Does Yasiel Puig Reemerge as a ManBear again?

You all remember the clever hashtag #ManBearPuig that parodied the brilliant South Park episode ManBearPig, right? Of course you do, because you use Twitter and you love South Park. Sadly, Yasiel Puig is quickly shedding his ManBearness. After posting a scintillating .398 wOBA during his 2013 debut, his performance has declined for two straight seasons, with the fall off this year a precipitous one. Will ManBearPuig make his triumphant return?

So Puig’s rookie season was an exciting one and likely blew away even the most optimistic of expectations. He showcased his power (.215 ISO), some speed (11 steals, 4.8 Spd score), crazy awesome BABIP skills (a .383 mark), and even some defensive chops (9.7 UZR/150 in RF). Surely we figured there had to be some regression the following season, which we did see.

In 2014, his HR/FB rate was cut in half, though his ISO didn’t drop nearly as dramatically thanks to big improvements in both his doubles and triples rates. And by batted ball distance, he was actually hitting the ball slightly further. Even with the power decline, he still managed a .379 wOBA and delivered everywhere else for fantasy owners. And given the upside his batted ball distance hinted at, we could have forecasted some significant HR/FB rate upside in 2015.

That didn’t happen. And in fact, little went right this season. His wOBA plummeted to just .328, just 0.15 points above the league average. But looking more closely, the slide was primarily fueled by his BABIP, which predictably has sunk from that inflated 2013 mark, to .356 in 2014, to just .296.

So the first question we must ask is how real were his 2013 and 2014 BABIP rates. Running his metrics through Alex Chamberlain’s xBABIP equation with my slightly altered coefficients yields the following:

Yasiel Puig BABIP vs xBABIP Trend

Season	BABIP	xBABIP
2013	0.383	0.326
2014	0.356	0.312
2015	0.296	0.300

Hmmm, so maybe Puig never actually possessed the talent to post such inflated BABIP marks. Of course, xBABIP is an equation and although Alex’s has proven to be the best we currently have, the R-squared is still just 0.456. That’s rather low for our best shot at validating BABIP. Clearly there are other things at work here not being captured. And equations are not good at dealing with outliers. They shouldn’t be, that’s the definition of an outlier!

We do still see a declining trend though, which isn’t a good sign. But, hitters don’t just lose their BABIP skill each year. Of course there’s an aging effect, but it’s not just a gradual decline each year or all the 30+ aged guys will be BABIPing .200 every season! So it’s likely nothing to worry about. Puig probably had no business posting marks above .355, but Steamer’s .323 2016 forecast seems reasonable. He should certainly bounce back off this low.

Let’s move back to his power. As we continue to observe the oddities in Puig’s statistical profile, his power from 2014 to 2015 is yet another example. His HR/FB rate did indeed rebound, although only marginally, jumping 2%. But his ISO actually declined slightly as his doubles rate collapsed. Consulting his batted ball distance, it did drop about 10 feet, but an increase in his standard deviation of distance offset the decline and resulted in an xHR/FB rate of 18.4%, just a bit higher than 2014’s xHR/FB rate of 17.0%.

Now you might be thinking, “wait Mike, ummm, he just drastically underperformed his xHR/FB rate for two straight years, don’t ya think that maybe your equation is, like, not very good?”. It’s a valid question! And the equation is missing park factors, which do matter (Dodgers stadium is exactly neutral for RHH homers). But then there’s this data point — his 2013 HR/FB rate (21.8%) nearly matched his xHR/FB rate (21.4%). So perhaps the two years of xHR/FB rate underperformance was just that, poor fortune, which hints at major upside in 2016. Or maybe the equation just got lucky in 2013 and he’s an outlier here too like in BABIP, but on the negative side.

It would be silly to ignore the injuries that Puig has dealt with. He’s only been a Major Leaguer and already has two pages of injury data! This year he missed nearly a month and a half with a strained left hamstring and then another month and change when he strained his other hamstring! I think it’s safe to say that we know exactly why his Spd score fell to just 3.9 and his willingness to attempt a steal diminished.

Obviously we are well aware that Puig has immense talent. He has shown flashes of incredible power, has above average speed (though needs to become a better base stealer), and a high BABIP now sits in his profile, which may be partially real. If he could avoid injury for the foreseeable future, he might not come cheaper in drafts again for a while. For the first time, he may offer a reasonable enough risk/reward to take the plunge, because in previous years he was far too expensive for my blood.