The Quiet Re-Emergence of Evan Longoria

Maybe it’s because the Tampa Bay Rays are not a particularly good baseball team. Maybe it’s because there are other younger and perhaps more exciting infielders that have burst onto the Major League scene. For whatever reason, it seems that nobody really talks about Evan Longoria anymore. This is true at least from a national perspective. Which is perhaps unsurprising, given his market. At the same time, fantasy owners surely appreciate what Longoria has brought to the table this season. While he hadn’t exactly been a disappointment in recent years, the 2016 season has seen him re-emerge in at least one major facet of his game.

A player routinely selected outside of the top 100 players, Longoria currently finds himself inside of the top 15 in position player WAR (3.9 mark heading into Wednesday). He topped out at 4.2 last season, so he’s definitely on pace to eclipse either figure that he’s posted in each of the last two years. The trends across the board, in a number of different respects, are very interesting for Longoria over the course of the last three years. The good news there is that those trends are largely positive.

	AVG	OBP	OPS	K%	BB%
2014	.253	.320	.724	19.0	8.1
2015	.270	.328	.764	19.7	7.6
2016	.281	.331	.857	22.3	7.0

The disparity in batting average is obviously a welcome one (which can be somewhat attributed from his BABIP rising from .285 in 2014 up to a better .317 thus far in 2016), as is the increase in his on-base rate, however slight it may be by comparison. The strikeout rate is interesting, but also unsurprising given that his overall swing rate, at 49.1%, has increased by about two percent (and his swinging strike rate has also increased by the same token, up to 12.4%). As such, it’s probably not too surprising that his walk rate has also declined.

At the same time, what is really impressive about Longoria (in obvious addition to his ability to stay healthy, which was something of a concern after 2012 and 2013) is that he’s managed to regain his power stroke. The pessimism in relation to his power came after his home run number dropped from 32 in 2013 to just 22 in 2014, with an ISO that declined from .230 to just .151 in that same span. The 2015 season didn’t provide much solace for those hoping that he’d get his power back, with 21 home runs and a .166 ISO, both of which provided an indication that that is where his ability to hit for extra bases could remain, at its height.

The 2016 season has represented a completely different story, however, in that regard. Longoria has that ISO all the way back up to .244, which would represent his highest mark since 2011. His 23 homers have already eclipsed last year’s total and he’s on pace for the most amount of doubles that he’s recorded since 2010. His wRC+, after two seasons of painting him as a just above average offensive player at 105 and 110, now stands at 128. And the way in which he’s making contact illustrates that that shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise.

His ISO improvement over the last three years is reflected below:

The formula for success is a relatively straightforward one, in terms of Longoria’s batted ball tendencies. The trends are somewhat unsurprising, but certainly lend themselves to an explanation as to Longoria’s recent uptick in power:

	LD%	GB%	FB%	Soft%	Hard%
2014	20.4	39.0	40.6	13.6	32.1
2015	20.6	39.0	40.4	15.0	30.8
2016	22.7	30.4	47.0	17.6	38.0

The soft contact is really the only negative increase on there, but is a somewhat unsurprising one given Longoria’s increased aggressiveness at the plate. It’s interesting, though, that Longoria isn’t necessarily swinging at different locations, as his penchant for swinging at various points in the strike zone hasn’t different too much from 2015 to 2016. But he’s making linedrive and flyball contact off of those breaking and offspeed pitches more to the tune of seasons before 2014 and 2015, when his power numbers were far more impressive. And as is reflected in his contact distribution, it’s obviously been a welcome trend that has turned him back into one of the game’s more formidable power threats at the plate.

It’s not that Evan Longoria ever necessarily went away, so perhaps declaring his 2016 season a “re-emergence” would be a rather misguided label. At the same time, it surely looked as if his power had been sapped, to an extent, over the past couple of seasons, and, as such, might’ve led to something of a decline in his fantasy value. But despite a relatively low draft position heading into the season, Longoria has re-established himself in the power game and cemented himself right back among the game’s top offensive third sackers.