Pittsburgh Pirates must now resist temptation to tinker with McCutchen

The Pittsburgh Pirates were clearly onto something in moving Andrew McCutchen to the sixth spot in the batting order

Here at Pirates Breakdown, we pride ourselves in deeper statistical analysis of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

This will not be an analytical column.

Instead, we will simply state the obvious and offer a plea.

The obvious: Andrew McCutchen batting sixth is flat out working.

The plea: The Pirates would be best served to leave things the way they are, and resist the urge to have him return to a higher batting spot.

If it ain’t broke…

23 games have passed since the Pittsburgh Pirates moved McCutchen down. As is the case with any article with a focus on McCutchen, here now is your obligatory look at how he has done there versus the third spot:

Obviously, the move has agreed with him. Okay, I lied. There will be a little analysis here.

McCutchen has of course improved his slashline across the board, while actually putting up similar raw production numbers in terms of power. He has stayed at relatively the same realm in terms of strikeout percentage while increasing his walk rate by three percent.

Some will point to his swollen BABIP (batting average on balls in play) as an indicator of some luck. To those, I say: Nay. He has certainly earned that BABIP with a spike in key hitting metrics.

We see here that Andrew McCutchen is simply turning ‘meh’ contact into much better contact with more drive.

Here we see some of that weaker contact from his days batting third:

Here, McCutchen got bailed out by a Starlin Castro error, but the contact was bad. He got under the pitch — a cutter — and did nothing with it.

Contrast this against a game from June 13th. Here, McCutchen sees the exact same pitch in the exact same part of the strike zone (as labelled by statcast), but does a ton more with it:

Earlier in the year, we pondered if McCutchen had lost a bit of his legendary bat speed. Our own Alex Stumpf had a detailed look during his Fangraphs residency.

That did not seem to be the case on this at-bat.

Again, McCutchen is locked in right now, and all of this is presented as reinforcment of what anyone can see with their naked eye.

….Don’t fix it

The Pittsburgh Pirates will now have to battle against themselves to resist the urge to move McCutchen back into the third-slot in the order.

And that internal debate does not come as a function of others performing admirably in the outfielder’s old stomping grounds. Gregory Polanco and Josh Bell, among others, have tried their hand there with poor results. McCutchen is getting no better protection at sixth than he did at third, at least in terms of consistency.

Rather, the need to keep McCutchen in stasis in the sixth spot arises from a desire to ensure the 30-year old remains a productive player. Doing so translates to better on-the-field performance — we have already seen that both on an individual and team level — and it also helps rebuild any future trade value that was damaged over the last season-plus.

At the top of this column I maintained that this would be a piece light on analysis. And that is because, sometimes, you just cannot explain certain things with statistics. Yes, those same statistics are a direct result of what happens on the field, but they are certainly do not explain the impetus behind what appears to be the same approach.

Andrew McCutchen’s significant uptick in performance is one of those things.

And the Pittsburgh Pirates must recognize that, and resist the urge to put him back into a more “traditional” run creation spot.

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