Here’s a ranking of the guys who chase the most pitches in MLB in 2016:
1. Jeff Francoeur – 45.2% o-swing%
2. AJ Pierzynski – 44.8% o-swing%
19. Erick Aybar – 39.7% o-swing%
See the title of this section. By the way, if you take those three guys and add together their wRC+s (note: please don’t add wRC+s together. That’s not what they’re for), you get a number about equal to Wilson Ramos’ wRC+ this year. Again, see the title of this section. Pierzynski and Francoeur are second and eighth, respectively, in terms of overall swing rate, in MLB this season. Freddie Freeman is 19th, and Adonis Garcia is 26th.
Other “interesting” plate discipline tidibits include:
- Ender Inciarte and Nick Markakis both make contact with lots of non-strikes (fourth and eighth in MLB this season, respectively). On the one hand, not striking out is kinda neat. On the other hand, making contact with a bad pitch is actually often a bad thing, as swinging through it would give the player another swing and extend the plate appearance, while making contact with a bad pitch can lead to a weakly hit out. Inciarte is third in overall contact in MLB, and Markakis is 19th, but neither have particularly good batting lines this season.
- Tyler Flowers makes contact with fewer than half of the non-strikes he swings at. Given the above, we probably should have expected this.
- Feeling frustrated by Freddie Freeman, but can’t quite put your finger on it? It’s probably his 78.7% z-contact% (contact rate on pitches in the zone). It’s a pretty large relative drop from the mid-80s where he usually sits, and puts him in the bottom 30 of MLB.
- Jeff Francoeur has been around long enough that no one throws him strikes anymore, yet he still keeps hacking away. Only 40 percent of the pitches he’s been thrown have been strikes, and yet… welp. If having a walk rate above six percent was important, I guess they’d put it on the scoreboard.
