Matt Carpenter: Hard Contact Extraordinaire

In the interest of transparency, my original goal here was to examine contact rates across the board for third basemen. But given the factors involved a much more intricate study and time overall, something I currently lack as a high school teacher, I elected to focus on one player in particular that really caught my eye out on the contact side of things.

Given my relatively obvious North Side loyalties, it’s often difficult for me to say positive things about the baseball club from St. Louis, Missouri. But what Matt Carpenter has accomplished to this point in the season has become absolutely impossible to ignore, in at least one very specific respect. While he doesn’t necessarily bring the loud home run power that some of his third base counterparts tend to demonstrate on a daily basis, he’s hitting the ball harder than all of them. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a hitter in Major League Baseball that makes hard contact at the rate that Carpenter has turned in this year.

That’s because only two of them exist.

David Ortiz and Trevor Story are the only two hitters in baseball with a higher hard contact rate than Matt Carpenter. But since this is a third base column, let’s first look at how Matt Carpenter stacks up against his colleagues at the hot corner:

	Soft%	Med%	Hard%
Matt Carpenter	8.1	48.1	43.9
Kris Bryant	16.9	41.7	41.4
Jake Lamb	14.3	44.4	41.2
Josh Donaldson	18.4	40.7	41.0
Anthony Rendon	11.6	48.2	40.2
Justin Turner	12.8	47.8	39.4
Evan Longoria	16.6	45.8	37.6
Kyle Seager	14.1	48.8	37.1
Nolan Arenado	14.1	48.9	37.0
Manny Machado	21.9	41.4	36.7

With the exception of the likes of Kris Bryant, Jake Lamb, and Josh Donaldson, all having stellar years in their own right, it’s difficult to get anywhere near the white hot Carpenter in regard to the hard contact. As such, it’s probably not by coincidence that Carpenter has easily the highest line drive rate among his peers, coming in at 26.3%.

One interesting trend in regard to the type of contact that Carpenter is making is his dramatic pull rate. In pulling pitches with which he makes contact 48.5% of the time, Carpenter trails only Todd Frazier in that regard among third basemen, with a mark that ranks 14th overall in the league. Much of that can probably be attributed to his penchant for jumping on offspeed pitches. While the percentages have fluctuated, offspeed has always represented the highest percentage of pitch type which Carpenter has attacked:

That pull rate hasn’t hampered him in the way that it has some hitters, though. He’s hitting .360 against the shift and has still managed a .326 BABIP, even with some glaringly obvious pull tendencies. The fact that he’s hitting the ball so hard obviously lends itself to him finding success, regardless of positioning by the opposing fielders.

Carpenter’s approach at the plate has certainly factored into his monumentally strong contact. Carpenter’s 4.28 pitches per plate appearance rank fifth in the National League and seventh in baseball overall. That has helped to contribute to a 15.7% walk rate that ranks at the top of the group of third basemen and ranks fifth in the league among all position players. As reflected in the chart above from Brooks, last year represented something of an outlier as Carpenter was a touch more aggressive. This year, he’s trended back toward his normal levels of patience, to the point where he’s actually set to post a career mark in that regard. But since free passes aren’t necessarily our concern here (even though his overall approach may be)…

I mentioned earlier that Matt Carpenter isn’t hitting the ball out of the ballpark like his fellow members of the third base club may be. That doesn’t mean he isn’t providing value as an extra base hitter. His ISO, coming in at .255, still ranks sixth at the position. Carpenter has 15 home runs on the season, while nobody else in the top ten among 3B in ISO has less than 21. The fact that he can post an ISO figure that high while trailing relatively significantly in the HR department really speaks to his ability to generate that hard contact and find spots to rack up the ol’ XBH.

If not for his defense, which currently carries a -6.3 Def rating, we’d likely see Carpenter a few notches higher in the WAR department. While he doesn’t necessarily succeed in the homer or RBI aspects of fantasy, he still provides tremendous value in literally everything else that he does. He brings a quality approach and hits the absolute tar on the ball. It’s no wonder he’s reaching base at a clip over .400, with OBP being something I didn’t even touch on here. There’s nothing that turns me into a zealous fanboy quite like hard contact (and elite defense, but that’s another matter), and Matt Carpenter has managed to turn me into one when he’s at the plate, regardless of where my franchise sympathies may lie.

Oh, those two contact rates higher than Carpenter? Ortiz comes in at 45.2%, while Story came in at 44.4% before his injury.