Franklin Gutierrez and a .327 ISO

Prepare for an adventure in which we fly over to the FanGraphs leaderboard, choose a minimum of 120 plate appearances, and sort in descending order by ISO. Unless you played in an AL-Only league and were trying to catch the standings leader who owned this very character, you might be shocked who sits ranked second. Obviously, I gave it away in the title of this article. But if you remain stumped, it was 32-year-old Franklin Gutierrez. The man didn’t even play in 2014 due to health reasons and came into 2015 with a career ISO mark of just .135.

And although 189 plate appearances constitutes a small sample size and allows for the manifestation of some crazy randomness, it’s still large enough to leave us with this reaction — WHAT. THE. HECK?

It really all started in 2013. That year, in an even smaller sample size, he popped 10 homers in 145 at-bats and posted a .255 ISO, which easily set a new personal career high in the category. Often, we find that a player makes a conscious decision to “sell out for power”. The evidence is more swings and misses and a spike in strikeout rate. And that’s exactly what happened.

Let’s check Gutierrez’s SwStk% and K% trend and include 2015:

Aside from a jump in 2007, Gutierrez’s strikeout rate was just drifting along and bouncing around like any normal trend. But then in 2013, something changed and his strikeout rate surged amid an increase in his SwStk%. Since it was coupled with a dramatic power surge, it certainly looks like the two are related. In fact, if we look back at his entire career, an interesting story emerges:

As his strikeout rate rises, so does his HR/FB rate. In fact, the correlation between his K% and HR/FB rate throughout his career is 0.888! To put that in context, the correlation between the two metrics for all qualified batters between 2011 and 2015 was just 0.542. So when Gutierrez decides to partake in his own personal home run hitting contest, it’s time to swing his hardest and hope enough balls clear the fence to offset all those extra strikeouts. How long this approach will last and why it came about in the first place is anyone’s guess.

Now for fun, let’s check on batted ball distances:

From his batted ball distance, it looks like the transformation actually began in 2012, but his HR/FB rate that year was just 9.3%. Perhaps if we cared enough about Gutierrez back then, we could have highlighted him as a power surge candidate the following year.

When Gutierrez was recalled this season, he was summoned to face left-handed pitchers. But he actually ended up doing just as much damage against righties, posting nearly identical wOBA marks right around .410. He has been significantly better against southpaws in his career (.360 wOBA against, .290 vs righties), but this is clearly a different hitter. Unfortunately, the Mariners outfield is crowded and our own depth chart assumes he takes on a reserve role again, accumulating 385 plate appearances. It’s too bad, because it would be quite interesting to see what Franklin Gutierrez 2.0 could do over a full season’s worth of plate appearances.