Adrian Gonzalez’s Power Outage
Adrian Gonzalez has been pretty much everything the Red Sox expected him to be and then some after sending three top prospects (and Eric Patterson) to the Padres to acquire the now-29-year-old slugger over the winter. Gonzalez leads all of MLB in batting average (.348) and runs driven in (92), and is tops among big league first baseman with 5.1 WAR. There is a slight problem though (and a really hesitate to call this a problem), and it’s the lack of homeruns, especially recently.
Since the middle of June, the arbitrary end point of June 18th, Gonzalez has hit just three home runs. Three in 212 PA. He hit three homers in the 22 PA immediately prior to that, and 15 in his first 311 PA of the season. It’s kinda hard to believe that he’s being out-homered by Jacoby Ellsbury (19-18) while out-tripling his speedy teammate (3-2) this season. When you look at Adrian’s day-by-day batting ball profile, it’s easy to see why the big flies have been scarce for the last month and a half…
Gonzalez has stopped hitting fly balls, basically. His season ground ball rate is 46.7%, easily the highest of his career. He had been in the high-30% range the last two years. The high ground ball rate helps explain his MLB leading .389 BABIP (.310 career coming into 2011), which has resulted in the MLB best batting average. Let’s look at the spray charts, beginning with his first 311 PA (before this recent homer drought started)…
It’s a pretty standard Adrian Gonzalez spray chart. The majority of the fly balls are out to left field, and the majority of the ground balls rolled over to the right side of the infield. You can get a general idea of which balls clanked off the Green Monster for hits, and I count four (maybe five) balls hit over the wall the other way. Now lets look at the spray chart for his last 212 PA…
Again, typical Gonzalez in that most of the balls hit to the outfield went the other way while the grounders have been pulled, but where are they majority of the hits? They’re in shallow right and center, and a lot them are grounders sneaking through the infield (remember, the spray chart shows where the ball was fielded by the defender, not where it landed). There’s basically no balls hit deep to left, at least relative to what he was doing earlier in the season. I’d like to hear from the Red Sox fans out there … is Gonzalez battling a nagging injury? Have pitchers changed their approach against him (more offspeed, maybe pounding him inside with fastballs)? Is there any evidence that would help explain this sudden spike in ground ball rate, which has led to the lack of homeruns?
By no means has Gonzalez been bad this season, in fact I just ranked him the top fantasy first baseman last week. He’s hitting for a super-high average and is driving in what seems like two runs a game because his teammates are awesome, though after four straight years of 30+ homers with the Padres in Petco Park, we all expected him to do no worse than maintain that pace in Fenway. ZiPS projects him to hit just nine more dingers the rest of the way, which would bring his season total to 27. Gonzalez showed earlier in the year that he can get hot (eight homers in an 11 game stretch in May), so it would not be a surprise to see how outperform that projection. But has his relative lack of homers to this point been a little disappointing? Yeah I think that’s fair.
Big ups to Texas Leaguers for the spray charts.
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Who is going to say Home Run derby curse first?
Home run derby curse.
the entire boston sports media.
There’s no HR Derby Curse; he wasnt hitting for power in the month proceeding
Why do people act like its a Home Run Derby curse? Most of the people who get selected to the HR Derby in the first place are selected because they have ridiculous and/or unsustainable HR totals in the 1st half.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Verbal_irony
Did you see what it did to Brandon Inge?! He can’t hit home runs anymore either!
From my observations (as someone who watches a lot of Sox games), it looks like Gonzalez goes up to the plate wanting to go to left. So much so that he’ll take that first off-speed pitch away and hit it to left. The problem is, these pitches just aren’t good pitches to hit for anyone and he’s not driving them with any kind of authority but popping them up instead. It’s very similar to that old theory about Fenway with right-handed hitters getting pull happy when they see that wall in left. Gonzalez is essentially doing the same thing just as a left-handed hitter.
From a Sox fan it looks as though Gonzo is playing a bit more for the easiest hit as opposed to waiting for a pitch to drive. He flicks the bat out for a single a TON on the first/second pitch. I’ve got 2 theories:
1) He’s not used to getting so many hittable pitches and so jumps on the first one that he can handle (an after-effect of being pitched around so much in SD).
2) He is almost always batting with runners on base in front of him, so he knows that a single will plate a run. Why try for a homer for 3 runs when you’re guaranteed 2 runs with an easy single?
good theory.
Comment above notwithstanding, I vote 20% chance of power-sapping shoulder issue that will only clear up after an offseason of rest, and 80% chance of “fun with small sample size”. Many of us wondered the exact same thing early in the season before he went on that homer binge in May.
Does Adrian have a history of being a streaky homerun hitter?
Yes. I live in San Diego and Adrian has always hit his homers in bunches. Four in three games was not uncommon for him while he played here. Then he’d cool off for a bit. The Majority of them, 65-70% I’d say, would go out left of center field. But only three home runs in his last 212 PA is very strange.
I know at the end of last year he said that his power numbers were down because his shoulder was bothering him. So he adjusted his swing to hit for more average.
Maybe with the lack of time for strength training, etc. before the season, his shoulder is starting to fatigue.
I have no clue, just a guess.
As long as he keeps up that RBI pace, he’ll obviously still be the deserved winner of the AL MVP over Bautista.
/shows self out
As long as he keeps up that RBI pace, he’ll obviously still be the deserved winner of the AL MVP over Pedroia.
FTFY
As long as he keeps up that RBI pace, he’ll obviously still be the deserved 10th place finisher in the AL MVP race behind Bautista, Pedroia, Ellsbury, Granderson, ACabrera, Sabathia, Verlander, Weaver and Zobrist.
A couple of things:
About a week and a half ago he sat out a couple of games with a stiff neck that he said had been bothering him for about a month at that point – http://espn.go.com/boston/mlb/story/_/id/6817102/boston-red-sox-1b-adrian-gonzalez-scratched-stiff-neck
There was also an article early in the year talking about how he has been very streaky his whole career as far as his power numbers go so this may not be all that unusual – http://www.nesn.com/2011/05/adrian-gonzalez-completely-locked-in-during-another-trademark-power-surge-and-eight-other-red-sox-th.html (point #5 talks about Gonzalez’s previous power streaks)
I have noticed that he definitely does seem to be hitting way more ground balls as of late (and an aggravating number of GIDPs), and it could be just that I’m looking for something, but it seems like pitchers may actually be pitching him in what would be a typical LHHs power zone (down and in, or even down and over the plate), and he seems to be hitting them on the ground more often than not.
Been aponderin the same thing myself. Can’t say for sure why he’s not hitting dingers.
As a Padres fan I can attest to him being a very streaky HR hitter.
“The high ground ball rate helps explain his MLB leading .389 BABIP ”
I love statements like this. The league average on GB’s is right around .200, but its driving his (close to ) .400 babip.
no, its not. Line drives are.
Maybe meant grounders have a higher chance to sneak through for a hit than a flyball?
The common assumption is that GB babip>FB babip, therefore more GB = higher babip. It’s true that LD% drives babip the most out of the three, but assuming LD% stays the same, higher GB%=higher babip generally. Given that his LD% is in line with his career rate, the higher GB% at least partially explains why his babip is so high, which is what the author said. However, it looks like AGon’s getting (at least somewhat) lucky on all 3 batted ball types, particularly FB’s at 0.288.
His homers aren’t even being missed since so many other guys are hitting them for Boston. Oddly enough, I don’t think the Red Sox mind. In Fenway, he’s going opposite field a lot more this year, and since his flyball rate(and homerun to flyball ratio)is down… that could be knocking down some homeruns that are doubles there but homeruns in other parks. I just looked at his hit chart on Fox, and 10 hits that have been pulled and traveled further than 300 feet.
That seems somewhat odd, but not sure if that’s everything since I haven’t seen all of his at-bats. Since the all-star break he only has one homerun in 106 at-bats so people saying the homerun derby curse has nothing to do with it… well, I don’t believe in that either but he’s not hitting homeruns at the pace he was earlier. One homerun in 25 games isn’t typical for a guy with his kind of power, but he has two in field base hits that were right down the third base line. He’s not a speedster, and maybe they employ a shift on him whenever the bases are empty so he has to think opposite field.
I did a little additional work looking at Adrian’s batted ball distance which has gone down over the past 3 years:
http://www.baseballheatmaps.com/2011/08/is-adrian-gonzalez-losing-his-power/
Nice work. You observe that he is turning on the ball less (his batted ball angle is also shifting more towards left field) – might it be that turning on the ball less is causing the decline in fly ball distance? I.e., he has changed his approach at the plate over time, as many have speculated.
It has to be mostly the change in his approach at the plate. The guy is hitting 56 points higher than his career average while on pace to have a career high in at-bats, runs, doubles, triples, RBI, slugging percentage and OPS. His walks are down, but I think pitchers fear someone else and I don’t mean Ortiz. Through today, Varitek has a slight edge in hitting bombs. Varitek is going yard every 24.3 at-bats while Gonzalez is barely clearing the fence once every 26 at-bats. Just another piece of the puzzle perhaps?
This wouldn’t be a subject if he were Yankee I’m guessing he’d have more since Granderson is on pace for 45 bombs and 130 RBI. If the Yankee “homerun specialist” can finish the season hitting just around .666 for the last 46, he could make a run at the triple crown.
Along the same lines at Jeff, I noticed that last year, he had a very high % (one of, or the highest of all batters in fact) of “just enough” home runs, seeming to imply that he got a little lucky last year, and shouldn’t have hit as many.
Fenway Park has always supressed HR output for left handed batters, some seasons dramatically, but always around 8-10%.
I’ll tell you who took his power. It’s that damn sasquatch.
Adrian Gonzalez should sign up at eHarmony, he loves smashing singles.
WTF is going on?