Matt Carpenter Has 19 Home Runs

You know when you don’t own a player on any of your fantasy teams and late in the season you’re browsing through box scores and you realize “Woah, Player X has XX homers?!?!?!”. Yes, as fantasy owners, especially for those in mixed leagues, we generally follow all of baseball. But I personally don’t pay as much attention to players I don’t own and know I am unlikely to own all season. So when spending the last 20 minutes trying to figure out what to write about, I noticed that Matt Carpenter had just hit his 19th homer of the season. Bingo! Something to write about.

But seriously. W. T. F. Carpenter has already more than doubled his home run total from last year and it’s come in about 200 fewer plate appearances. His HR/FB rate has nearly tripled and it’s more than double his first full season in 2013. Carpenter had established himself as a pretty darn good hitter. But that offensive ability stemmed from his great eye at the plate, resulting in big walk rates and solid contact skills, an enviable batted ball profile that will always lead to a high BABIP and lots of doubles. We only saw limited fence-clearing power, so the fact that his ISO has just jumped above .200 is rather surprising.

If you had perused the batted ball distance leaderboards over the last couple of years, you wouldn’t get very excited about Carpenter’s future power potential. He posted a distance mark of about 271 feet in 2013, which is below the league average and it actually dropped last year to just 267 feet. That’s not good. It certainly doesn’t portend a future power breakout.

This year, his distance has surged to 279 feet. It’s not a significant increase, but it’s meaningful and it does get him to around league average. He is pulling the ball just as often as he did in 2013 and his Hard% has remained remarkably steady since that season, so there aren’t any other signs of a power explosion. He has nudged his fly ball rate above 40% though, as he has essentially reversed his ground ball and fly ball rates. This might be a conscious change in approach, though as good as he had been previously, one wonders why he felt like it was necessary.

The change in approach theory is supported by something else. That something else involves his strikeout rate and SwStk%. His SwStk% has more than doubled from the tiny mark he posted last year and as a result, his strikeout has bounced above 20% for the first time. This appears to be a completely new Carpenter. This is a power version. One that has sold out for power. We see this a lot, actually. In fact, just last year, this is precisely what Devin Mesoraco did — swing and miss more often, which boosted his strikeout rate, but also hit more fly balls than ever before.

While the additional fly balls have likely hampered Carpenter’s BABIP and his batting average now sits at a career low, the additional power has ensured that his overall production remains Carpenter-like. His wOBA actually sits right at his career average.

At age 29, he’s slightly older than the typical player enjoying a power breakout. Since there are so many moving parts and changes made to his statistical profile this year, it’s hard to know what to expect next year. But I’d bet against a repeat, as odds are this is just a one-year thing.