Give Dustin Pedroia A Hand, Please

In 2013, Dustin Pedroia had what most fantasy baseball enthusiasts considered a down year. Despite hitting .301/.372/.415, Pedroia’s counting stats slipped to single digit home runs, and he failed to break 20 stolen bases for the first time since 2007 (not counting injury-plagued 2010). He did provide plenty of runs and RBI for the World Series champs, and considering he played with a troublesome thumb injury for quite some time, there were many who considered him a good bounceback candidate after getting it fixed in November of last year.

And why not a bounceback? After all, Pedroia had pretty firmly settled himself behind Robinson Cano in the top tier of second basemen for the better part of five seasons going back to 2008. Pedroia was a perennial .300 hitter with 20-20 written all over him, and among league leaders at second base in runs and RBI. With the thumb issue behind him, most prognosticators saw a return to 15 home runs and 20 stolen bases at a minimum, with his typical associated counting stat output to follow.

And then on April 4th, the Red Sox home opener, Carlos Gomez slid into second base to break up a double play. Pedroia went up in the air, and came down on his surgically repaired hand. And Pedroia’s season kind of mirrored that of the Boston Red Sox all season — it just never materialized. And in fact, Pedroia aggravated his hand injury several times over the course of the season, ultimately succumbing to surgery in September when it was clear the Red Sox weren’t going anywhere in 2014 and/or he just couldn’t play with it anymore. He would finish with a .278/.337/.376 slash line with seven home runs, just five stolen bases and the lowest wOBA as a professional by far at .318.

Looking at his 2014 performance is going to be difficult inasmuch as using it as a predictor for future contributions. Because there’s no doubt you need strong hands in order to hit a baseball, and if Pedroia lacked that for the majority of the season, well then maybe his performance was actually miraculous.

If you look at his batted ball data, Pedroia was well within what would be considered normal for his career:

	LD%	GB%	FB%	HR/FB
2011	19.10%	47.70%	33.30%	11.40%
2012	19.80%	45.60%	34.60%	8.50%
2013	21.60%	50.40%	27.90%	5.60%
2014	23.90%	48.30%	27.80%	5.20%
Career	20.70%	44.90%	34.40%	7.40%

His line drive rate was actually at a career high at nearly 24% while his fly ball rate was at a career low. His HR/FB rate was at its lowest mark since 2007, but if you look at his average distance on fly balls and home runs over the past four seasons, it might signal some bad luck (by his standard):

	HR/FB Distance
2011	279
2012	272
2013	265
2014	278

So after seeing his fly ball and home run distance drop to a pretty paltry 265 feet, it popped back up in 2014 almost to the level it was when he hit a career high 21 home runs. But obviously, the home runs never really materialized in 2014.

Something that might be of concern, and perhaps just a measure of his age, is the steady decline in his pitch values on fastballs:

Season	wFA/C	wSL/C
2010	1.87	-0.92
2011	1.62	0.32
2012	1.37	-0.72
2013	-0.22	0.25
2014	-0.28	0.36

I include sliders here simply because that’s the second most frequent pitch Pedroia sees, and he’s holding his own there — but on fastballs, which he sees almost 40% of the time, he has been in steady decline for five seasons, although this year was a hair less terrible than last year. I’m not sure we can pin all of this on a bad hand, but it could be part of the explanation.

Pedroia has been a guy who historically has used all fields pretty well, and his scatter plot from the 2014 season demonstrates a pretty decent distribution:

But somewhere around mid-season, Pedroia started to become a very pull-heavy hitter (from July 15 to end of season):

And during that same time span, he became a much heavier ground ball hitter in lieu of line drives:

This data is what makes me lean towards his hand bugging him. He was hitting less like Pedroia than ever, and it just deteriorated over the course of the season. It’s incredibly difficult to predict which Pedroia will show up in 2015, but I’ll certainly be looking for news on his health, specifically that troublesome hand. Because he’s now seen two seasons ostensibly derailed by the same hand injury and prior to that, he was one of the most reliable second baseman in both real and fantasy baseball. He could be a bargain on draft day, but the risk is high — if he turns in another year like 2014, you’ll be kicking yourself all the way to Rickie Weeks.