To get this out of the way, it is entirely appropriate to sometimes be inspired by other writers and content creators. In this particular case, I was particularly inspired by Mike Petriello’s deep dive into the insanity that is Yoan Moncada’s BABIP, and decided to further investigate some of its applications to other players. While BABIP measures some fluid combination of luck and skill, it can be a useful exercise to determine how much of each are playing into the present output, and help us decide what to expect going forward. The players we’re looking at will have two things in common- an extremely high BABIP and an extremely low K%. Let’s start with everyone’s favorite breakout star.
Jesse Winker
I love Jesse Winker. You love Jesse Winker. Winker is not only great but has vastly outperformed his draft position. He’s the second-best performing hitter in all of baseball. But anyone (myself included) that says they saw Winker doing this well in mid-June is lying. As you might guess, his BABIP is a career high .368, and everything else is a career high too, except for his K%, which is right around his career average at 17.9%.
While we do expect 27-year-old hitters to produce their best seasons on record, doing it to this degree across the board with no drastic change in skill set, approach, or hitting environment is certainly something that catches the eye. Can we expect him to continue this torrid pace? Almost certainly not. Can we expect him to regress a bit while still being an exceptionally valuable fantasy asset even if not a top 5 wunderkind? I think that’s reasonable, yes. Let’s dive into the numbers and see what’s going on under the hood.
At first glance- almost nothing has changed. Slightly more medium contact, and even slighter changes in hard and soft contact, but almost entirely in line with career baselines. He has eliminated some ground balls, but only 4% off his career average, and so the resulting gain in line drive and fly ball % wouldn’t be enough on its own to generate this outlier performance result. You would expect the power numbers to be higher, and while the ISO is higher than career averages to be sure, it’s about in line with his 2020 performance.
What’s he doing? Winker is swinging and making contact with better pitches, making better contact, and maximizing the good contact when he makes it. In his last two full seasons in 2018 and 2019, he recorded 237 and 278 batted ball events respectively, resulting in 14 barrels in 2018 and 12 barrels in 2019. His Barrel% jumped to 13.5% in 2020, but we all expected that to be a small sample size fluke. It wasn’t! 2021 has resulted in 12.4% barrel rate, and 21 barrels, easily a career high through only 169 batted ball events. He’s also at a career high 92.1 MPH Exit Velocity, so even when he isn’t barreling the ball he’s still not making much soft contact (as we saw earlier).
All of that to say- this is the new Jesse Winker, and he is likely here to stay, but he would be one of the best players of all time if he kept this up, so this is likely also the best version of the new Jesse Winker, not necessarily the median outcome version.
Cedric Mullins
Another left-handed hitting outfielder experiencing a breakout season, Mullins success so far comes in similar circumstance as Winker’s as not much changed on the surface, but the results have been fantastic. There has been one surface change, and that’s that Mullins has hit exclusively left-handed this season (he had 38 PAs as a righthanded batter in the abbreviated 2020 season, in which he slashed a lowly .171/.216/.286 and struck out almost 30% of the time. Just by eliminating at bats as a rigty swinger, Mullins dramatically improved his hitting profile.
But that’s not where it stops. Quite literally every facet of his game has increased not only from the most recent (and often fluky) small sample size in 2020, but from his career averages as well. Slash line, ISO, BB% and hard contact are all up, K% is down. Similarly to Winker, this appears to be another case of making sure he sees the best pitch to hit, and then doing as much damage as possible when he gets it. Unlike Winker, Mullins also has a good amount of speed, so even when he does hit the ball on the ground, he still has some outs towards positive outcomes. He probably won’t end the season hitting .320, but with this season’s skill set seeming to have stabilized, finishing at .285/.290 wouldn’t be terribly unrealistic, and doing so with more power with anyone expected without losing what was thought to be perhaps his primary asset (speed) makes Mullins highly valuable going forward.
Adam Frazier
Unlike Winker and Mullins, you won’t find anyone describing Frazier as a world beating breakout star. Part of that is almost certainly due to his environment- the Pirates are awful in a way that the Orioles and Reds just aren’t, and lack of talent surrounding him puts a damper on any enthusiasm that might bubble to the surface when you see him sustaining a modicum of success. That aside, he also is more pesky than dominant, and his performance doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the superlatives used for Winker (or Mullins) to this point. All of that said, he is still performing on the extreme end of the BABIP spectrum and squeezing as much juice out of his effort as can be hoped for, and that’s worth diving into.
First, the BABIP is almost on equal playing field as the other two at .358, which is extremely high for both Frazier’s baseline expectation and of course MLB averages. He’s hitting more fly balls and line drives and fewer ground balls, but he is actually not hitting the ball as hard as we have to come from expect from him, with only 20% hard contact as opposed to his career average of 28%. Similarly, his ISO is roughly where you’d expect it to be, so it’s not like Frazier has changed his approach to result in better contact, nor has he even particularly made better contact.
So this is the other side of the coin in terms of when BABIP can be useful- Frazier’s performance and output are likely unsustainable due to the extremely high BABIP without any real supporting factors. I’m not sure how valuable Frazier (or any Pirate) is to the fantasy community in the first place, but if there were ever a time to sell high and extract whatever value you could from Frazier- now would be a pretty good time to do so.
