One (1) Precedent for Not Bailing on Chris Carter

Chris Carter is off to a bad start. This is an unambiguously true fact. Jeff Sullivan, among other Twitterers (Tweeters?), have succinctly illuminated this unambiguously true fact:

selection of players with ISO of .000 Curtis Granderson Brandon Phillips Desmond Jennings Logan Morrison Chris Carter

— Jeff Sullivan (@based_ball) April 21, 2015

Carter has supplemented the zero extra-base hits with four singles, 21 strikeouts and nary a run batted in to speak of through 51 plate appearances. (FYI, that’s a 41.2-percent strikeout rate.) His atrociously bad start is the talk of the Twitter town, and it has Astros Manager A.J. Hinch dropping him in the batting order. As of last night, Carter’s ownership had dropped to 67.7 and 73 percent in ESPN and Yahoo! leagues, respectively, as owners have jumped ship.

I remember, however, that Carter started the 2014 season pretty miserably as well. I recall an owner in my primary rotisserie league added him from free agency in May or June as Carter began writing the prelude to his (physically and emotionally) powerful novella.

Alas, Carter’s 2014 game log shows he, indeed, began the season in an almost-equally atrocious fashion. Through each of his first 10 games:

2014: 38 PA, .143 BA, 0 HR (.114 ISO), 42.1 K%, 7.9 BB%, .263 BABIP
2015: 40 PA, .083 BA, 0 HR (.000 ISO), 40.0 K%, 10.0 BB%, .150 BABIP

The 2015 isolated power (ISO) is an obvious eyesore, but it’s not as if his 2014 ISO at that point was much better, at least relative to his 2014 year-end ISO. To attest: he didn’t hit his first home run until his 19th game last year. Moreover, this season’s extremely slow start has been exacerbated by an inexplicably low batting average on balls in play (BABIP).

Thus, the precedent to not give up on Carter is Carter himself. Carter proceeded to hit 37 home runs and bat better than Mario Mendoza in spite of himself last year. There’s no reason he can’t do it again.*

*unverified claim

Yet fantasy owners are panicking over what still qualifies as a small sample size. It’s growing, sure, but when a slump isn’t masked by a half (or full) season’s worth of plate appearances, it becomes amplified. What happens when you break down Carter’s 2014 into a collection of small sample sizes?

I plotted the 10-game moving average (which calculates the means of subsequent data subsets — in this case, games 1 through 10, then 2 through 11, then 3 through 12, and so on) of Carter’s strikeout rate for the duration of 2014:

His worst 10-game stretch at the plate in terms of not striking out peaked 51.6 percent on June 28, 2014, his 71st game played of the season — almost exactly half his season. From games 62 through 71, he went 3 for 30 (.100) with no extra-base hits, no runs, no RBI and 16 strikeouts. Sounds familiar, yeah?????? He was batting .184 at the time with 13 home runs. If you don’t know how this story ends: Carter had a torrid second half to his season, during which he raised his batting average 44 points and belted another 24 home runs.

He also repeated the feat of a roughly 50-percent moving-average strikeout rate 48 games later. He fared a bit better during that 10-game stretch; he hit 7 for 35 (.200) with four home runs. Basically, over a span of 10 games, Carter only put 12 balls in play that didn’t clear the fence. Were it not for the home runs — which, who knows, could have been long fly outs elsewhere — it would have been a largely unproductive week and a half for him (cue oh, really?).

Both snapshots represent moments in 2014 when Carter’s moving average was worse than it has been at any point this season (it peaked at 46.2 percent after Monday’s game). The latter strikeout spike occurred when Carter had already amassed 29 long bombs away (before tacking on his 30th through 33rd) and was safely entrenched in fantasy lineups.

Look, it’s ugly. I know it’s ugly. But Carter has been ugly before, and he has been ugly often. You simply may not have a better time to buy low on a player who subjects himself to massive slumps because of his power-packed Swiss cheese swing. Maybe it doesn’t get better, and this is all for naught. Carter’s track record alone warrants your patience for him, but if it doesn’t, then the precedent he established last year should.