Explaining Miguel Cabrera’s Home Run Decline
Yesterday, I dove into the three xHR/FB rate components to explain what fueled Todd Frazier’s home run surge. Today, I’ll dissect Miguel Cabrera, who set a new career low HR/FB rate, as it dipped from a career high of 25.4% in 2013 to just 14.0% in 2014.
The first and most obvious place to begin is Cabrera’s distance. He has remained near the top of the leaderboard for years, so you figure with a large decline in HR/FB rate, surely he has simply been hitting his flies a shorter distance, right? Wrong. Check out distance trend since 2008:
Cabrera has remained consistently in the 300 to 310 foot range, with a small dip into the 295 to 300 range in 2011 and 2012. His distance this year sat below his peak, but was right in range of historical marks. It may be surprising given the big drop in power, but it wasn’t due to a lack of distance that led to it. Since his distance remained strong, it provides optimism for a full rebound, though it would be silly to figure that rebound would be all the way up to his 2012 and 2013 peak HR/FB rate levels.
So since distance wasn’t the issue, let’s see what his average absolute angle was. Was he hitting it down the lines less?
Bingo. This explains one piece of the puzzle. Between 2010 and 2013, Cabrera’s angle sat between 20.4 and 21.1, a very narrow range, which was above the league average. But in 2014, he suddenly stopped hitting it toward the lines as frequently, as his angle dropped to its lowest mark since 2009. The good news is that since angle has a relatively low year-to-year correlation, this is probably just a one year blip.
But it’s unlikely that the drop in angle was all that plagued Cabrera’s home run prowess in 2014. So let’s take a gander at our last metric, the standard deviation of distance (SDD).
And there’s the double whammy. So although he’s hitting the baseball on average generally the same distance as always, his big blasts have been less frequent. And as you could tell by the SDD leaders and laggards, there is an obvious correlation with power. So to see Cabrera suddenly hanging out on the same level as Alberto Callaspo and Yunel Escobar is just odd. Since there still remains little research into these new metrics, I still wonder if such a decline in SDD is a real ominous sign. It does correlate decently from year-to-year, almost as well as distance, so this isn’t something to ignore.
The fact that Cabrera maintained a 300+ distance is a good sign, and that his angle dropped isn’t really a big deal. But the falloff in his SDD is worrisome and could prove that maybe his power truly is on its way down. That threat, plus news that he may not be ready for opening day as he recovers from surgery on his foot and ankle makes him a bit less safe than he had been. Since he’s not going to come at any sort of discount, there’s essentially a 0% chance he ends up on any of my teams.
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
Maybe he just played while injured most of last year.
He’s getting old.
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The Tigers are done.
I had to check the masthead after the first three comments. I thought I was on Yahoo’s Big League Stew.
Definitely interesting analysis. I do wonder, however, whether the author watched Cabrera play much in 2014. He was “running” the bases for a good chunk of the year at what might best be described as a fast walk. Isn’t there some chance that his injured lower body could’ve impacted his power numbers? There isn’t even a mention of this fact. It’s as if the author is ignoring the existence of actual baseball games in his analysis.
The author addressed the injuries, ” That threat, plus news that he may not be ready for opening day as he recovers from surgery on his foot and ankle makes him a bit less safe than he had been.”
I guess I wouldn’t really call a brief mention at the end as addressing it. Not to be nitpicky, but it just seems like incredibly autistic analysis.
It is important relative to the topic, I agree. However, given the audience, is a paragraph about the uncertainties related to injuries and the probability of full recovery needed? I’d rather have Pod focus on giving us this new info, putting the Abs angle and SDD to work with HR/FB distance.
I glossed over injury concerns because his distance was normal. Wouldn’t you expect him to post a lower distance if he was hampered by injury? We don’t know enough about the SDD to say injury leads to a decline in the metric.
Good point
Subjectively, it seemed to me (even in September when Cabrera hit a lot of homers) that he wasn’t able to turn on the ball. The bad ankle prevented him from rotating right.
I would have also expected average distance to fall, but I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that playing through an injury hurt his flyball angle.
“And there’s the double whammy. So although he’s hitting the baseball on average generally the same distance as always, his big blasts have been less frequent.”
Seems his ultimate power was down, likely due to injury. The guy just wasn’t healthy in 2014, but that doesn’t mean he will just bounce back and be 100% going forward either.
We’re not talking about a situation where after the season team personnel mention there may have been injury concerns, we’re talking about a situation of an incredibly obvious injury which would ordinarily land a player on the DL for a significant amount of time. I can’t think of very many cases where a player on a daily basis played through an injury so observable and detrimental to that player’s ordinary mechanics.
The absolute angle change matches up with pitchers avoiding the inner half more in 2014 than from 2010-2013 (per FG heatmaps) when pitching to Miggy. If they pitch him outside he has to go that way more often. If this is a permanent change, I would expect that abs angle to stay closer to 2014 and not return to his career norms regardless of injury concerns.
This
so pitchers suddenly, in 2014, realized Miguel Cabrera is good?
I find it interesting that fantasy writers focus on value so much rather than the expected production when drafting. This leads to my question as to when you WOULD draft Cabrera, as, right now, he is a first round pick until we hear more about his recovery?
Curious if there is any way to break this down by month for Cabrera?
For distance, yes, but I don’t have the data for the other two metrics by month
He just dropped to 13 in my 20 team dynasty keeper league. I think I’ll roll the dice on that value
The Cabrera MVPBeast played the early part of 2014 still healing from the core surgery the previous off season. Some time in mid season a Tigers game watcher could see something was wrong with his foot/ankle. Playing with bone spurs in his ankle and then when the MRI and following surgery this past offseason showed a stress fracture in his navicular bone, it is no wonder his power and home run distance dropped this past year. Miguel Cabrera must have an incredible threshold for pain. His final numbers were still the kind that 98% of players in the ML’s would take every year.
It seems unusual for SDD to drop while average distance remains the same. Perhaps it’s a classification issue. What is the cutoff for a ball to be classified as a fly ball for the purposes of the average distance calculation? If he’s losing 10 deep homeruns which become wall scrapers, and also losing 10 shallow flyballs that get bumped into the “pop out” bucket or something, that could explain the drop in SDD despite maintaining his average distance.