Reviewing Pittsburgh's outfield: Andrew McCutchen
Going into the 2016 season, everyone considered the Pittsburgh Pirates to have one of the best group of outfielders in baseball. Andrew McCutchen, Starling Marte, and Gregory Polanco were poised to become a true three-headed monster, leading the Pirates to another postseason appearance.
In their ranks they had a bonafide, former-MVP superstar, an established regular with all the talent for further improvement, and a youngster still finding his way, with possibly even greater talent that hadn’t quite shown itself yet.
So the question becomes: how did they do? Did they meet expectations this year, exceed the best case scenarios, or fall flat? Well, it turns out, they pretty much did all three. Here is our first in a three-part series on the Pirates outfield, beginning with Andrew McCutchen.
Where did it all go wrong?
Answer: it didn’t all go wrong, but we are so used to seeing brilliance out of ‘Cutch that any steps backward seem magnified. First of all, let’s look at season expectations, using Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projection system from the start of the 2016 season:
149 games, 651 PA’s, 23 HR, 89 RBI, .293/.392/.493, 5.6 WAR
As you can see, he’s supposed to be pretty, pretty good. Those aren’t eye-popping, crazy numbers, but they would be ‘best player on the team’ numbers for sure. Especially for a center fielder going into his age-30 season, they are great. But now, here is what he has actually produced:
132 games, 584 PA’s, 20 HR, 62 RBI, .247/.329/.411, 0.5 WAR
Career lows in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage happened. The speed that had been slowly going away for several years disappeared, and his once-mighty defensive prowess has gone missing.
Why did this happen? First of all, the speed and defense have been trending down for a while now, which is not unusual for a 30-year-old, if just a bit early. If he hasn’t lost a step (and his range is down), he’s lost at least a half-step. He’s never going to be a 25-30 stolen base guy anymore, and it might just be time to entertain the possibility of moving him off of center field.
But then there’s the offensive cratering. Let’s dig a little deeper. With a Batting Average of Balls In Play (BABIP) of .299, he is right around league average. However, McCutchen has always been in the .340-.350 range of BABIP before this year, so losing 40 points of batting average sounds reasonable.
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Just from a decrease in balls finding a hole and, yes, less infield hits (from 22 to 13 to 10 the last three years), you can see at least part of the reason why McCutchen’s batting average has dropped.
But the drop in his slugging percentage is a little more concerning. Looking at the hit-type data, from 2012 through 2015 his soft-contact percentage was 11.8, 10.9, 11.8, and 13.1 percent, respectively. In 2016, that number has skyrocketed to 21.1 percent. His medium and hard-hit rates have both plummeted accordingly, so while his home run total hasn’t fallen off–23 home runs in 2015 and 20 so far this year–he just isn’t making good contact as often as before.
To combat this slipping contact rate, McCutchen has begun to try to pull the ball more–from 38.9 to 46.1 percent–and isn’t taking the ball back up the middle as often. He’s also swinging more frequently, up to 47.1 from 44.1 percent last year. Of course this has led to less walks, with a 9.4 percent walk rate this season, down from 14.3 percent last year. That explains the corresponding decrease in his on-base percentage.
So is this just a blip or the start of an early decline phase? It’s obviously too early to tell, but his numbers have been trending down for two years now. It’s quite possible that the best years of McCutchen’s career are behind him, and that makes me sad as a fan of his career.
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