One Man’s OUTs Are Another Man’s Treasure.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a stat which I call OUTs.  I’m bad at naming things, I’m sorry. If you have a better name, please, help. Anyways, this stat sums weakly hit balls and strikeouts and subtracts well hit balls and walks, then divides it all by plate appearances. If you would like to see the exact formula, you can read this article.

For this stat, lower is indeed better. Also, you can convert this number to a bbFIP (batted ball FIP) by multiplying by -11 and adding 5.6. You can also convert to a Draftkings salary by multiplying by -2700 and adding 4000, although with Draftkings it is better to add and subtract the standard deviation (.3) from the OUTs score to create a range of values.

So, for example, Aaron Judge has an OUTs score of -.231, so he would have a salary range of (-.231+.300)*-2700+4000 to (-.231-.3)*-2700+4000. Plug that into a calculator and you get 3813 to 5434. If he costs less than 3800 (which he never will) then he is a must buy, and if he costs more than 5400 (which he frequently does) then you probably shouldn’t buy him. None of this includes stolen bases, so that is a factor you might want to consider separately.

However, this is a tangent. Today, I want to highlight a two players, both of whom I identified using this OUTs statistic.

Jackie Bradley Jr.

I first wrote about JBJ back in May. At that point I felt he was on the verge of breaking out, and in the time period since he sure has done so. However, have you noticed just how good Bradley has been? It is easy to overlook, considering the slump he went through to start the season, but some of that slump came as a result of poor luck on batted balls. At one point he was one of the most unlucky batters in the league.

In June he posted his highest value hit rate (12.3%), second lowest poorly hit rate (17%), and his fourth lowest K rate for any single month since 2015. Those value hit and poorly hit rates are elite, only very good hitters can sustain that level over a long period of time. Guys like Freddie Freeman and Miguel Cabrera. JBJ probably cannot maintain this level of performance much beyond this red hot June, but his projections aren’t terrible, either. He could easily post 10% value hit rate in July, he’s posted figures that high in four months since 2015. This level of production would no longer qualify as elite, but it would certainly be well above average. The average value hit rate is 5.8% with a standard deviation of 4.5.  So a 10% rate is still a full standard deviation above average, and June’s 12.3% is 1.4 standard deviations above average.

Right now, JBJ is ranked 39th in OUTs among batters with at least 200 plate appearances, right beneath Edwin Encarnacion, Matt Adams, and Nolan Arenado. Okay, that middle name there is a bit funny, but did you have JBJ sitting around this sort of company coming into the year? I doubt you did. Encarnacion’s ADP was around 25, and Arenado about 6. Bradley was all the way down around 145 or 150. (I’m going by memory, I might be off a little.)

Sure, some of this is the result of the other batters falling back, and this value rating assumes league average success rates on batted balls, which Bradley has not had. Even having said that, if Bradley continues hitting the ball like this for the rest of the season, this could be a very strong year for him. Also, I’m jealous if you managed to pick him up in April or May.

His rest of season projection stands around .262/.337/.450 with a .336 wOBA, but you should take the over on that. He could just as easily bat .280/.350/.480 with a .355 wOBA and 12 to 14 home runs over the next three months.

Trevor Story:

Here’s another guy I’ve written about before. In that piece I calculated an expected home run rate for Story that was more in line with what you could realistically expect going into 2017. I determined 17.7% HR/FB was about right for him in Coors Field. Much less than the 23% he had in 2016.  Also, much greater than the 13.5% he has actually put up this season.

Trevor Story seems to have graduated from the fly ball revolution and enrolled himself into graduate studies with pop up university. His launch angles have gone up across the board, especially early in this season. Right now his average launch angle is 22.6 degrees, whereas it was closer to 16 degrees last season. Nearly 17% of his plate appearances end with a weakly hit fly ball, the majority of which are infield flies.

He began the season with a launch angle that was ridiculously out of whack, and way too high. He was eventually placed on the DL with an injured left shoulder, and upon his return his launch angle returned to normal.

However, now that his launch angle is back to normal, his exit velocity has gone in the tank.

This sort of sudden drop in exit velocity may point towards injury. Or, in his case, perhaps a re-injury of that left shoulder. He has hit the ball in the 80 mile per hour range for nearly two weeks, occasionally dipping into the 70s as well, and he averaged 94 in one game. That is a very bad stretch, especially for a guy who averaged 90.2 mph last season.

Story managed only 2.1% value hits in the month of June, the 18th worst rate out of the 198 batters with at least 75 plate appearances. He also had the 7th worst strikeout rate. Right now his OUTs score, .173, ranks 173rd out of the 217 players with at least 200 plate appearances this season. With a score of .173, that means a team of nine Trevor Story’s might score around 3.7 runs per game. Not great.

At this point in the season it is difficult for me to point to a positive sign with Story. His struggles are deep, and there is no telling how long it may take for him to snap out of this funk. Maybe I should have seen this coming, seeing as how I compared him to Justin Smoak prior to the start of the season. Smoak suffered through many seasons very similar to what Story is going through right now. Namely, every season between 2010 and 2016. So, that doesn’t bode well.

But what can we do with Story going forward? Full disclosure here, I have several shares of him myself, and I am starting to lose hope.

The xStats projection for Story is pretty similar to that from Steamers of ZiPS: .257/.324/.466 with a .336 wOBA. The projection systems all pretty much agree on these numbers. However, watching him play, looking at these velocity numbers, I am worried. These numbers may be too optimistic. Maybe we should expect something more akin to Smoak’s 2015 season, closer to .220/.300/.450 and a .330 wOBA.

It is possible he could bounce back, but there are too many things going wrong at the moment. Maybe the injury to his left shoulder is driving his exit velocity down, I’m not sure.