An Ode to Former Third Baseman Matt Carpenter

As many surely are, I’m finding it particularly difficult to write about baseball today. And it’ll be a while before the sting of the events of November 8th wears off. More than four years, probably. But in this instance, I must press on. And since we’re likely saying goodbye to a lot of things that we enjoy about the United States (in the most dramatic sense possible), it’s probably appropriate to say goodbye to someone that I’ve really come to admire as a third baseman in Matt Carpenter.

Not that Carpenter is disappearing from the St. Louis Cardinals in the way that many of our American principles are set to disappear from mainstream society. But the Cardinals announced earlier this week that he’d likely become the Cards’ everyday first baseman in 2017. This was a transition that became more apparent down the stretch this past year, with Kolten Wong, Aledmys Diaz, and Jhonny Peralta set to make up the remainder of the infield by the time next season rolls around.

And given that my duties are restricted to the hot corner, this may be one of the final opportunities I have to evaluate Matt Carpenter and what he brings to the position. As such, Let’s reflect on some of the things he did particularly well as a third baseman in 2016.

Overall, this is what the 2016 season looked like for Matt Carpenter:

AVG	OBP	OPS	ISO	K%	BB%	wRC+	WAR
.271	.380	0.885	.235	19.3	14.3	135	3.2

The first thing that I quite enjoy about Matt Carpenter is his ability to make consistently hard contact. He doesn’t hit for the power that other players at the position might, but he’s almost a lock to give you a quality at-bat and some strong contact on balls put in play. At 41.9%, nobody make hard contact at a more consistent rate than Carpenter last year. Not Josh Donaldson. Not Kris Bryant. Nobody. When you’re in league with names like that, this is a pretty impressive feat.

That ability to make consistently hard contact could absolutely be attributed to a high quality approach, which is a second element of Carpenter’s game that I admire. He’s an extremely patient hitter, with his 38.6% swing rate serving as the lowest among third basemen and seventh lowest in baseball overall. Only eight hitters in all of baseball swung at fewer pitches outside of the strike zone. As such, he’s maintained a minuscule swinging strike rate, at just 6.7%. That mark isn’t even the lowest of his career. That came back in 2014 when he hacked and missed at just 3.3% of pitches. In terms of his actual pitch selection, Carpenter loves him some offspeed stuff. He swung at offspeed pitches just over a rate of 47%, with changeups specifically accounting for hacks 47.12% of the time..

Here’s what that patience looks like in graphical form. As illustrated here, that patience isn’t necessarily a new development for Carpenter. The approach has largely always been strong:

And just to throw out an additional visual, here’s his overall contact rates with those swing numbers in mind:

One interesting note is that despite the impressive contact numbers, he still maintained a relatively high strikeout rate, at just a touch over 19%. Some of that came after his oblique injury in the second half of the year, with the final two months of the season seeing that rate come in over 21% in each instance. That’s a few notches above his 17.7% career average in punchouts. There has been a bit of susceptibility to pitches on the outer part of the plate, as well as some whiffs against those offspeed pitches that he loves to get after.

At the same time, while pitchers have obviously managed to find the appropriate ways to get him sent back via punchout, given the high rates of contact (and subsequent high rates of hard contact), this isn’t necessarily a startling trend. The good far outweighs any bad that this would present for Carpenter.

Obviously, it was noted earlier that Carpenter doesn’t hit for quite the booming-type power that the likes of Bryant, Donaldson, or Nolan Arenado demonstrate. But that doesn’t mean that Carpenter hasn’t been a productive power hitter in his own right, necessarily. Hooray for double negatives.

Carpenter pretty consistently managed to stay above the league average in his ability to hit for extra bases. There’s the obvious decline in the latter parts of the season, but we can definitely attribute that an oblique injury he suffered in July. After a couple of months with big ISO numbers, the remainder of the season featured figures of .056 in July, .167 in August, and .194 in the season’s final month. So he started to get it back, but that injury definitely affected his ability to find the gaps, even if he was still making solid contact regularly. Overall, he finished with a .235 mark in the ISO game, putting him ahead of names like Justin Turner, Kyle Seager, and Adrian Beltre, who all had outstanding offensive seasons in their own right.

One thing that’s certainly going to be interesting to watch is how Carpenter’s offensive game translates to first base. Again, he doesn’t bring the obnoxious power to the mix, but he should be able to appropriately utilize the offense that he does provide in order to be an effective option there. It’s not as if he’s lacking significantly in the power game, he’s just not going to be a 40 homer 1B. His defense will likely play a bit better over there, as he’s always been average or just below average with the glove. Moving over to first should help in that regard and help his WAR to become more indicative of the value that he actually provides.

So goodbye, Matt Carpenter. We’ll miss you over at this side of the diamond.