How Excellent is Logan Morrison?
Today, we’ll focus on one National League outfielder instead of the entire class. We know from his twitter feed that 24-year-old Logan Morrison is an excellent young man worth paying attention to, but it’s hard to know exactly how excellent he is with respect to his fantasy value without unpacking his power potential.
Right now, Mr. Morrison has a .313 ISO which would be fourth in baseball if he had played enough to qualify for the batting title. We can’t hold his foot injury against him, but we do know that it means that he’s had fewer PAs than his competitors and his sample is even smaller than average. For a guy that showed a .164 ISO last year, and a .174 ISO in his minor league career, we can remain skeptical that his power will last, and the size of the sample doesn’t help matters.
We do know that isolated power doesn’t even really stabilize over a season, so maybe we don’t really know what his major league power looks like on a reliable level. He’s only played for 366 major league plate appearances. Players don’t usually put up power numbers that trump their minor league work, but certainly young men put on weight and become more powerful as they age. Could Morrison out-do his rest-of-season projections that have him dropping back down to a .177 ISO? That projection would mean only ten more home runs the rest of the season even though he’s managed five in his first 79 plate appearances.
One piece of good news is that Morrison has changed his batted ball profile slightly. After putting up groundball rates over 50% regularly in the minor leagues, Morrison is showing what would be a full-season low in that category right now (40%). Correspondingly, he’s hitting more fly balls (43.6%) than groundballs for the first time in his life. If these changes hold, he could very easily outperform his previous power work.
How far are we from being able to reliable predict that these changes in his batted ball profile will hold? Some might say never because of stringer bias, but Pizza Cutter tells us the ground-ball rate numbers that we have stabilize around 40 PA. So Morrison has shown us that he’s willing to hit the ball on the ground a little more in the major leagues. According to his work, we’ll have to wait another 100 PAs to believe the fly ball rates, but we do know that he’s hitting fewer ground balls.
You have to get the ball in the air to get it out of the park. This is true even if your home park suppresses home runs between one and five percent depending on your handedness. It would be folly to believe a .300 ISO from Logan Morrison, given his minor league career numbers, but a .200 ISO now seems possible with his new ground-ball rate. With the average major league ISO now down to .139, Morrison’s power looks better in comparison even if he doesn’t sustain a .200 ISO, though.
It’s clear that Mr. Morrison is an excellent play even if he doesn’t ever hit 30 home runs a season. His modest power is being boosted by what might turn out to be a real change in approach at the plate.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
It also should be noted that Morrison had a fractured wrist in 2009. It is not uncommon for it to take two years for a player to recover his power recovering from an injury like that.