New Miguel Cabrera: Old Miguel Cabrera?

Miguel Cabrera was the third-best first baseman this year by our end-of-year evaluations, but his owners paid first-best fantasy player prices. Take a look at his isolated power — the main missing component this year — over his career, and last year actually looks familiar. Has Cabrera returned to being the player he was earlier in his career?

Isolated slugging is a bit of a cudgel, though. There are plenty of ways that your ISO can suffer: your legs can slow down, you can hit fewer fly balls, you can pull the ball less, and so on. If we knew more about *why* his power declined last year, we might be able to better decide if he’ll have the same issue next year.

Let’s first take a look at his batted ball distance. You could say that his batted ball distance on homers and flies declined four feet last year, but you’d be missing the larger context. Miguel Cabrera has been top-40 in batted ball distance since 2007. He’s been remarkably consistent in a stat that often fluctuates wildly and generally just declines.

In fact, if you look at a table of Cabrera’s batted ball stats, it’s hard to see much of a difference over the last seven years.

Generally, Cabrera goes oppo/center with his fly balls and pulls his ground balls, which is pretty much what everyone does. But he’s middle of the pack in both, as the extreme angles cluster around 20 and he ranks around 90th out of 170 right-handers in both angles. He’s had a few more extreme years in both angles, but he’s settled in around +6 and -6 and has a generally good up the middle approach.

But then there’s the matter of the HR/xHR columns. If his angle didn’t change much, and his batted ball distance didn’t change much, why was his expected homer total so low? I asked Jeff Zimmerman that, and his response was: “For xHR I look at each hit. He could have a higher variety of results. Last year all his homers could have been 400 feet long, this year half could be 300 and the other half 500.”

Here’s a graph of Miguel Cabrera’s batted ball distances on homers and flies over the last two years. You can see that the distribution is different. In 2014, there is an emptier area near the max distance at the top.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Look at his spray chart for 2013 on the left, and 2014 on the right. See that opposite field power that he used to have? It’s been sapped a bit.

Four feet may not be a big deal, but if it’s the wrong four feet in the wrong spot, it can rob you of many home runs. With Miguel Cabrera considering ankle surgery for bone spurs that may have been bothering him all year, it’s fair to wonder if it’s just a blip during a Hall of Fame career. With so many of his statistics in line with his career averages, and his approach fundamentally unchanged, that’s the direction I lean as well. Steamer projects the first baseman for 32 homers and I could see him outproducing that number with a healthy ankle and a different distribution of his fly ball distances.