Mitch Moreland’s Career Month

Mitch Moreland had a career year in 2015. He only matched his previous high in home runs (23), but his AVG, OBP, SLG, 2B, and RBI totals were all the best of his six-year career. He only needed 132 games to set a new high in AB with 471, but his 515 PA were actually only second-highest for him. Was it real? Can he repeat or even grow as he enters his age-30 season?

For the most part, when you’re talking about a roto league, the breakdown of a player’s season doesn’t really matter. If he put up numbers for your team, you’ll take ‘em in April or August. But even still, it is worth noting the big fade that Moreland experienced as the season progressed. He started out strong before an elbow injury cost him some time. Thankfully, it was the minimum 14 games and he stayed just as hot after returning, though he shifted from base hits to power.

He had a 129 wRC+ in April (56 PA). It fell to 122 in May (71 PA), but his ISO jumped nearly 100 points from .152 to .250. The power jumped another level in June. Moreland was on fire that month with 9 HR that fueled a 167 wRC+ in 105 PA. June was the culmination of Moreland’s excellence for 2015. He wasn’t bad in two of the final three months, but he was no longer a mixed league starter at 1B. He sank to a 67 wRC+ in July and slowly climbed out of that hole the rest of the way (92 and 107 in Aug & Sept/Oct).

You can see the decline is all about a power drain. Was it the elbow? Sure, he returned immediately from it and dominated for 1.5 months, but that doesn’t mean it was just out of the picture entirely after that. I honestly don’t know how much, if at all, the elbow played a role in his decline so we can only speculate on how much of a role health played in his fade, but I think there are some identifiable factors that stalled Moreland.

Like a lot of lefty power hitters, Moreland doesn’t exactly dominate his lefty counterparts. His .681 OPS against them this year was better than the .669 league average so it’s not the end of the world for Texas to keep him in there vs. southpaws, but it’s still essentially dead weight for us in fantasy baseball. That’s one of those “real baseball vs. fantasy baseball” things.

At least he’s getting the playing time which is key in fantasy baseball and it’s better than not having the 5 HR, 21 RBI, and 15 R he amassed in 167 PA, but the .245/.293/.387 line counterbalances some of the impact from those counting numbers depending which of the rate stats your league uses. His history against lefties and relatively advanced age says he isn’t about to go Anthony Rizzo on us (.903 vs. L in ’14-15; .617 ’11-13), either.

If they continue to play him, he’s likely to get worse (career 72 wRC+ in 548 PA; 80 this year) so you might not even get that 5-21-15 on the counting stats with even worse rates. Or they just full on platoon him and he loses the playing time altogether. Losing those starts could cost him some late-game PA against right-handed relievers. Obviously, he can be inserted as a pinch-hitter in those spots, but then he has the PH penalty playing a role which we know to be about a 10% cost:

Research has shown that hitters typically have a much more difficult time hitting off the bench than normal, so we expect their wOBA to be about 10% lower in these situations.

He does his best work against righties, but we don’t want his plate appearances to be as a pinch-hitter and incur the penalty. For his career, he has a .797 OPS (110 wRC+) against right-handers in 1538 PA and drops to .778 against righty relievers. His second half fade was almost entirely against righties as he went from .948 to .791 in OPS. I’m always careful not to focus too much on 1H/2H splits because of arbitrary endpoints and such, but this isn’t new for him:

Plus, let’s be a little bit kinder than “fade” since it was really more of a leveling off. In fact, the further you dig into his season, the more it looks like the excellence of it was simply June.

He blasted nine of his 23 HR that month, including four in the last two days which again speaks to arbitrary endpoints, but it seems he was just super-hot for that time period while being his usual self the rest of the way. Admittedly, it wasn’t only June, but his April and May spikes are perfectly normally given his track record.

The .998 OPS in June was something we’d never seen from him. His 33% HR/FB and 50% Pull rate were pretty far out of character, too. His career marks are 15% and 42%, respectively. In terms of looking forward, even if we normalize his June and don’t expect him to have any elite months like that, he still carries risk. Consistent health has eluded Moreland in his career.

I already mentioned the 2015 elbow injury which is added to DL stints for his left ankle (’14), his right hamstring (’13), and his left hamstring (’12). The elbow and ankle both required surgery. Health is the reason that he’s never played 150 games in a season, even more so than his platoon splits. So we’ve got a playing time and performance risk against lefties, performance risk against righties, and health risk for a 30-year old first baseman. That’s a tough sell at fantasy baseball’s deepest position.