One of my favorite stat lines of the year is most definitely Mark Teixeira’s. I love a good extra-base hit as much as you all do and those have defined Tex’s season to this point; to borrow a phrase from Mike, singles are for the weak and Tex has certainly bought into that philosophy. As I write this on Saturday morning, Tex’s line sits at .250/.359/.592, good for a .392 wOBA and a 150 wRC+. He has 30 total hits and all but 11 of them are for extra bases: 11 home runs and eight doubles. To one’s surprise, he has zero triples; Tex may look appear equine while running, but the speed doesn’t match the aesthetics. All that power has led to a .342 Iso which leads the Yankees and places him third in the majors behind Bryce Harper (.373!!) and Nelson Cruz (.372!!).
Speaking of leaderboards, all those extra-base hits combined with his 21 walks (14.5 BB%) and 20 strikeouts (13.8 K%) produce a super low BABIP of .207, good for the seventh lowest in all of baseball. The difference between Tex and the other BABIP-laggards, though, is production. All the rest of the top-10-lowest-BABIP hitters are below a 100 wRC+, though Luis Valbuena checks in at 99. The rest of the list consists of a bunch of high-50’s to mid-60’s wRC+ marks along with Chase Utley’s 7, which makes me very, very sad.
Regardless of what others are doing, Tex is off to a fairly hot start, which is the “what.” I’m more interested in the how. To find out how, I took a trip to Baseball Savant and looked up the differences in how pitchers have attacked Tex in 2014 and 2015. Like many things in baseball, Tex’s 2015 performance (again, through Friday’s games) depends on location.
In 2014, Tex saw a total of 2,082 pitches. 64% of those pitches were out of the zone, meaning 36% were inside the zone. Looking at some key results, we can see that Tex whiffed on 8.7% of his pitches last season, 67% in-zone whiffs, 33% out-of-zone whiffs. When I looked at 2015, I expected to find slightly different results in the whiff department, given that Tex’s overall strikeout percentage this year (13.8) is down from where it was last year (21.5). It turned out that in terms of in-zone and out-of-zone whiffs, Tex has performed exactly as he did last year. However, his overall whiffs are down by about two percentage points; he’s seen 536 total pitches as of Friday’s game, whiffing on 6.9% of the pitches he’s seen. Those changes aren’t too huge, but they do show improvement. Why’s that improvement coming? It has to do with the pitchers Tex is facing.
Of the 536 pitches Tex has seen this year, 61% have been outside the zone and the remaining 39% have been inside the zone, three points off from last year’s approach. For whatever reason, pitchers are challenging Tex inside the zone just a bit more in 2015. And aside from whiffing less overall, he’s doing more with pitches in the zone. Of his 30 hits, 67% have come inside the zone, compared to 64% last year. There’s been a similar uptick when it comes to home runs in the zone: 63% in 2015 compared to 60% last year.
All too often, we hear hitters say that they’re “not trying to do too much” at the plate; it’s a cliche that you can count on in post-game interviews (Stephen Drew said it last night on the radio, prompting my fiance to drop a cliche of her own: “If I had a dollar for every time a player said he wasn’t trying to do too much…”). But with Mark Teixeira this year, it seems to ring true. He’s seeing more pitches in the zone than last year and he’s being more productive with those in-zone pitches than he was last year. It’s not something that’s obviously noticeable like new swing mechanics or even a new approach; he’s simply taking what the pitchers are giving him and he’s raking. Let’s hope it keeps up.
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