Photo: Redleg Nation Staff
Hey folks. It’s been a minute since you’ve all heard from me, but I found some interesting numbers, and what baseball fan doesn’t like interesting numbers?
The inspiration for this was noticing that, despite his general offensive shortcomings, Ke’Bryan Hayes really had been quite unlucky and then wondering how that stacked up for the Cincinnati Reds as a whole.
What we have here is a table with information anyone could freely look up, but nice and easy for you right here. Players are arranged in order of plate appearances. Have fun looking at the 10 most common hitters for the Reds so far (through Sunday’s game). The blue and red coding is, I assume, self-explanatory.
wOBAxwOBADifferenceMLB.318.323-.005Reds.288.320-.032Elly De La Cruz.378.367.011Sal Stewart.420.414.006Matt McLain.282.332-.050TJ Friedl.221.241-.020Eugenio Suarez.337.298.039Spencer Steer.284.307-.023Tyler Stephenson.287.359-.068Ke’Bryan Hayes.099.305-.206Will Benson.273.229.044
Now, expected stats are not my favorite things in the world, but I do think they’re useful for the first couple of months in the season because they will remind us that sample size matters, and it is still small. Also, xwOBA doesn’t care about my feelings or yours. And I find that’s good for analysis from time to time.
With the note that Eugenio Suarez has such a long track record, that I’m not worried about him, I think there are five really interesting pieces of information here.
The Reds, as a team, have been quite unlucky. xwOBA thinks they are almost average with the bat. But, as we all know, that has not been the case.Matt McLain has been unlucky. There have been good at-bats. There have been bad at-bats, but he’s walking a lot, striking out less, and somehow hitting worse than last year. This seems unlikely to hold.Tyler Stephenson is also unlucky. And he’s hitting the snot out of the ball. If he had enough plate appearances to qualify, he’d be 4th in baseball in average exit velocity. Really can’t see that .226 BABIP sticking around.Holy crap Ke’Bryan Hayes. We all know the arguments, but my lord. This is absolutely impossible to sustain bad luck. With neutral luck, he’s probably hitting well enough that we all tolerate him at third.Will Benson’s time may be up. I always hate it when I have to write something bad about Benson, but it’s been a long time since he got it done. He’s not getting it done this year AND he’s been lucky. LUCKY!
So there we go, there’s other stuff up there I’m sure some of you will find room to argue about. But my take away is that the Cincinnati Reds are going to hit better. Also, they should keep trying different outfielders until something sticks because what’s out there right now isn’t scaring anyone.
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