http://www.fangraphs.com/fantasy/index.php/wainwright-and-pujols-rough-starts/
Albert has not been living up to his expectation so far this season. Looking
over his stats, two values stick out as potential areas of concern, his walk
rate and power.
Currently Albert has a career low 7.1% BB%. It is less than half of what it
was just 2 years ago. It might seem that this value is not much of a concern
because he is not being intentionally walked as much. Albert has been
intentionally walked 3.3% of the time over his career. By subtracting out the
intentional walks and the non-intentional intentional walks (IBBump), here
are his walk rates and corrected walk rates over the past 5 years:
Year: BB%, corrected BB%
2008: 16%, 8%
2009: 16%, 7%
2010: 15%, 7%
2011: 9%, 6%
2012: 7%, 3% (2 of his 5 BB have been IBB)
His corrected BB% was similar from 2008 to 2011. This season it has been cut
in half. He is definitely not being walked as much.
A reason he may be seeing more strikes is that pitchers don’t fear him as
much as they did in the past because of a lack of power (0 HRs in 2012). Here
are his ISOs from 2009 to 2012:
Year: ISO
2009: 0.331
2010: 0.284
2011: 0.242
2012: 0.108
It would be nice to have Hit FX data to see exactly if he has been hitting
the ball weaker or in the air more. GameDay data, while not perfect, does
give us some clues that he is just not getting as much distance behind his
hits. Here are his 2011 and 2012 batted ball locations from texasleaguers.com:
两张图
So far in 2012, Albert has not even put a ball near the warning track. To
further illustrate the point, here are the average distances of his fly balls
and home runs from 2010 to 2012 as taken from baseballheatmaps.com:
Year: Distance
2010: 313 ft
2011: 303 ft
2012: 275 ft
One possible explanation for the drop in power this season is that he is not
yet familiar with the pitchers in the AL. MGL over at The Book Blog looked at
how hitters and pitchers did once they became more familiar with each other.
Here is his conclusion:
.. there is a large advantage to the batter when he has faced
a pitcher a lot in the last year.
Albert should expect to hit better as he becomes more familiar with the
pitchers in the AL.
Albert is displaying a lack of power that has been trending down the last few
years. On top of the power decline, he is not walking as much even when IBB
are taken into account. I would not recommend selling on him just yet. He
should see an increase in production as he becomes more familiar with AL
pitching. It might be a time to see if his owners are getting impatient with
him and try to buy low.