Apparently the talk of the town in New York these days is David Wright’s incredible strikeout rate. A sampling of recent headlines about the Mets:
- "New York Mets third baseman David Wright still lost at the plate, despite two-hit night against Nats"
- "David Wright: Where Have All His Line Drives Gone?“
- "Mets need to get back on Wright track"
- "Mets' Wright whiffs of desperation"
David Wright is striking out at a prodigious rate, to be sure—he’s K’d in nearly a third of his plate appearances so far this season. (Incredibly, he still isn’t leading the NL in strikeouts—that dubious honor belongs to Justin Upton of the Diamondbacks. And another Diamondback, Mark Reynolds, is in third place.)
Of course, this isn’t the first time Wright has baffled people with his stat line. Last season, of course, was the incredible power outage—only 10 home runs all season, after putting up 30 home-run seasons pretty consistently before then. (Wright seems to have recovered his home-run stroke, at least, belting out seven so far.) So one year a power outage, one year a ballooning K rate.
What’s funny is that looking only at results, not much seems to change for Wright:
| Year | TAv | WARP |
| 2004 | .289 | 0.9 |
| 2005 | .313 | 6.8 |
| 2006 | .311 | 5.1 |
| 2007 | .338 | 9.6 |
| 2008 | .323 | 7.8 |
| 2009 | .306 | 3.6 |
| 2010 | .330 | 2.1 |
| Career | .314 | 35.9 |
Neither a lack of power last season nor a high K rate so far this season have kept Wright from being an outstanding hitter. Notwithstanding all the headlines, Wright has been the Mets’ best hitter. Looking at WARP, he’s already put up nearly as much value this season as an average position player does in 150 games.
But what about down the road? Is Wright’s increased whiff rate a harbinger of things to come?
Wright’s K rate so far has been .299 in 144 plate appearances, compared to a PECOTA projection of .187. How likely is that result, assuming nothing at all has changed for Wright—that is, assuming that it’s totally a fluke? (And while we’re at it, assuming that the PECOTA forecast was totally on the nose—more on that assumption in a minute.)
OK, so strikeouts divided by plate appearances is a binomial—either you struck out or didn’t. We can estimate random variance of binomials in a straightforward fashion, and taking the square root gives us the standard deviation. So, given his PECOTA projection and his PAs so far:
In other words, assuming a wholly accurate forecast of Wright’s “true” strikeout rate, in 144 plate appearances we should expect to see a strikeout rate within .037 of his forecast about 68 percent of the time.
Taking the difference between his projection and his results and dividing by the expected random SD tells us that Wright’s strikeout rate so far this season has been a little more than three standard deviations away from his projection. We should see outcomes like that roughly one-quarter percent of the time.
That said—there are, so far, 196 batters with at least 100 plate appearances this season. Hitting on a quarter of a percent change in 200 tries is really nothing to get worked up about. (Especially when you consider we could just as easily have looked at home run rates, walk rates, hit rates, etc.—add up all the permutations and the odds of something being three SDs or more out of sorts go from “outlandish” to “nearly certain.”)
And we picked on Wright because we knew something weird was going on. Call it “selective sampling” or “cherry picking,” if you will. From a statistical point of view, we can’t call what we’re seeing here significant, in spite of the magnitude of the effect, because we plucked him out of a larger population.
That doesn’t mean we can rule out the idea that something has changed with Wright. But it means that we don’t really have any evidence that something has changed. Our most likely supposition is that this is just one of the many, many flukes that occurs over the course of a season of baseball.
And of course, even if he does keep striking out at this rate, so long as he keeps doing everything else at the same clip then he’s still one of the most productive hitters in the league. So don’t worry, Mets fans—at least, not about Wright. (It’s probably still OK to worry about the rest of the roster.)
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He is overmatched by league average RH fastballs with an alarming frequency. Coupled with a propensity to bail out and pull his head on breaking pitches that threaten the inner-half of the zone.
Hopefully he gets his stroke back in some sort of consistent manner, but it is an abuse of "statheadism" to throw measures around and "conclude" that nothing has changed with D Wright. It simply ain't so.
Even his HR's this year have been on massive upper cut swings. He use to have a much more compact swing and hit a ton EBH's into the gaps, not so much anymore. His swing has gotten too long and thus too slow. Also, since the beaning against Cain last year, he is still gun shy on inside pitches.
Last year, of course, he managed a .394 BABIP, somehow. That put him up at a .307 average, but this season he's hitting with an inflated BABIP and he's only at .279. If his BABIP was more around his .346 career mark, his batting average would look a lot more Mark Reynolds-ish than David Wright-ish, which is what you'd expect with his current K rate.
I don't see how you can't be worried about Wright at this point since his contact rate has dropped a huge amount. Even if there's some luck effect where he's been unlucky on some swings somehow or something and his contact rate will rise some it's a MASSIVE drop. His career Contact% is 82.8% but this season he's at 72.2%!
Also, he's walking a ton, but that's not what you would expect from his swing statistics. He's swinging more at pitches outside of the zone - 25.6% versus around 21.8% for the past three years and 20.4% for his career - and swinging at less pitches inside the zone - 64.6% against a 67% career mark - and he's hardly taking more pitches as his overall swing% may be low for him at 42.5% but it mirrors a few of his previous efforts with his career mark at 44%.
Take all of that together, and I would definitely be worried about him. It's quite possible that all of this changes and he starts striking out less and everything goes back to normal for him, but I would certainly be worried.
Last year he suffered a spike in strikeout rate due to a decrease in contact rate, but his numbers were pretty close to usual other than power thanks to his BABIP. I figured that would be the outlier year and things would go back to normal this season. Well, he's suffered an even larger drop in contact rate so far, so it looks like his increased strikeouts weren't a fluke. Granted I doubt he K's 33% of the time or whatever massive number he's at right now, but it looks like he may not be the guy who hits .300-.320 every year anymore.
Having said that, I've seen enough confident declarations by people who claim to see "obvious" changes in a player's swing or the quality of their at-bats turn out wrong when the player breaks the slump that I'll wait and see what the numbers look like in another month.
I remember- he killed my fantasy team with no power, lots of K, errors, can caught steals...
Wright 2009 after 8/15/09 beaning: 35 Ks in 121 PAs (28.9%)
Wright 2010: 46 Ks in 152 PAs (30.3%)
Am I reading too much into this ... coincidence?
a) understandable
2) possibly a pretty good explanation
iii) malpractice, if the coaching staff hasn't seen it and isn't trying to help him with it...
he's seeing a lot less four-seam fastballs this year (just 31.3%) than in 2009 (50.3%). Which, if he's coming to expect off-speed, may or may not be the reason he's whiffing so much more on the fastball. When he swings at four seamers from RHP this year, he whiffs 30.7% of the time, compared to just 17.2% last year.
At this point we should expect to see a strikeout rate within .031 of his forecast about 68 percent of the time. Based on Colin's math (if I'm doing it right), David Wright is now 6.31 standard deviations away from his projections. That's sick.
This year David Wright has struck out at a higher rate than Rob Deer's career mark. Wright's 2010 K rate would be the 15th-highest career mark in MLB history.
I think the big question is: What will normalize first? A "fluke" deviation from predicted strikeout rate, or the unusually high BABIP?
Two interesting things about "flukes" are:
When one observes a fluke, often part of the fluke is that the player looks awful. In other words, players (pitchers and batters) go through fluctuations in which they look and perform awfully. We call them "flukes" or "luck" or randomness, even though technically they may not be, just like the landing of a coin on heads or tails, is not technically a random event (it is a function of how it is thrown), it is properly treated as such. So, to declare that something is not a "fluke" (in statistical terms), because you saw the player and "things just look different" is not good reasoning or logic. Things may in fact BE different about that player's approach or technique or even health (or his psychology, such as WRT the beaning) for some period of time, but if there is little we can do to predict when it will start or end (and I am not saying that we can or cannot), then for all practical purposes, it may be treated as random, luck, or a fluke.
The other thing is that declaring something as either a fluke or not is a false choice and a large one at that. There an in infinite number of combinations of fluke and non-fluke that can describe or explain a spate of performance.
The really sad thing is that Wright has turned into a New York media whipping boy even though he's clearly been the Mets' best hitter so far. Heavy hangs the head...