Mark Trumbo’s Hot Start a Bit of Déjà Vu

Humor me for a second. Pretend that you don’t already know this post is about Mark Trumbo. OK, good.

As of Monday morning, through 48 plate appearances, Bryce Harper hit six home runs, stolen three bases and walked twice as often as he struck out. It’s ridiculous to extrapolate, but acknowledge that Harper has basically replicated Barry Bonds‘ historic and infamous 2001 batting line through a small sample size, and it gives you a sense of just how monstrous of a start Harper has had — at just 23 years old.

Now, try to comprehend that Harper, per weighted runs created (wRC+), isn’t even the best hitter in the game right now. There must be luck involved, you think to yourself, and you’re certainly right in one instance: Daniel Murphy and his .500 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) have vaulted Murphy to the top of the leaderboard.

But right below him, sandwiched between him and Harper, mere decimal points of a percentage point of wRC+ better than Harper, is Mark Trumbo. Mark Trumbo, of the career 110 wRC+, is, in a sense, hitting like peak Barry Bonds. They got there in different ways, but numbers are numbers. I guess everyone is due for a good week, Trumbo included, right? Or is there something more to this?

Before I go any farther, you really should read David Laurila’s post from last week on Trumbo, in which Trumbo discusses his approach at the plate and the process of maturing as a hitter. He’s transparent about his approach, and he’s honest about the type of hitter he is, and he’s frank about how he simply hits more efficiently when, in so many words, he doesn’t try to optimize according to sabermetric ideology. His optimal level of production does not coincide with optimal plate discipline.

With that said, it’s easy to take Trumbo at his word and assume he has finally settled in as a hitter. It’s also easy to dismiss it, because talk is talk, and talk is cheap. Any spring training, best-shape-of-my-life interview can serve to prove that.

There are signs of change, though, that set apart Baltimore Trumbo from Los Angeles of Anaheim Trumbo. (First things first: small samples. Those are things, and Baltimore Trumbo’s season thus far is that kind of thing. It’s only 46 PAs. We have, have, have to keep that in mind.)

He looks like a different hitter at the plate. If you, indeed, clicked through the link above to David’s post, you’ll know that Trumbo has tinkered with his approach. He has tried before to be a more patient hitter, and he has tried before to cut down on his strikeouts. Currently, his strikeout and walk rates both sit well below his established norms — currently at 17.4 K% and 2.2 BB%, respectively — which indicate a more contact-oriented approach. And that, in a sense, seems to contradict Trumbo’s optimal approach.

Yes, Trumbo seems more locked in at the plate, not in the sense that every pitch looks like a beach ball — although it might, considering he has hit five trum-bombs this month — but, rather, in the sense that he seems to have a solid feel for the strike zone. Depending on whom you ask, Trumbo has cut down his chase rate (O-Swing%) either an itty bit (PITCHf/x) or a bunchy bunch (Baseball Info Solutions, or BIS). However, regardless of whom you ask, his current chase rate, if extrapolated, would represent a career-best.

Additionally, Trumbo appears to be swinging more often than ever before at pitches in the zone, and he is, by far, making more contact on such pitches, too (per PICHf/x and BIS). There might be too much noise in the chase rate to make much of it — you could argue, using the BIS data, that it’s not statistically significantly different from years’ past — but the zone contact rate (Z-Contact%) is a bona fide improvement, no matter which way you cut it.

It’s hard to identify just how many streaks such as the one in which Trumbo is entrenched and when they might have occurred, but I quickly spotted a similar 19-game streak from last year in his game log:

Mark Trumbo’s Streaks of Dominance

Date	PA	HR	R	RBI	SB	BB%	K%	ISO	O-Swing	O-Contact	Z-Contact	Contact	SwStr
4/18 – 5/12/15	74	5	10	15	0	5.40%	13.50%	0.314	32.70%	51.00%	91.60%	76.50%	11.80%
4/4 – 4/16/16	46	5	10	11	1	2.20%	17.40%	0.364	29.90%	57.70%	87.00%	79.00%	11.20%

You could argue that the second, and most recent, streak is much more impressive. Trumbo is hitting for more power and, despite the plate discipline outcomes, seems to have a better control of the strike zone. But, truthfully, the two lines are not very different.

In other words, it’s not like we haven’t seen this side of Trumbo before. I would say that it’s because it’s April, and there’s not four months of performance to obscure his hot start, but the previous streak I cited above also occurred early in the season. So it’s not like we haven’t seen this side of Trumbo early in the season before, either.

It’s fun to think that Trumbo might be a hitter reborn. He’s hitting the snot out of the ball, shrinking the zone and capitalizing on mistakes. But it’s hard for me to think he’s something new. At best, he’s something borrowed, from a previous iteration of himself. It’s fun to think that this could end some other way, but hitter profiles wax and wane throughout the year. Right now, Trumbo is waxing hard. But he’ll have to wane at some point, too, and I cant help but think we’ll start to see old Trumbo again.

Ride the hot hand while it’s hot, or maybe flip Trumbo for something nice. In the meantime, I’m reluctant to rank him higher than the top-30 outfielders. Even that is a stretch. Perhaps there’s something I’m missing. Color me skeptical.