So when I decided to do a post on Andrew McCutchen, I was planning to write how I though that he's striking out way too much to begin the season, which is keeping his production down. After looking at his stats, I realized he's probably having the best season of his career. Sound weird for a guy with a batting average of .246? I'll break down what I found to try and prove that he is having a very good season so far, and that it should only be getting better.
The first thing that jumps out to expain the low batting average is his low BABIP of .259. His career BABIP over his first two years was .319, so it's reasonable to expect it to regress back over .300, causing his average to jump as well. That said, I wanted to look into his batted ball statistics to see if there is a reason why the BABIP is low. It looks like batting in the 3 spot and trying to hit more HRs has a lot to do with it. The first 2 years had a fly ball percentage of about 39% and this year it is 46.9%, which in turn dropped his ground ball percentage from 43% to 36.7% From him trying to hit for more power, he's had fewer batted balls that he hasn't had the opportunity to run out for an infield single. But has this swing helped his power output?
A great indicator for power is ISO (isolated power), which is calculated by slugging percentage minus the player's batting average. In a nutshell, it takes out singles and measures the player's ability to hit for extra bases. McCutchen's ISO is .207 , good for 5th among all CF. The leauge average this year for ISO is .137, and McCutchen's highest ISO before this year was his rookie year when it was .185, which is a huge difference.
His plate discipline has improved greatly from the beginning of the year when he struck out 27 times in April, but only 9 times so far in May. His K% is down to 17.9% which is still a tad high for him, but it's well below league average of 20.7% His BB% is a great 12.6%, 4% over league average. Combined, his BB/K ratio of 0.81 is 2nd among all CF (Denard Span leads with 10.7). He's really putting it together now. His triple slash line for May is .277/.368/.494 which is much more like the McCutchen we expect.
Switching over to his fielding, he is drastically improved from last year. Anybody who's into sabermetrics will tell you how flawed all the defensive metrics are, but UZR seems to be the most reliable, although it doesn't take into account how hard a ball is hit. Last year his UZR/150 (ultimate zone rating over 150 games) was a miserable -12.9 but this year it's a respectable 7.9, good for 10th among CF. For fun, gold glover Nate McLouth is dead last at -29.1.
Putting everything together, his WAR is 1.8, tied for 27th in the league and tied for 7th among all CF. For as much as Pittsburghers tend to say he's only having a decent season and for the few people that drive me crazy saying he won't be as good as Jason Bay (he already is). If he continues on this trend through June like he produced in May, he'll be all over Baseball Tonight and MLB Network before you know it.
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