Yan is the Man, and Could be for a While

So “Yan” and “man” don’t actually rhyme, which makes the title less fun, but has nothing to do with its accuracy. Maybe it’s because I am an Indians fan and see him play almost daily, but I spent much of the last two years wondering why Yan Gomes wasn’t getting more love from the fantasy community. You have to look no further than these very pages, where Gomes was mentioned for fantasy purposes all of twice in 2014.

The first time it was because Brett Talley was covering the Cleveland infield and Gomes was listed there only as a sleeper (and likely only because you can’t just ignore a team’s starting catcher in talking about their infield). The second was when Nicholas Minnix noted, in September, that Gomes was a top five fantasy asset at his position. By the end of the season, he was top four.

In the pre-season, RotoGraphs consensus rankings had Gomes listed 14th. Of the 13 players ranked higher, only two – Buster Posey and Jonathan Lucroy – actually finished the season ranked higher than him. And yet, you could have seen this coming.

FG+ subscribers visiting Gomes’s page would see my blurb on the guy noting that his high BABIP would come down, but that he had a track record and an xBABIP that suggested his batted balls would fall in at a high clip. “A .265/.325/.450 season with 15-20 home runs isn’t hard to imagine,” I wrote.

Well, Gomes complied with my wishes, putting up a .278/.313/.472 season with 21 HR. His .326 BABIP was about what his past performance would have suggested, as well. So how did Gomes do it?

For starters, he hit a ton of line drives. He jumped from a 17.8% LD rate in 2013 to 24% in 2014. Next, he hit the ball a lot harder. His 2013 HR and FB distance was 284.7; in 2014 it was 292.1. Want a quick primer on how to put up good offensive stats? Make hard contact and hit lots of line drives. Check and check.

Gomes, however, didn’t do everything right. His walk rate was a poor 4.6%, down a full percentage point from 2013, and far below his minor league track record. His strike out rate increased, as well, jumping to over 23%. The underlying cause is not hard to see: Gomes saw fewer pitches in the zone (the type of respect you get when you show what he has shown over 1.5 seasons in Cleveland) but has swung at those pitches more often. His more aggressive approach may well have something to do with the increased power, but it also led to more swinging strikes, which meant fewer walks and more strike outs.

Going forward, this creates an interesting situation. On the one hand, Gomes has never been incredibly patient, but he has typically been more patient than this. On the other, the new approach may be creating the powerful swing that he relied on this year. In 2015, he could maintain the aggression but see his power dwindle, which would hurt his xBABIP and his HR and FB distance. He could also regain some of that lost patience without losing the power, which (coupled with that hard-earned respect from pitchers) could lead to a similar power output with a better OBP.

Gomes is 27 years old. Once you account for the difference in BABIP and playing time, he has put up almost the same line two years running. That line left him #4 among catchers this year.

I am not holding my breath waiting for a bigger breakout, but Gomes came into the year with a lot of questions – can he really hit for that much power? Can he maintain that BABIP? Can he hold up to the full-time catcher workload? The answers have all been resounding yeses, and you ignore that at your peril.