Concerning Atlanta Braves Drake Baldwin and Jarred Kelenic, are all early-season samples equal?

Frankenmuth, Michigan is an interesting place.

Oh boy, here we go.

It’s not a place you would go for vacation, but it is a place you’d go to get away for a long weekend. Located north of Detroit, Frankenmuth is a German oasis in the northern United States. You can get all the stollen bread you want. You can get all the pretzels you want. You can go to the largest indoor Christmas store in the United States. And you can buy tons of dragons.

It caught my wife and I off-guard at first. We were up there for Oktoberfest, which is oddly one of the very few “recognized” Oktoberfests outside of Germany, and we started going into a bunch of stores. All of them had fairies, elves, gnomes, dragons, and basically any kind of fantasy being you can think of. It took a while before it dawned on us … Grimm fairy tales.

I do love me some dragons, but I didn’t go crazy, though I do regret not buying this garden statue of a sleeping dragon (maybe I’ll go back one day). I’m not entirely sure why I like dragons so much, but given my general interest in fantasy, it’s not exactly much of a surprise or uncommon in terms of people interested in the genre. But it did cause me to enter into a weird side conversation.

What is a drake? A guy was looking through various dragon-like creatures on a shelf, and one of them was marked as a drake. He wasn’t sure, and because I am who I am, I “had” to explain to him that a drake was essentially a dragon without wings, while vaguely gesturing at the figure who (of course) did not have wings. The face this guy gave me … well, I deserved it.

I bet you did.

So far, Drake Baldwin is not off to a flying start. But is that bound to turn around?

The poor rookie is hitting .154/.241/.192, good (?) enough for a 29 (gulp) wRC+. It’s not good, and with Sean Murphy back and hitting, he’s not likely to get consistent playing time anytime soon unless he starts playing left — which Atlanta Braves conspiracy theorists have been wondering about for a while.

It is, of course, very early, and Baldwin doesn’t even have 30 plate appearances on the year. If you even look at a basic metric like BABIP, his .190 BABIP screams that he’s been a bit unlucky, and his 10% walk rate and 17% strikeout rates are both above-average. He’s not even hitting too many or too few groundballs. We’re just looking at random variation. But can we see more?

Oh yeah, baby. Lots of red, and the bat speed, exit velocity, and expected metrics are all looking very good. If you were looking at this from a front office perspective, you would want to get this guy more at-bats. If he were to continue hitting like this, good things are bound to eventually follow.

The “if” carries some water here, though. These have some predictive power, of course, but they are mostly representation of what we would typically expect to see if someone were to hit like this. Nothing is guaranteed, after all. But there are plenty of reasons why it might not amount to all that much in the future – with the most glaring being pitchers adjusting eventually.

At this point, pitchers are still challenging and probing him, looking to see what he can do. In this case, he might get a simpler approach than a more seasoned veteran, but if Baldwin were to start getting the results that are indicated by those gorgeous bright red lines above, they’d pitch him differently. And we don’t know how that would affect him or how he would adjust. And either do those bright red lines.

Which brings us to Jarred Kelenic.

I was wondering when we’d get to how these things related.

Kelenic is nearly 1500 plate appearances into his career, so while his 30+ plate appearances aren’t automatically indicative of talent, his early-season performance tells us a little more than Baldwin’s. And that’s not good.

The surface-level metrics are bad. He’s hitting .186/.267/.296 (62 wRC+), and he’s striking out 40% of the time. He’s hitting a lot more groundballs than he usually does, and given that he’s not a burner, that’s not exactly helpful. Even worse are the Statcast metrics …

Well … at least he swings fast.

At this point in his career, pitchers are no longer guessing on Kelenic. They know what he can do, and they’re having success. One of the biggest changes in how they are approaching him is that they are throwing him sliders almost one-third of the time as opposed to about one-fifth of the time over the course of his career. Another Statcast chart …

Yikes. Kelenic is off to a slow start, and it’s more indicative of where he’s at than it is for Baldwin’s (for good and for ill in regard to Drake).

There are still things Kelenic can do – hit the ball hard and take a walk – and I’m not suggesting Atlanta give up on him. He’s not even 26, and Kyle Stowers (27) seems to be having a bit of a breakout this year.

But I’m getting less hopeful that there’s much magic left in Kelenic’s career.