Has Granderson Carved Out a New Niche for Himself?

It’s hard to believe the current incarnation of Curtis Granderson could show up, by default, at the very top of any FanGraphs leaderboard for positive reasons. Yet there he is: the Grandy Man leads all National League outfielders in chase rate (O-Swing%), at 16.7 percent. Only Brett Gardner and the fabled Joey Votto have offered at fewer non-strikes than Granderson among qualified Major League hitters.

Granderson has seen 128 pitches outside the strike zone. Of those pitches, he has swung at 21 of them. And of those swings, he has made contact with 17. For the mathematically disinclined, that’s a grand total of four swings and misses on pitches out of the zone. That’s the fewest of any hitter who has seen at least as many pitches as Granderson has.

Then again, that’s not many other hitters. Granderson is seeing a lot of pitches per plate appearance, but that’s not really an accurate representation of what’s happening. Granderson is watching a lot of pitches: his overall swing rate trails only those of Gardner and Ben Zobrist.

The reluctance, refusal, what-have-you to swing has manifested itself in a 22-percent walk rate, which is almost double his career best and good for second-best of all qualified hitters behind only Joc Pederson. His strikeout rate has continued to plummet from its 2012-13 levels and now sits at less than half of what it was a mere two years ago. Most peculiar: he owns the best hitter K-BB% at -8.4 percent.

Granderson is obviously not the same hitter he once was; the 40-homer power of yesteryear is all but a distant memory, as is the hope of a baker’s dozen steals. But his transformation is pretty astounding, and I think it could be legitimate. It’s easy to feed his much-improved plate discipline to the Small Sample Size Gremlins and predict he’ll regress, but Granderson displayed the same patience in spring training, too, walking 10 times in 58 PAs (17.2 BB%) while striking out half as often (8.6 K%). These developments came at the heels of a 6.6-percentage point strikeout rate improvement last year.

No, he appears to be a Grandy Man with a grandy plan, employing an approach that fundamentally differs from basically his entire career dating back to forever. To attest, a technically sophisticated two-frame GIF comparing his 2014 and 2015 contact rate heat maps:

Witness the selectivity. Observe the copious grey space and how it hugs the strike zone. Marvel at the abundance of red squares, almost half of which are populated with 100%s.

Granderson has also been using all parts of the field when he (infrequently) puts the ball in play. I created two more undoubtedly impressive GIFs, although the functions of these are primarily to demonstrate that he typically pulls the ball when he grounds out. That much hasn’t changed from years past. But when he doesn’t hit grounders…

… in 2014, Granderson put into play many a shallow pop fly, and he generally pulled his line drives — only 16 of his 80 (20 percent) ended up beyond the far side of second base. In 2015, however, you see, well, not very many dots. But of the dots you do see, almost 40 percent of them are red, and more than half of them are to the opposite field, green dots excluded. Moreover, Granderson has avoided pop-ups of the shallow variety (besides that one infield fly); in fact, his average home run and fly ball distance, per Baseball Heat Maps, is about three feet farther than last year’s, and that’s without the help of any home runs (which will come in due time).

Give Granderson his 2014 ratio of home runs to fly balls (HR/FB) and batting average on balls in play (BABIP), and you give him three more hits — a nontrivial number of hits, in that it is the difference between a .196 batting average and a .261 batting average. His OBP, which, as it sits now, would probably rank in the top 20 among qualified hitters were he to sustain it through September, would soar north of .400. And, as fun as it is to rip him for his .022 isolated power (ISO), give the guy just one home run, good for a career-low 6.7-percent HR/FB, and his ISO jumps 87 points. The season is young!

It would be asking a lot of Granderson for him to continue to perfectly replicate his, uh, “success” at the plate — the line drive rate will inevitably fall, and he’s bound to hit a shallow pop fly eventually or swing at a pitch outside the zone and miss it. But right now, Granderson appears to have a plan of attack, or at least some semblance of one, and it may start to pay dividends once the sample size noise smooths out. I don’t know if he’ll be much more than the 20-homer, 10-steal kind of guy he was last year, but an all-fields, contact-based approach could do wonders for his BABIP and, thus, his batting average. That’s really been his Achilles heel for years now.

Bold prediction season is over, but I dare say Granderson mounts his comeback in non-standard formats and, if a few extra batted balls fall in for hits, standard leagues as well. If anyone can do it, the Grandy Man can.