2015 Roto Rookie Hitter

You don’t need me to tell you that 2015 produced an outstanding group of Rookie Hitters. The question is which player rises to the top of this very stellar group?

In order to make this determination, we first needed to select  criteria upon which to assess offensive performance. In my opinion, RC+ is a great tool because it is easy to use.  Any two players can be compared because it establishes a league average rate for position players of 100. It also controls for league and park effects but does not control for position played which will enter the conversation latter. Since we are talking about hitting only, we are not factoring in the defensive wizardry or lack thereof of any of the players selected.

Next, we need to account for the fact that we are dealing with Rookies whose seasons started at different times during their 2015 year. I needed to make a judgment call on how many PA’s would be needed to qualify for this Roto Rookie Hitter Award. My decision was based primarily on an article written by Eric Seidman in 2009 in FanGraphs entitled, When Samples Become Reliable. The following numbers were shared in his article and establish the number of PAs required to make certain statistics more relevant for hitters:

50 PA:     Swing %

100 PA:   Contact Rate

150 PA:   Strikeout Rate, Line Drive Rate, Pitches/PA

200 PA:   Walk Rate, Groundball Rate, GB/FB

250 PA:   Flyball Rate

300 PA:   Home Run Rate, HR/FB

500 PA:   OBP, SLG, OPS, 1B Rate, Popup Rate

550 PA:   ISO

In most cases with Rookies, we don’t have the luxury of a full season of PAs.  I selected a minimum of 300 PAs as the cutoff point since this is the number of PAs where HR rate and HR/FB rate become statistically more reliable. Based on 300+ PAs, and using the RC+ tool as the measuring stick, here is my top 10.

 

Player	Pos	PA	HR	R	RBI	SB	ISO	BABIP	AVE	OPB	SLG	wRC+
Miguel Sano	3B	335	18	46	52	1	.262	.396	.269	.385	.530	151
Randal Grichuk	OF	350	17	49	47	4	.272	.365	.276	.329	.548	137
Kris Bryant	OF	650	26	87	99	13	.213	.378	.275	.369	.488	136
Carlos Correa	SS	432	22	52	68	14	.233	.296	.279	.345	.512	133
Jung-ho Kang	SS	467	15	60	58	5	.173	.344	.287	.355	.461	130
Francisco Lindor	SS	438	12	50	51	12	.169	.348	.313	.353	.482	128
Maikel Franco	3B	355	14	45	50	1	.217	.297	.280	.343	.497	128
Justin Bour	1B	446	23	42	73	0	.218	.294	.262	.321	.479	117
Matt Duffy	3B	612	12	77	77	12	.133	.336	.295	.334	.428	116
Joc Pederson	OF	585	26	67	54	4	.206	.262	.210	.346	.417	115

This table below is often published in FanGraphs and provides our rating of player offensive performance based upon wRC+

Ratings	wRC+
Excellent	160
Great	140
Above Average	115
Average	100
Below Average	80
Poor	75
Awful	60

 

As you can see, our Rookie Hitting Group did quite well in this comparison with all hitters in MLB. Miguel Sano’s season was rated as Great while a number of our Rookies approached Great. The average wRC+ for our top 10 hitters was 129.1 which means that as a group they performed  29.1% better than the average MLB player.

For the sake of wRC+ comparison, this 2015 group was the best Rookie Hitting crop since the 2012 season which produced Trout, Harper, Cespedes, Rizzo, Carpenter, and Frazier. This illustrious group, who have all gone on to have very strong early careers, averaged a 120.9 wRC+ in their Rookie 2012 Season.

As previously noted, wRC+ is a strong tool for measuring offensive performance, but it does not account for the players position. There are 4 positions represented by our top 10 rookie hitters… SS, 1B, OF, and 3B. In order to take the position factor into consideration, I looked at the average 2015 wRC+ results for the top 10 players at each infield position (1B, 3B, and SS) and the top 30 for the OF.

We get the following average wRC+ results from FanGraphs data:

Position	wRC+
1B	150.1
OF	128
3B	127.2
SS	99

It was simply remarkable that the SS position, which produced by far the weakest hitting performance of all of the positions that we looked at, had 3 hitters in the top 10. When factoring in overall production at each position, I think that SS Carlos Correa rises from the 4^th position in our top 10 to challenge 3B Miguel Sano for the award.

Sano’s calling card is raw power and he clubbed HRs every 18.6 PAs.  Correa was not far behind Sano with one in every 19.6 PAs.  Sano has a higher hard hit % but makes contact at a weak 60% rate with an alarming 35% K rate. Correa is a good contact hitter with far better plate discipline at this point in their careers. The two hitters have similar bat speed and their distance on HR’s hit and percentage of “Just Enough” HRs as measured by ESPN Home Run Tracker, are very much in line. Sano also benefited from a very high BABIP of .396 while Correa’s .296 number was probably low for someone with his speed.

While a number of underlying peripherals clearly favor Correa, it is his speed and the position he played that combine to be the most significant deciding factors for me when choosing between these two budding stars.

In my opinion, Carlos Correa’s combination of power and speed, at a very thin SS position, makes him the most outstanding Rookie Roto Hitter in 2015.