DJ LeMahieu last season had a career-best year at the plate to complement his excellent defense. He hit .301/.358/.388 for the season. The figures aren’t eye-popping, especially the low slugging percentage, but they combined with his defense to result in a solid two-win season. One of the changes in LeMahieu’s game that might explain his success was that he didn’t pull the ball as much. His pull rate went down, and most of his batted balls went either up the middle or to the opposite field. While correlation is not causation, the link between his batted ball outcomes and a healthy batting average and on-base percentage does count for something.
So far this season, LeMahieu has been even better. Specifically, he’s hitting for more power. It’s not home run power; he’s only hit four and isn’t likely to hit very many more. Instead, his slugging percentage and his isolated power (ISO, which is slugging percentage minus batting average) have gone up quite a bit. LeMahieu has almost matched the number of doubles he hit last year, 18 this year to 21 in 2015, and he’s already hit the same number of triples (five).
Season | G | PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | ISO | BABIP |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2016 | 66 | 278 | 0.318 | 0.382 | 0.483 | 0.165 | 0.353 |
2015 | 150 | 620 | 0.301 | 0.358 | 0.388 | 0.087 | 0.362 |
Perhaps the most significant part of the chart is LeMahieu’s BABIP. As we know, a high BABIP can indicate that player is getting a bit lucky with his balls in play. Each player should be measured against himself. For his career, LeMahieu has a BABIP of .342, a product of having good contact skills and playing half of his home games at Coors Field, which has yet to meet a ball in play it didn't want to turn into a hit. This season, LeMahieu's BABIP is .353, which is not anomalously high. In fact, it was higher last year. One way a player’s BABIP might decline without it indicating improvement at the plate is by putting fewer balls in play. That’s not the case for LeMahieu either. His strikeout rate so far in 2016 has declined five percentage points from 17.3 percent last year to 12.2 percent this year, and he makes contact over 90 percent of the time. His progress at the plate cannot be ascribed to luck.
Spraying the ball around the field also doesn’t help explain LeMahieu’s advances, even though it was a pretty good explanation for his step forward in 2015. In fact, according to FanGraphs, LeMahieu is pulling the ball more this year than he did last year. He’s doing so 24.2 percent of the time in 2016 against 21.2 percent of the time in 2015. He’s hitting the ball up the middle at the same rate, but he’s going the opposite way less frequently.
The truly significant change is coming in how hard he’s hitting the ball. According to Baseball Info Solutions, which classifies each ball in play either as soft, medium, or hard, LeMahieu has elevated his hard hit percentage almost ten percentage points. In 2015, his hard hit rate was 26.6 percent; it’s 35.7 percent so far in 2016. His career hard hit rate is 28 percent. Notably, the rate at which he’s hitting balls classified as "soft" has stayed the same, about 12 percent. He’s turning "medium" balls in play into "hard" ones.
These classifications are subject to the individual counting them, which means they are subject to change depending on the observer; however, Statcast data tells the same story. In 2015, LeMahieu’s average batted ball velocity was 90.6 mph. So far this year, it’s 93.7 mph. This measured change supports the one identified by Baseball Info Solutions.
My inclination is to conclude by saying that while LeMahieu was an All-Star in 2015 and probably won’t be in 2016, he’s having a better year in 2016. That I made the same argument about Charlie Blackmon in the middle of 2015, and he ended up having essentially the same year as he did in 2014, cautions against that. For now, it’s sufficient to say that LeMahieu is demonstrating tendencies that support his improvement at the plate. He’s hitting the ball harder, which might be leading to more extra base hits, which in turn lead to better a slugging percentage and ISO. And that all amounts to a better hitter.