Is Matt Holliday Back?

On May 1 of this season, Matt Holliday's numbers were troubling.  He was batting just .215 with just 8 walks and 7 extra-base hits.  This is especially problematic for a player like Holliday who seems to evoke criticism with even the slightest missteps from fans.

Make no mistake: Holliday has been more than worth his contract up to this point.  This is how long-term contracts are supposed to work.  Player outperforms salary first couple seasons (check), and the last few seasons, he's an above average and overpaid player.  That's the ideal model.  Rarely do they work that way in actuality.  (*Cough Albert Cough*)*

In April, Holliday's problems stemmed beyond batting average.  He had just a 7.9% BB rate compared to a career 9.4% BB rate.  But that doesn't tell the whole story.  Since 2008, he's had a BB rate above 10.2% with the highest being 11.6% which was last season.  So he should be expected to walk in about 11% of his plate appearances.

His isolated power (slugging percentage - batting average; "power" average) was .179, which was also below his career average of .225.  His lowest isolated power in his career is .198 which happened twice in his first two big league seasons.  Last year, it was at .229.  Given age-related decline, he final season line should be around .215.

I searched into why his ISO was lower than previous seasons.  He had hit 4 homers, which put him on pace for around 24 homers.  That's not really that low for a hitter like Holliday, although he did hit 23 homers in about 150 less plate appearances than normal last season.

The real reason is that he stopped hitting as many doubles.  He hit just 3 doubles in April.  That would put him on pace for 18 doubles on the season.  Given 600 plate appearances, Holliday has never had less than 38 doubles in season.  That's quite the precipitous drop.

To be fair to Holliday, it also should be noted that he was on the bad luck side of things.  Baseball is a tough sport where a line drive can be an out and a pop fly a hit.  That's obviously the extreme side of things, but the point is that a batter can get unlucky over a period of 100 plate appearances.  That's about 75 balls in play.  The difference in a few hits going your way results in a considerably higher average.

In April, his batting average on balls in play (BABIP) was just .225.  That's probably not all unlucky since anyone who saw Holliday play can attest to.  He was clearly struggling and was probably not getting as good of contact as he is expected.  Still, his career BABIP is .345 and the last two seasons with the Cardinals were at .330.  Given age-related decline, he should be expected to have about a .330 BABIP.

Luckily, there is a tool to try and calculate how lucky or unlucky a hitter was based off his batted ball profile.  It's called xBABIP.  The goal is to take into account how he hit the ball and use that to estimate what his BABIP would have been with basically no luck involved.  xBABIP takes into account eight different things.  Ground ball/fly ball ratio, line drive percentage, fly ball percentage, ground ball percentage, infield fly ball percentage, infield hit percentage, bunt for a hit percentage, and homer/fly ball rate.

Using a xBABIP calculator (which is both hard to find online and necessary given the formula is complicated), Matt Holliday's lands at .328, which is slightly below his .330 last season.  This does not mean he should have hit for a .328 BABIP if he wasn't lucky or unlucky.  There are error bars in classifying line drives between fly balls, ground balls, and line drives.  However, it does somewhat show that he has been getting unlucky on balls hit in play by a good amount.

So, to summarize, Holliday's biggest issue in April was that he wasn't walking as much as he normally does and he is well off where he is supposed to be in hitting doubles.  His K% was actually lower than last season at 17% so he wasn't even striking out at a high rate.

This brings me to the topic of my post: Is Matt Holliday back?  I'll use arbitrary endpoints to greater benefit my narrative by using the date when Holliday's average was lowest, which was on April 21, when it was a Pujolsian .194 (yesterday's game actually pushed him to .212 so my bad on that one).  Since that time, he has posted the following line:

First 15 games: 70 PAs, .194/.229/.358, 4.3% BB rate, 18.6% K rate, .191 ISO, .196 BABIP
Since: 92 PAs, .333/.435/.541, 15.2% BB rate, 20.7% K rate, .208 ISO, .418 BABIP

He's pretty much erased any doubts about his ability to walk at a good rate.  With a walk in yesterday's win, his BB% for the season is now 10.5% which isn't very far off from where I want him to finish.  A minor concern is that his isolated power is only .208 in that hot streak when he is expected to finish around .215.  After all, if he can't hit his expected line in a hot streak alone, how can he do it in a season.  However, he has 3 doubles in May already so I expect he will somehow still finish the year with greater than 38 doubles.

But is he back?  (By the way, I know he never left, just go with it).  My personal expectation is that his BABIP (currently sitting at .302) will finish at .320.  So if he had a .320 BABIP right now, would his stats look normal?  If they look normal, then it's reasonable to assume that he is fine.  Let it be said, I have full confidence in Matt Holliday, and even if the stats don't back it up, I will assume he'll finish the season back to his normal standards or slightly below (He's 32-years-old, so if they are slightly below, well that's expected to happen.)

If two of his outs turned to singles to date and made his BABIP .320, his average would be .283 with a .358 OBP with a .483 slugging percentage.  It should be noted by the way, that a .320 BABIP is a slightly conservative projection given he has literally never had a BABIP below .330 in his career.  (He did play at Coors Field, which greatly enhances a person's stats).

He's walking at normal rates, power slightly below, and his average slightly below.  How does that explain the fact that his .389 OBP the last two seasons drops to .358 with only slight drops in average and walking ability?  Well, randomly, pitchers decided to stop throwing the ball and hitting Matt Holliday with it.  Maybe the pitchers all got to know him better and decided against hitting him.  There has been data to back up that a player has a certain ability to get hit by a baseball.  Craig Biggio obviously comes to mind.

Matt Holliday this season has been hit by a baseball zero times this season.  For whatever reason that is, it's not going to continue.  Or at least there is no reason to expect it to continue.  His career low in HBPs is 6 and he hasn't done that since 2004.  The last two seasons, he's been hit by a pitch eight times.  Since we've already played over 1/6 of the season, he'll probably get hit less than six times this year.  Assuming a .358 OBP without getting hit by a pitch over 650 plate appearances, if you add in five HBPs to his final season stats, his OBP raises to .366.

That still seems low.  The reasoning is his increase in strikeouts and my projected decrease in BABIP.  There is still a chance that he cuts down on the strikeouts, hits for a .330 BABIP (or more), and gets hit by a pitch eight times in the next 500 plate appearances (which has happened before in his career with 15 HBPs in 2006).

Is Matt Holliday back?  The answer is yes.  But, Holliday is 32-years-old, starting the downside of his career.  His stats will likely - doesn't mean they will - decline from what we've come to expect in this coming season.  Unfortunately, some fans - who for some reason have come to dislike him - will grow a further hatred for him.  My message to those fans: What did you expect?  Player's numbers don't increase after signing big deals.  If you're lucky, they stay the same.  If you're unlucky, you get Carl Crawford or.... yeah you know who I'm talking about.

My final thought: I would not be surprised AT ALL if Matt Holliday beat these admittedly modest expectations.  However, I would be shocked if he did worse than these expectations.  So I guess what I'm saying is the numbers set forth on this blog are what I would consider the low end of possibility.  This doesn't represent reality as that is what most projection systems, such as zIPs, think he's going to do based on history.  This represents my personal gut feeling about Matt Holliday.  (Yes, I did just make a claim without stats, what you gonna do about it?)

*Yes I know it's been a month and a half of baseball in Albert's contract, but his early season numbers strongly suggest his contract will be an albatross of a contract, sooner rather than later.  Rarely would I make such declarations so soon, but... I mean have you his stats???!