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.
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
I hate Matt Carpenter.
I’ve always felt that a change in approach at the plate such as this helps explain why there were so many crazy high BAs and low K rates from hitters pre-Babe Ruth, and also largely why HRs exploded once Ruth showed up on the scene. Pre-Ruth, the goal was to get the ball in play and knock as many hits as possible, but once Ruth showed that chicks dig the long ball, batters adjusted accordingly.
There’s a story, apocryphal or not, that Ty Cobb (at age 38) was so fed up with the attention that long balls were getting that he declared before a game that he’d show that HRs were nothing special – and he then went out and hit three in the game and two the next day before scoffing and going back to his usual. While I doubt he could so easily flip the switch like that, I like to think that there is a kernel of truth there regarding swing style and approach at the plate.
It’s not apocryphal, you can look it up. Though the weirdly shaped parks probably had something to do with it. http://www.baseball-almanac.com/box-scores/boxscore.php?boxid=192505050SLA
I think the change in approach theory has some legs. The Cards are 24th in HR this year and if Carpenter was sitting on his normal 7 or 8 at this point, they could easily be sitting at 29th (where they finished last year). It could be that with the loss of Adams, limited availability of Holliday, and general lack of power in the lineup, management asked him to focus more on power than average.
When Carpenter got roughly 300 at bats in 2012, the thing that impressed me was how hard he hit the ball – long, low, line drives. I pegged him for my 2013 sleeper when they announced the move to second. In 2013, he had he exact same approach, he had a line drive swing, he just tried to hit it hard, and drive it. He rarely tried to elevate. This year he’s swinging for HRs. It looks to me like a conscious approach, and that’s not a statistical analysis, it’s purely observational.
If I remember correctly, stltoday.com ran a story during Spring Training which stated that Matt Holliday had talked to Carpenter about changing his approach to try to drive the ball more this year. I haven’t been able to track down the article, but if my memory is correct then maybe Carpenter has changed his approach.
He has certainly made a change to hit more home runs although the power potential has been evident since 2013 when he hit 55 doubles. He has incredible strike zone judgement and bat control and he consistently works deep in counts. In previous seasons he would shorten up with two strikes and look to take the ball the other way. Now, he is trading off additional strikeouts for additional home runs in two strike counts. He’s hit 8 of 19 home runs with 2 strikes this year including his home run last night in a 3-2 count. His ISO with a 3-2 count is a ridiculous .328 this year. He’s definitely a different hitter now, but this is probably his high water mark when it comes to power.
As a Cardinal local, I’ve heard him interviewed before and say that he’s made a conscious change in his approach at the plate to try to elevate and hit for more power this year. What I think is amazing is that anyone can say they are going to try to hit more homeruns, but it takes real talent to change an approach and succeed.