George Springer's best month featured his best bat speed against four-seamers*
George Springer's best month featured his best bat speed against four-seamers*
Part two of a series of Statcast Post-Mortems on some of the Jays' most important and confounding players.
Welcome to part two of my multi-part end-of-season series of Statcast Post-Mortems on some of the Jays’ most important and confounding players.
In part one, where you can also read a preamble explaining the series in a much less concise way than in the sentence above, I looked at the whirlwind success of Bowden Francis. In this edition, however, we’ll but going a different way.
Here’s a dive into some underlying data on George Springer, and what it may or may not mean for the man set to be paid $45 million over the next two seasons…
From one of the season’s best stories, we move next to one of its worst: the continued deterioration of George Springer. And while I do think he can prooooooobably? continue to have some kind of utility for the Blue Jays going forward—and I certainly am not here to lament that he was ever signed in the first place (because if you’re going to act like a big team you’ve got to accept that contracts will sometimes go south earlier than you expected or hoped), or suggest they’re going to cut bait on him anytime soon—clearly this is a problem.
Thing is, it was a problem that appeared to potentially correct itself back in July, when Springer rose from the ashes to produce a 141 wRC+ for the month despite having arrived at the ballpark on Canada Day sitting at 89.
And if you looked at the time at what was going on with his bat speed against four-seam fastballs, you actually might have been pretty encouraged.
Of course, Springer’s bat kept most of its gains against four-seamers in August and September, yet those two months have somehow been even worse (75 and 78 wRC+) than his awful April (82) and May (81). So what gives?
Well... bat speed, it turns out, is complicated, and we’re still learning about it. My instinct—and maybe yours—was to isolate four-seamers because, frankly, they're the fastest pitches, so they should require the fastest swings to hit, right?
Wrong, actually.
In a very illuminating piece from back in May, FanGraphs' Ben Clemens looked into this, as well as other things about bat speed, and here's what he found:
“When pitchers throw harder fastballs, hitters slow down their swings to compensate. It sounds counterintuitive. Shouldn’t hitters speed up their bats to try to get to the faster pitch? But I had a hunch that this wasn’t the case. If you listen to hitters describe their approach against flamethrowers, they focus on shortening up and putting the ball in play. ‘Shortening up’ might sound like it describes swing length, but it also surely describes swing speed. A hitter who is just punching at the ball likely won’t swing as hard as one trying to launch one. If you’re prioritizing having your bat on plane with the ball as long as possible, you probably aren’t focusing as much on raw speed.”
The data backed up his hunch. And in the piece he also highlighted one from Patrick Dubuque and Stephen Sutton-Brown at Baseball Prospectus, Putting Bat Speed in Context, that showed how important the count is when looking at bat speed as well. Clemens ran some numbers of his own on this and found “roughly what you’d expect.” He explained:
Hitters let it eat when they’re ahead in the count and swing more slowly to prioritize contact when they’re behind. If you don’t account for this effect, your answer won’t make sense. Consider an obvious cross-correlation: Pitchers throw harder when they reach two-strike counts. Hitters naturally swing more defensively in two-strike counts. If you don’t control for count, you’ll find that hitters swing slower at faster pitches, and it’ll be an artifact of count.
Could Springer’s bat speed against four-seamers have “improved” in July because he was getting himself into better counts and requiring fewer defensive swings? Maybe! But if so we’d then need an explanation for what happened in August and September, when the speed stayed high while the results tumbled—and we might have one.
We can chop this data up even more, and just look at how Springer’s bat speed against four-seamers when ahead in the count. When we do so, it tells us a decidedly different story about his last two months.
Yikes.
When Springer is trying to let it eat, there just isn’t a lot of firepower there—or so this makes it seem. But is it the right avenue for us to be exploring here? Are we on the right track?
Springer has only seen nine four-seamers while ahead in the count in the month of September, which means that the bat speed value we’re seeing above isn’t based on a whole lot of information. It could fluctuate pretty severely with just a couple hard swings. It also raises another intriguing question: Why is the number of four-seamers he’s seeing here in September so low?
Partially I suppose that could be because Springer hasn’t been ahead in the count very much, but partly it’s because something sort of odd has happened in the way pitchers have approached him this month.
Springer has been seeing a lot more sinkers lately, and almost all appear to have come at the expense of four-seamers. Now, that could just mean that he’s happened to face a lot of sinker-throwers. Not everybody has one, and because Springer has been playing less this month the statistical foundation here is a bit shaky. It could just be a blip. But the guys who do throw a sinker often have a four-seamer as well. Are those types of pitchers choosing to go the sinker route with him? Is there something other teams are seeing that the Jays ought to be paying attention to here, or is it just statistical noise?
It’s an interesting question, but I’ll leave it here, because these are precisely the kinds of rabbit holes Statcast can send you down. As for his bat speed, perhaps the best way to look at it would simply to take the biggest sample possible and… uh… oh…
That does not look good. But even it needs context!
If you look at Statcast’s main leaderboard for bat speed, Springer looks much, much better than this. For the season he’s at 71.9 mph, which is slightly better than where he was at when this data was first rolled out, and slightly above average for MLB. So what gives here? Has his bat speed gotten better or worse as the season has worn on?
I’m honestly not sure, but maybe both?
What we’re looking at here—assuming the data being spit out is actually correct and there isn’t just a bug that’s still to be worked out—is Springer’s measured bat speed against all pitches. The numbers on the leaderboard are for “competitive swings,” which are defined as “the fastest 90% of a player's swings, plus any 60+ MPH swings resulting in an exit velocity of 90+ mph.”
You’d expect there to be a discrepancy between the value in the graph and the one with a player’s slowest 10% of swings removed, but Springer’s feels pretty big! Vlad, for example, shows a bat speed of 73.3 on his player page and 75.9 on the leaderboard. That’s a 2.6 mph difference, whereas Springer is at 5.3 mph. Are his non-competitive swings especially non-competitive? Is he better at slowing the bat down when he doesn’t want to swing, which is producing values that are dragging what we’re seeing here down? Seems plausible enough, but it’s yet another wrinkle to consider when looking into all of this stuff.
Anyway, he seems cooked!
⚾ Want to support without going through Substack? You could always send cash to stoeten@gmail.com on Paypal or via Interac e-Transfer. I assure you I won’t say no. ⚾
Getting old sucks.