Starling Marte Has One Home Run in Two Months

On June 9th, Starling Marte blasted his 12th home run of the season, leaving him just two shy of setting a new a career-high with 105 games left in the season. Marte has just one home run since June 10th so he is still one shy of that new high with 46 games left in the season. He hasn’t been bad during that stretch, not by a longshot, but the power has evaporated. In those 52 games, Marte is hitting .320 and has scored 29 runs with 12 stolen bases which would pace to 91 and 38 over a full season, respectively. But with just that one homer and a .091 ISO, he is no doubt disappointing some of his fantasy teams.

Honestly, the power outage shouldn’t surprise any of us.

In his first 57 games of the season, Marte had a .223 ISO with those 12 homers, but his .251/.310/.474 line was un-Marte-like. Coming into 2015, he had a .282/.342/.445 career line and so while it felt like he was breaking out because of the power, it was kind of a strange start to his season, especially because the power was a fraud. This isn’t just hindsight, either. Through June 9th, Marte had a HR/FB rate that was nearly 2x his FB% at 38% and 21%, respectively. He was hitting very few flyballs and yet they were leaving the yard at an incredible pace.

It just couldn’t continue this way and of course, it hasn’t.

In addition to that weirdness in his batted ball profile, he was also hitting the ball softer than ever with a 27%-42%-30% soft-medium-hard profile. In his three previous seasons, he had soft% rates of 19%, 11%, and 18% and stable hard% rates at 31%, 33%, and 33%. So not only did we have the HR/FB and FB% oddness, but he wasn’t even hitting the ball particularly well. Maybe…maybe if he had been toting a 40% hard% rate or something we could’ve bought into the HR/FB rate insanity a little bit.

I ranked Marte 20th in the midseason outfielder rankings, well below my colleagues (4, 4, and 9) solely because of the feared power outage, which he was 29 games into already. As I mentioned earlier, he hasn’t been a total dud as the batting average, speed, and runs scored contributions have been significant (.300, 14, and 4 in 23 games since the rankings went up), but he’s not a top 10 outfielder without the power, not by a longshot.

Marte’s batted ball profile has rebounded some, but only with some of the soft hits moving into the medium column as his hard% has actually fallen some:

There is no particular significance to June 10th, other than the fact that it started an 18-game homer-less streak. He hadn’t gone more than 10 games with a bomb to that point. It was the start of the regression that could be seen a mile away at any point prior to that date. There wasn’t a change in early-June that sent him on this path.

Marte is undoubtedly having a good season. He still sits ninth amongst outfielders on ESPN’s Player Rater (though just 37th in the last month), but there was nothing supporting a power breakout in those early months so the regression was inevitable. He now holds a 20% HR/FB rate for the season which is still really high for him after 12% and 13% rates in his two full seasons of 2013-14. He kinda did something similar to this in his 47-game debut back in 2012 when he had an 18% HR/FB rate despite just 25% of his batted balls being flyballs and a 2.3 GB/FB ratio (he’s at 2.6 this year).

Checking HitTrackerOnline further illustrates some of the weirdness and good fortune that went into those 12 homers in 57 games. Half of them were in the Just Enough classification and four wouldn’t have even been home runs in every park in the league. You can view Marte’s home run profile at HTO here. For those unfamiliar with their classification system, here is how they describe the JE homers:

“Just Enough” home run – Means the ball cleared the fence by less than 10 vertical feet, OR that it landed less than one fence height past the fence. These are the ones that barely made it over the fence.

Marte isn’t devoid of power, but he was pacing toward a 35-homer season on June 9th which would have been five more than his entire career prior to 2015 (he hit 30 in 1293 PA). When someone is on that kind of tear and it’s nowhere near their career levels, you have to be skeptical of it even if you’re favorable toward that player. Marte was a breakout pick this year who many believed could see an uptick in power this year into the low-20s while continuing to hit for a nice average, steal 30+ bases, and score a ton of runs in that Pirates offense.

He’s still on pace to do most of those things. If he stays upright the rest of the way and hits at his current rates, he will be around 85 runs and 30 stolen bases with a .284 AVG, but the home run pace has cratered to 18 which would still be a career-best, but actually feels high now. He will need to turn it up to reach even that mark, as he has just the one in his last 214 plate appearances spanning 52 games, six fewer than the 46 the Pirates have left on the schedule.

Of course, the 3% HR/FB rate he is sporting since June 10th is just as big an outlier as the 38% prior to that date, just on the other end, so it is reasonable to suspect that even with this batted ball profile – which isn’t conducive to power – his home run output should be better the rest of the way. Just don’t expect anything close to what the start of the season offered. All three projection systems give him 4 HRs the rest of the way and that seems perfectly reasonable.