Indicators show that the Pirates’ offensive lull may be temporary

The Pittsburgh Pirates have had a hard time scoring runs over the past week or so, but several indicators show that the team’s offensive ineptitude may be temporary.

Despite a 10-run win over the Rockies, Pittsburgh Pirates hitters have struggled to score runs over the past week — a stretch that saw them go 1-6 over their last seven contests.

The club is currently searching for answers. To this point, Clint Hurdle has been steadfast in maintaining a sense of lineup continuity, with the main — and, in reality, only — change coming at the top of the order, which has seen Sean Rodriguez and Adam Frazier attempt to fill in for Josh Harrison, with middling results at best. Hurdle said it himself during Spring Training, as Rob Biertmpefel of The Athletic chronicled:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”Clint Hurdle as told to The Athletic” link=”https://theathletic.com/286603/2018/03/24/why-clint-hurdle-expects-to-use-a-smaller-array-of-lineups-this-season/” color=”” class=”” size=””]“We’re looking for some type of consistency in the lineup,” Hurdle said. “The lineup is much longer than we’ve ever had in the past and I believe it’s got much more play in it, more hit-ability and more power.”[/perfectpullquote]

Is Hurdle right to be so dogged towards his lineup when it is failing to produce runs at the level it was doing so as recently as earlier this month?

Actually, yes. Kind of. Maybe.

Things will probably even out

In attempting to determine if the recent Pittsburgh Pirates hitter ineptitude can turn into a season long trend, we have no shortage of statistics that one could cherry pick to make the case that the club will get hot again at the plate.

Folks like to point to BABIP — Batting Average on Balls In Play – as a pure indicator of luck, be it the fortuitous or punitive. Simply pointing to a low or high BABIP as a sign of bad or good luck only tells half the tale. For the rest of the story , one could point to hard-hit rates and average exit velocity on batted balls. As it turns out, the Pittsburgh Pirates have struggled in both of these areas over their week to forget.

First, over the bad stretch, the Pirates have the second worst BABIP in baseball, with a .253 rate. They also sport the lowest hard-hit percentage in all of baseball over that same time frame with a 18.9 percent rate as per Fangraphs. That is the lowest during this stretch by a wide margin. 

The next lowest team hard hit rate is 25.8 percent. That is a sizable difference, and considering that a rate of 30 percent is generally considered “average,” logic alone tells us that while the Pittsburgh Pirates’ “bad luck” BABIP is truly earned with a downright-anemic hard hit rate, the law of averages will bring this closer to a respectable number at the very least.

Let’s talk about wOBA, baby

Another quick note on the Pittsburgh Pirates hitters and luck — When trying to determine how unlucky or lucky a club’s hitters are, one could easily use xwOBA and wOBA (Expected weighted on base average and weighted on base average, respectively) as an inverse of sorts to the BABIP/Hard hit rate argument.

xwOBA is a Statcast metric that adds exit velocity and launch angle to the standard wOBA formula. Defense is taken out of xwOBA, giving us a more “pure” measure of a batted ball.

Having said that, Here’s a look at the club’s xwOBA and wOBA over the last week of games:

	xwOBA	wOBA	Diff
Elias Diaz	0.439	0.461	0.022
Sean Rodriguez	0.347	0.407	0.06
Corey Dickerson	0.294	0.175	-0.119
Jordy Mercer	0.266	0.27	0.004
Gregory Polanco	0.264	0.211	-0.053
Starling Marte	0.26	0.27	0.01
Francisco Cervelli	0.253	0.278	0.025
David Freese	0.244	0.216	-0.028
Josh Bell	0.24	0.174	-0.066
Colin Moran	0.217	0.192	-0.025
Adam Frazier	0.205	0.167	-0.038
Max Moroff	0.162	0.352	0.19

The biggest differences here — Corey Dickerson, Gregory Polanco and Josh Bell, aka three of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ most relied-upon run producers — have been victimized by some “bad luck” — or, perhaps, good defense — in the midst of their respective slumps. And, to be clear, they are slumps. Does it even matter if their xwOBA is worse than their wOBA, when their wOBA was “poor” to begin with?

Well, yes, but it speaks to the degree of the slump. So, yes, Dickerson and Bell in particular can’t catch a break. But, just like BABIP and Hard hit rates above, is their bad luck earned?

We can take a look at the club’s average exit velocity before this recent downturn and during to start to answer that question.

Average exit velocity	Pre-4/16	4/16 – 4/23	Difference
Max Moroff	N/A	94.2
Elias Diaz	90.5	91.7	1.2
David Freese	85.4	90.5	5.1
Colin Moran	88.9	90.4	1.5
Jordy Mercer	90.4	89.2	-1.2
Francisco Cervelli	91.2	89.1	-2.1
Adam Frazier	87.7	88.2	0.5
Starling Marte	85.9	86.9	1
Josh Bell	89.1	85.5	-3.6
Sean Rodriguez	92.9	85.4	-7.5
Gregory Polanco	90.8	84.3	-6.5
Corey Dickerson	88.9	82.5	-6.4

We can add Gregory Polanco to the list of Pirates stalwarts who are not making great contact. These differences illustrated here are startling, especially when considering that the current MLB-wide average exit velocity rate is is 88.4 mph.

So not only are three of the Pirates’ chief run creators not making good contact, they are also victimized by either bad luck or defense — depending upon your view — and are capable of so much more. Even if they do not produce to the level that they were earlier in the season, these chief cogs in the Pittsburgh Pirates lineup are very likely to rebound to their established norms at the very least, with a chance to do much more.

Photo credit – Daniel Decker