Turning Smoak Into Fire with Hernandez & Grichuk
One month into the regular season, Randal Grichuk’s tenure with the Blue Jays is off to a horrendous start. At the same time that Grichuk has struggled, Teoscar Hernandez has picked up where he left off last September, slugging .632 through sixteen games since his mid-April call up.
It doesn’t take a genius to point out that Grichuk (who was just sent to the DL) isn’t this bad and Hernandez isn’t this good. Or that Grichuk and Hernandez are actually very similar players. Both players lack plate discipline – they walk infrequently (although Hernandez has walked in the minor leagues and so far this season) and both players have been striking out around 30 percent of the time to this point in there careers.
These offensive holes have prevented Grichuk from providing much more than league average production in the major leagues for any extended period of time. They also prevented Hernandez from being viewed as an elite prospect. The swing and miss in their games means slumps like Grichuk’s are going to happen; don’t be surprised to see Teoscar hit a similar skid at some point this season. And don’t be surprised if you see Grichuk go off like Teoscar has, either.
Despite their warts, they both excel at one offensive skill: hitting the ball hard. Both Grichuk and Hernandez have shown strong batted ball skills as measured by exit velocity, hard contact percentage, and barrels per plate appearance.
| Avg. Exit Velo 2015-18 | Career Hard Contact% | |
|---|---|---|
| Teoscar Hernandez | 90.9 | 37.6 |
| Randal Grichuk | 90.9 | 39.1 |
| 2017 | MLB Rank | 2018 | MLB Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teoscar Hernandez | 9.5 | 8th | 17.3 | 1st |
| Randal Grichuk | 10 | 6th | 11.7 | 12th |
Seeing as the Jays traded for both Grichuk and Hernandez, it appears the team’s front office values the high exit velocity/swing and miss hitter profile more than some organizations.
Is it possible that the Jays see the same thing in Hernandez and Grichuk that they did in their 2017 breakout player, Justin Smoak?
Smoak is a lot more similar to the two athletic outfielders than you think. Smoak was 37th in all of baseball in average exit velocity (90.4 mph) between 2015 and 2017. Of major leaguers who put at least 100 balls in play, he ranked 8th in barrels per plate appearance in 2017 and 18th in 2015 (although he did drop to 67th in 2016). Smaok doesn’t get much press as an exit velocity darling, likely because he was doing some of his barreling and exit velo damage before it was cool. But just like Hernandez and Grichuk, Smoak was hitting the ball on the screws pretty often for someone who owned a career wRC+ of 95 heading into 2017.
Smoak also had a strikeout problem. It wasn’t as pronounced as Hernandez (28%) or Grichuk’s (30%) but Smoak’s strikeout rate had been creeping up gradually, year over year, and reached 33% in 2016.
Then Smoak’s breakout happened. As Travis Sawchik noted, (link) Smoak was able to cut his strikeout rate by making more contact both inside and out of the strike zone (contact rates that he has carried into 2018 so far despite a slow start). Something he attributed to “I stopped trying to hit home runs”.
Is the path to offensive improvement for Hernandez or Grichuk making more contact?
For Grichuk, it appears as though his O-Contact% and Z-Contact% numbers have trended in the wrong direction this season – 52.8% and 76.1% compared to 55.1 and 81.5 for his career. But this downward trend would be true for even an elite bat-to-ball hitter in the midst of a slump.
Hernandez, however, does appear to be making more contact in his 75 plate appearances (hellooooo small sample size). So far this year, Hernandez’s in-zone contact percentage (82%) is up from his career mark of 77% while his out-of-zone contact percentage (52%) is in line with his career mark (53%). As a result his strikeout rate has dropped.
Like Smoak, Hernandez has maintained the same overall swing percentage (51% this year compared 50% last season) while improving his contact rates. Grichuk has reduced his overall swing percentage (47% compared to 52% for his career) and the results have not been pretty.
The season on the whole is only four weeks old. Hernandez’ is only three weeks old. Plate discipline statistics require a lot of information (ideally a full season’s) before they can indicate a real trend. They can also be subject fluctuation during a player’s hot or cold streaks.
Smoak’s breakout last year could give us an indication of what to look for when determining if a breakout is happening for Hernandez or Grichuk. If the Blue Jays think they can work with Hernandez and Grichuk to improve their contact rates, like they did with Smoak, it’s possible the outfielders could take their offensive production to another level, and sustain it.
Maybe Hernandez has begun to do that. With 282 career plate appearances to his name, he is very much an unfinished major league product. Despite his early season struggles, Grichuk still appears to be barreling the baseball better than almost anyone in the major leagues. As the season rolls on, if Hernandez is able to maintain his increased contact percentage, or Grichuk is able to increase his, expect bigger things from them moving forward.
Nick thinks running a Major League or fantasy baseball team is incredibly easy. Until he is handed one of those coveted GM positions, his writing at RotoGraphs will illustrate how to do it properly. Fantasy baseball trade consultations and anything else can be sent to nick.dika@gmail.com or tweeted to @nickdika.
Since you seem to indicate Grichuk and Hernandez hail of the same hard hit/high K-rate performance for fantasy purposes are you advocating buy low on Grichuk with the idea his performance will normalize/revert to the mean?
I think that given his batted ball data (all of the hard contact), Grichuk shouldn’t be as bad as he has been. He is second in baseball in xwOBA-wOBA difference. It depends on league depth and keep in mind he will be on the DL for a couple of weeks. But if your league is deep enough, he could be a value source of of power and should be better. Hernandez appears to be making the same changes that Justin Smoak did – namely making more contact and could matter in even shallower leagues as long as he sustains his higher contact rates. Keep an eye on the contact rates of both players, I think it’s key to determining if either’s success is sustainable. Hope this helps!
Nick! Thank you for this breakdown and for providing readers with the KEYS for what to look for moving forward!!!!
I find it funny that people are talking about “buying low”on a guy whose owned in 3 pct of leagues. I do think he can turn it around, but buying low seems a bit extreme. Even in AL only he is likely on the waiver wire.
Totally. For me, I was trying to talk about how to tell if they can hold improved results, not when to buy (as that’s got so much to do with specific league context).
I’m sure you’re aware that a few key plate discipline stats become 50% stable very quickly, contact rate in 70 plate appearance, swing rate in 50. Teoscar is at 79 PAs this year. I think you’re underrating him.
I could be misunderstanding, but I think there is a difference between statistics stabilizing and owning the skill moving forward? For example, a contact rate after 50 PA’s means the results in the previous 50 PAs weren’t fluky, but not necessarily that the contact rate is predictive of the hitter’s performance moving forward?
I think the definition of there being more signal than noise after a certain number of plate appearances is that the results start to become predictive
I definitely agree that the results after 50 PAs are meaningful. I also think that the become more meaningful after more PAs and that 50 can’t tell us everything we need to know about a player moving forward.
Nobody thinks that 50 plate appearances tells us everything we need to know about a player moving forward.
Right. contact rate in 70 PAs isn’t fluky, nor is exit velocity in 40 BIP, but it also isn’t necessarily predictive. Nonetheless, it’s evidence of a possibly true underlying shift in skills, and many of your colleagues, e.g., Podhorzer, Zimmerman and Sullivan, give it a lot of weight in trying to find breakouts–much more weight than you seem to in this analysis.
Here’s Russell Carleton talking about reliability in a 2016 BP article: “I think it’s worth adding in a caveat about these sorts of analyses that people don’t often heed. The idea that a number has become “reliable” is not the same thing as saying that the player is now that number and that going forward this is what we should expect out of him. Reliability in this sense is a retrospective number. I can look back on the first few weeks of the season, look at the Statcast leaderboard and feel pretty good that those 40 balls in play represent a good estimate of what a player’s actual “talent” for exit velocity was during that time which is now past. It’s not a bad assumption that he might continue at that talent level during the next 40 balls in play or the next 100 or the next 200, but it is an assumption.”
https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/28956/baseball-therapy-the-one-about-exit-velocity/
*and it also isn’t necessarily predictive.
Nick, you do give weight to teoscar’s small improvements in contact, and his swing rate is the same, so I don’t want to come across as too critical. I think the exciting things about teoscar are his league leading average exit velo on fb/ld, and the difference between his xwoba and woba (447 vs 407 before yesterday’s doubleheader). Also, his minor league k-rates are mostly in the 20-25% range, so last year’s higher rate in the majors was the outlier more than anything…and if you plug in teoscar’s plate discpline numbers for this year and last to calculate teoscar’s expected k rate, you’ll find it near 25% as well (https://www.fangraphs.com/fantasy/formulating-a-hitter-xk-metric/). It’s 26% this year and 28% in 2017. So even without major gains in plate discipline his expected Ks are manageable. Now, idk if podhorzer’s expected ks equation stands the test of time, but if you compare teoscar to other hitters with around 69% contact there are plenty of guys near his expected upper 20s k rate.
Hey this is all really great stuff and I always dig the discussion – don’t hold back! It’s definitely possible that I’m putting too much weight on his recent K rates. His minor league stats aren’t as bad (although he did K a lot his first time through double-A). I was worried more about the combination of the high 20s K rate with a lack of walks (but I don’t think we’ve established Teoscar’s true talent K/BB rates yet). Would you say most of the other hitters who K as much as him have had higher walk rates (Gallo, Moncada etc.)? But all that said, I do think it’s totally fair to be excited about him (like you said, he is murdering the ball), and given his track record it’s very possible I’m not high enough on him.
Thanks, Nick 🙂 I appreciate the discussion! I checked O-swing (bc it predicts walk rate) and walk rates leader boards and Devers and Teoscar are the closest comparables. Devers’ contact rate is 69.1% vs 35.9% O-swing; Teoscar’s contact rate is 69.2% vs 34.1% O-swing. Teoscar is walking 9% of the time vs 8% for Devers. Devers is K-ing 26% vs 22% for Teoscar. I think regression to a mid to upper 20s k rate should be expected for Teoscar. Domingo Santana also has similar plate discipline periphs and is walking 10% vs 29% ks. Gallo makes less contact than Teoscar and swings outside the zone more, while also walking 9% of the time…and Moncada is much more disciplined than all these guys! 12% walks and a very low O-swing rate. Anyway, when it comes down to it I think we’re both pretty excited about Teoscar, and your slightly higher level of caution is certainly reasonable 🙂 I appreciate the discussion!
Looks like I “appreciate(d) the discussion,” one time too many
If you add in the 14 PAs that he had in AAA this year where he took 0 walks and struck out 38% of the time, the numbers don’t look quite as great either.
That said- he’s starting to run a bit more, and has a track record of running in the minors, which isn’t being noticed as much. I’m a big believer.
I definitely agree with ya. I did consider talking about Hernandez’ potential to steal bases, but given that he’s been batting in the middle of the order and the Jays haven’t traditionally ran very much under John Gibbons, I thought I wouldn’t include it. But you’re totally right, he’s could very easily add value in the SB category too.
Good stuff, Nick. Always interested to read about potential organizational philosophies when seeing trends in acquired players.
One thing about Teoscar that worries me, however, is that unlike Smoak, his swinging strike rate has remained high. Smoak lowered his from 12.7% to 8.9% in his breakout season while Hernandez is still at 16%. My guess as to why Hernandez has been able to lower his K rate while maintaining a bad whiff rate is that he’s aggressive earlier in counts, simply avoiding 2-strikes whenever he can. My concern would be if pitchers adjust and stop challenging him 0-0, we might start to see the K% erode again.
Thanks so much! To the Jays’ organizational philosophy – they also signed Kendrys Morales who rates really highly on the publicly available exit velo metrics as well. I wonder if given how hard he hits the ball he can get away with the higher swinging strike rate as long as he keeps the Ks down?
You might be interested Josh Howsam at BP Toronto dove into Hernandez’ approach and why he’s optimistic.
http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/05/02/the-new-teoscar-hernandez-may-be-here-to-stay/
Thanks, I did read Howsam’s piece (great stuff too) and I probably had the 1st pitch aggressiveness thing on my mind from that. You could be right that Teoscar is able to get away with a high SwStr% while still being good. In that Joey Gallo, Avisail Garcia and Khris Davis kinda way. It’s not all too common but it does work for some players.
Maybe I am being obtuse, but how does a player have 10 barrels per plate appearance? Said another way, how can someone average barreling a ball 10 times in one plate appearance? Is that number a percentage or is it plate appearances per barrel?
Hey Kevin. I believe that the barrels/PA stat is a percentage of the batted balls the hitter is barreling. Ex – if Grichuk has a barrels/PA rate of 10.0 it means he’s barreling the baseball 10% of the time. Here’s a link with a bunch of good info on the stat:
https://www.mlb.com/news/new-statcast-metric-barrels-has-best-hit-balls/c-201699298
Yeah strictly speaking “barrels per plate appearance” is a misnomer because it’s a percentage, everyone just calls it that because it’s easier than saying “percentage of plate appearances resulting in a barreled ball”
Is there any credence to looking at the fact that Grichuk is also making the dreaded NL to AL switch? He wasn’t much of a hitter in the NL anyways so struggles should be anticipated. Meanwhile Teoscar already has 40+ games in the AL so imo he has somewhat of a leg up on the adjustment.
Maybe both can be good, but I really believe we won’t know if Grichuk is a washout til mid-June in keeping with the typical timing for transitioning leagues.
Definitely an element that I hadn’t looked into but one worth exploring for sure.
So Grichuk, Diaz, and Garcia have all sucked so far. Maybe the Blue Jays should stop picking up the Cardinals’ cast-offs.
After getting rid of what would be 2 of their 3 best outfielders the Astros still won the world series.
Not sure what Franchy has to do with this discussion, but any discussion that talks about swinging strike rate that doesn’t somehow mention him at least needs a comment on him. 71.7% zone contact. I cannot tell you how many times I have watched him go to plate and swing and miss 3 fastballs. I have never seen anything like it.
It is perplexing sometimes to see hitters who can do some things so well and others so poorly.