Reflection and Speculation: Derek Norris

The Oakland Athletics are undoubtedly quite pleased with the breakout at the plate of Derek Norris in 2014. He batted .270/.361/.403 in 442 plate appearances, posting obvious career bests in AVG and playing time, both of which proved useful to fantasy baseball players.

Two aspects of Norris’ production in his supposed breakthrough season seem to warn his owners not to get too far ahead of the backstop’s train, however. He hit 10 home runs, but eight of them came before the All-Star break, in only 28 more PAs than he accrued after the season’s faux midpoint. His uptick in PT could be traced to team need as well as some notable gains in his splits versus right-handed pitchers early in the year, especially in terms of strikeouts, something I chronicled in June, but that discipline against same-handed pitchers faded as the season wore on.

The lack of power might seem to be more concerning for the future. Norris’ .132 ISO this year isn’t much lower than anything he’s produced at the MLB level already and isn’t far off what equivalencies of most of his minor league numbers should look like early in his career, however. Norris belted 20-plus bombs in two different farm campaigns, both of them, obviously, pre-peak for power production. Scouting reports have always included two assets of his: patience and power.

Norris has displayed power often enough to believe that those reports are correct. There’s not a ton of reliability in analysis of batted-ball distance data yet because of a lot of potential noise, so it’s not much of an explanation for his shortcomings. If it were, it’d suggest that he was considerably overrated in terms of power. The average distance of his home runs – around 390 feet, pretty good – has basically not changed in his three major league seasons. Analysis of that data alone is noisy, too, but that’s kind of the point: There’s, at minimum, some conflicting data that gives pause.

The second-half plunge in performance against RHPs is what I found to be disappointing. The RHB began to strike out notably more often against pitchers of the same handedness, discounting the seeming gains he’d made. Norris’ heatmap from the first half of this season suggests that he’d done something a little different with stuff down and away from RHPs than he did in the second half or in the previous year. His swing and chase rates, albeit impressive overall, rose by about a half-dozen percentage points from the first to the second half.

Still, overall, he improved. And Norris displayed a problem with pop-ups initially in the bigs, but that has incrementally dissipated. He went from 9% pop-ups in 2012 to 7% last year and to 5% in 2014. The trend is encouraging, overall. His career rate against RHPs is nearly 10%, another indication of where he’s had his issues. Still, he’s made strides against them in terms of the product of infield-fly and fly-ball rates, from more than 14% to nearly 12% to about 7%.

The combination of the pop-up problem and the strikeout rate, no doubt not abnormal for many same-handed hitters who become casualties of their deficiencies and thus platoon players, might be deterring for his long-term prospects. He’s made such encouraging global gains against them that it seems too soon to cast him as a player with such a fate, though. The A’s probably aren’t ready to make that determination, either, but it’s probably fair to wonder how much better he can be and will become. The club has made it a point to have alternatives at the position for the last several years, not just for Norris’ sake. They had the flexibility of LHB John Jaso as a backup plan this year and, likely, LHB Stephen Vogt next year.

Norris’ merely OK defense may limit his upside, too. The A’s were one of the five worst teams at throwing out base-stealers, with a 22% caught-stealing rate, this season. There are, of course, variables in that equation which don’t involve the catcher, but the catcher is the closest thing to a constant on the defense’s side of it. Norris threw out only 17% of runners who attempted to pilfer a base on his watch. Given that Oakland went with the more adept Geovany Soto over Norris in their wild-card playoff loss against the Kansas City Royals, the club would obviously like Norris to improve in this aspect of his defense.

Statistical gauges suggest that Norris may never be more than average, defensively, period, but he’s been labeled above-average in terms of athleticism and therefore deemed to have the capacity to improve that aspect of his game. It’s reasonable to ask how much better he can be if those results haven’t really shown up yet, though.

I don’t see much reason to doubt that Norris, at 6 feet and 210 pounds (215 with the beard) and entering his age-26 campaign next year, remains a potential high-end source of power at the major league level. The ballpark is, obviously, a limitation, granted. He clearly hasn’t “put it all together,” but he still seems to be a lot closer. He reportedly worked pretty hard this past winter in order to improve his approach and to become a candidate to play a more regular role, and he achieved that goal. Will he continue to pursue and to attain greater advances in the areas in which he has? If he’s to do so, then the next year or two seem like the best times for the results to reflect it.

There’s still a little reason to be cautious. I don’t see another huge jump in PT coming, given his club’s habits in terms of roster construction. Another huge leap in terms of fantasy-relevant production is far from guaranteed, too. He remains such an intriguing asset, relatively speaking, with the ability to go on significantly fantasy valuable streaks like he did in the first few months of 2014, though. The all-around great year may be a season away, if it comes, but if he continues on the arcs he’s started, then 2015 could be the one.

How soon the power shows up consistently is a major question, I think. If it doesn’t do so, then he could look like a good sell-high or buy-low candidate at any time next season. Given his 2014 production, I expect that more folks will be buying in the beginning, so I may shy away – perhaps at the expense of some good production out of the gate, granted. If so, then his 2015 drafters might be better served to explore what he’d bring on the block, and if not, then he might come on the cheap as a rest-of-season rebounder.

Given the progress he’s made, he isn’t categorically a bad investment for fantasy owners – even if he’s “overvalued,” he may still have a decent floor, assuming that he doesn’t lose ground in the areas where he’s made strides. If he doesn’t meet their expectations right away, however, then they should probably be patient, the way Norris has been. A bigger breakthrough might be on the horizon.