But you can see a couple of spots around the strike zone’s upper border and outside edge where the racked up a fair number of whiffs. That’s a lot of pitches, so naturally it’s pretty clustered. Here’s a visualization of Anderson’s swings on four-seam heaters last season: This is going to get a little granular, but squint and you’ll find some cool trends. Roughly one out of every seven pitches he sees is a four-seamer, so this is a bit of a big deal! What’s important is not just the fact that Anderson is not missing fastballs anymore, it’s where and when he’s not missing fastballs. First, by pitch type - Anderson has seen improvements across the board, but it’s a precipitous drop in whiff rate against four-seam fastballs that jumps out: Looking at information about pitch types and pitch location tells us how, though. It’s hard to say exactly why it’s happening. It’s a lot more remarkable than it’s getting credit for. Yet here’s Tim Anderson, moving from roughly the 40th percentile all the way into the Top 10 in the entire league. Statistically speaking, players are almost always set quite firmly in their ways by the time they reach 3,000 plate appearances. If you don’t swing and miss, and also swing early and often enough to put the ball in play before you get to two strikes - Anderson’s 3.13 pitches seen per plate appearance this year is the lowest in baseball, and the gap between he and second-place Luis Robert (no comment) is bigger than the one between Robert and 10th-place Jean Segura - strikeouts are going to be fewer and farther between.Ĭonsidering Anderson’s strikeout and whiff rates remained relatively consistent from his initial call-up in 2016 through 2021, this is a pretty remarkable trend. That does a lot to explain strikeout rate. He still swings and chases out of the zone more than just about everyone, but Anderson’s overall whiff rate has dropped all the way to 19%, well below league average. In 2020, Anderson achieved incredible results despite a 30% whiff rate that was well higher than the MLB average. It’s not just a product of typical streakiness - Anderson has never sustained this level of contact ability for as long as he has to this point in the season.Īs you might guess, the amount that he swings-and-misses has declined at the same time. Except this time, Anderson is doing it with an 11% strikeout rate that’s the eighth-lowest in the majors out of 169 qualified hitters. Looking at Anderson’s barrel rates and expected wOBA on contact (you might think of that as Statcast BABIP), he’s once again punishing the ball the same way he did in the abbreviated 2020 season, when he slugged. Shenanigans with the baseball have made expected statistics a bit screwy this year - although there’s a very strong argument that a deadened ball is beneficial for gap-to-gap, line-drive hitters like Anderson - but a full set of career-highs and league-leading numbers doesn’t lie. Quite the opposite: Anderson’s leap to the production of an MVP candidate has been under-girded by batted-ball data that shows he’s hitting the ball like an MVP candidate. He’s comfortably outperformed his expected stats in every season since his breakout, but this clearly isn’t just a string of fortunate results on balls in play. If they weren’t already, any doubts of his status as a bona fide superstar are being put to rest amid this explosion. It’s appeared in flashes before, but so far in 2022, Anderson has been almost the complete package as a hitter. 917 OPS isn’t just excellent for a shortstop, it sits barely outside the Top 10 in the entire game. If that wasn’t enough, Anderson has taken it to an entirely new level this year: His three hits in yesterday’s drubbing brought his batting average to. There’s simply no faking those kinds of results over a sample of 350+ games across four seasons. Anderson’s 13.2 rWAR slots in just behind Turner, Trevor Story, Xander Bogaerts, Fernando Tatís Jr., and Carlos Correa. Dating back to his 2019 breakout, only Trea Turner has accumulated more fWAR than Anderson’s 13.8. 377 BABIP and 6.7 WAR (both kinds!) in 160 games. Since this tweet was posted, Anderson has batted a cool. 400 BABIP at the all-star break /zMIzICZY6v- Foolish Baseball March 19, 2021
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