Atkins Non-Tendered
Garrett Atkins is an intriguing addition to the free agent pool. His career has been on a pretty steady downward trend for the past four years — from his six-win season in 2006 to his below-replacement season in 2009. His wRC+, which adjusts for Coors, has gone from 145 in 2006, to 117 in 2007, to 98 in 2008 and finally an ugly 65 this past year.
A repeat of his 2006 season is pretty unlikely, but still, a rebound to 2007 or 2008 form — a league average third basemen — could help many teams. So will we see such a rebound?
In 2009 his problem was batted-ball based, not plate discipline based (his walk and strikeout numbers were fine). His FB/HR rate dropped to a career low 7.3%, which is troubling when playing half his games at Coors, but the bigger problem was his BABIP of just .247. Before this year he averaged a BABIP of .320. What happened there? Turning to Baseball Reference’s BABIP by batted ball type:
BABIP +--------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+ | | Atkins Career | Atkins 2009 | League Aver. | +--------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+ | Ground Balls | 0.247 | 0.256 | 0.235 | | Fly Balls | 0.108 | 0.055 | 0.142 | | Line Drives | 0.711 | 0.600 | 0.718 | +--------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+
The problem was definitely with balls in the air. They not only went for HRs much less often but they dropped in for hits at a much smaller rate. Below I broke up the playing field into ten zones, counted the fraction of Atkins balls in the air to each zone and color coded each zone based on its BABIP (darker the better). The image on the left is for 2006 to 2008 and on the right is for 2009.
Atkins is just not hitting the ball as far: the four closest zones have more balls in play in 2009 than in 2008 and all but one of the farthest six zones have fewer. Atkins plays serviceable defense at third base and walks at an above average rate while striking out at a below average rate, but if he wants to have a job as a starting third basemen he is going to have to get back to hitting the ball with some authority.
It’s surprising how quickly his numbers plummeted.
However, he did have some bright spots during the 2009 season.
It will be interesting to see if he can bounce back next year.
The color coding looks messed up to me.
and/or the numbers.
I believe the darkness of the color is based on the BABIP in that zone and the number is the fraction of balls in the air
CSJ’s got it. Sorry it was not clear in the text.
It’s a little hard to get a hold on what areas these zones represent. Are the first two “rings” only the infield? I ask because that would suggest to me that 27% of Atkins balls put in play as FB/LD were on the infield. Is that a correct conclusion to draw?
Yeah I should have put a scale, I will do that if I use the figure in any future posts. The first ‘ring’ is 122 feet out, about the location of the outfield grass. Then each ring after that is 100 feet farther, so the next one at 222, the third at 322 and final at 422 (well actually there is no end to the last one because I put all hits that went farther than 322 in those bins).
I wouldn’t touch the guy. There is always the suspicion of chemistry being involved in patterns like Atkins has shown. Not saying there is.
Look, can we *please* get over thoughts like this? It disturbs me on two levels:
1) It’s obnoxiously passive aggressive. “All i’m saying, maybe he did roids. But I’m not saying he did.”
2) I think it’s been solidly proven (years ago, in fact) that we can’t statistically determine if somebody was doing steroids, or not. More in-depth analyses have shown insignificant correlations between statistical fluctuations and known steroid users (matched with their known usage periods).
So please stop writing crap like this.