Howie Kendrick’s Atypical First Half

Howie Kendrick has had an atypical season in 2016, defensively and offensively. He has played the vast majority of his career at second base, but this year he has filled the super utility role, with 253 innings in the outfield, 46 on first, 91 on third, and 139 on second. His manager, Dave Roberts, has had many positive things to say about Kendrick’s defense thus far, especially with his work filling in left field for the Dodgers.  He has shown range and an arm good enough to make a few nifty plays. Namely, throwing out Wilson Ramos at home. Ramos isn’t a speedster, and the throw was from very shallow left field, but the play did a lot to contribute to a win.  His offense, though, has been a bit of a let down. Especially for a guy who has been so consistent over the course of his career. Kendrick has never finished a season with a wOBA below .313, and only twice has his wOBA have been below average: 2006 (league average .332, Kendrick .313) and 2010 (league average .321, Kendrick .316). This year, to date, his wOBA has been .277, 42 points below average. Nonetheless, this isn’t the worst start to a season in his career.  At this point in 2009, he had a very similar slash line as he does today:

In the second half of 2009, he produced .356/.393/.544, finishing the season .291/.334/.444 with a .340 wOBA. Obviously, the Dodgers would be ecstatic to see that level of production in the second half of this season, but does he have it in him?

Kendrick’s ground ball, line drive, fly ball rates have jumped around a little bit from last season. He is pulling far fewer fly balls, and it has cut his overall fly ball rate to about 2/3 of where it was last season. That’s not ideal, many home runs come from pulled fly balls, and his home run per ball in play (HR/BIP) has fallen by about a third from 2.5% to 1.7%. However, Kendrick has never been a big home run guy, so this isn’t that big of an issue for him. His line drive rates are up, so that’s positive. So are his pulled ground balls, but he is a right handed batter, so pulled ground balls aren’t quite as bad since they cannot shifted as aggressively.

His average exit velocities between the two seasons are roughly the same, 90.4 mph versus 90.5 mph. The break downs are also very similar, with the exception of balls batted up the middle. His ground balls up the middle have been hit far harder, 97.8 mph this season, while fly balls far softer, dropping to 87.6 mph. Hitting softer fly balls up the middle is actually a good thing, which might seem counter intuitive. The area in front of the center fielder is one of the three best places on the field to bat a ball for a hit, the other two are on the lines, behind first and third base, just deep enough to be unplayable by the infield. If you bat a ball to one of these three areas, assuming the trajectory is shallow enough, you will have an almost guaranteed hit since fielders are never positioned there to make a catch. Balls to shallow center are almost always a single, but hitting the ball there is a great strategy to boost your batting average. On these fly balls up the middle, Kendrick has batted .286, but he has an xBACON of .457, suggesting he may see more success if he continues the trend.

Between 2015 and 2016, Kendrick’s batted ball quality have gone through a “shuffling of the deck chairs” type scenario. A few percentage point shifts here and there between fly balls and line drives, but overall he should be producing roughly the same value overall. He isn’t suddenly hitting the ball more often to one place over another, or hitting the ball harder or softer or even with much of a change of elevation. Some other batters around the league certainly have gone through drastic changes in their batted ball types and quality. I wrote about Cameron Rupp last week, and how his trajectories have pushed more towards the extremes, with higher line drives and fly balls and lower ground balls, which translates to more extra base hits. He has also drastically increased batted ball velocities, +3 mph, which has fed a huge leap in his BABIP. Howie Kendrick is not like that, he hasn’t changed much at all. Kendrick should, you would think, be putting up numbers very similar to what he did last year. His expected stats and actual stats these past two seasons:

His expected stats last season closely resemble his actual stats. He may have been lucky with a few of his hits, but they didn’t matter enough to change the overall picture. By both expected and actual stats, he was a .320+ wOBA guy last year, as he has been for most of his career. Compared to last year, his expected stats this year have not changed much. I wish I had Statcast data from seasons prior to 2015 as well, because I doubt his batted ball quality has changed much at all over the course of the past five seasons, if not longer. Even without a change in batted balls, for whatever reason, his in game production has gone down so far this season. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though. If you look at just his past month of performance, from June 4th to July 5th, he has hit .270/.350/.382 with a .320 wOBA. Perfectly in line with his expected stats.

This chart for his 15 game rolling xOBA and wOBA averages should put it all in perspective. His wOBA bottomed out in the first 20 or so games this season, but his xOBA, his batted ball quality, went through a normal dip.  Kendrick probably should have gone through a regular slump, but luck and timing within the season amplified it, which is unfortunate for both him and the Dodgers. This start isn’t without precedent in his career, he went through a very similar stretch in 2009, and rebounded in the second half to have an above average season. In the past month, his in game production has matched his expected stats, and one may assume he will continue to put up career average numbers for the remainder of the season. Nothing about Howie Kendrick screams he is suffering from any sort of loss of skill or talent, but rather two months of bad luck, which has already appeared to have corrected itself.