Ed. note: Today, we welcome 310toJoba, once a contributor to the late, great Walkoff Walk. J has thoughts about Ichiro, and also stats, and thus his work is a natural fit here. Take it away, guest!
The greater baseball blogosphere’s infatuation with one Ichiro Suzuki is well-documented and equally well-founded. Anyone who goes on the record and says this? Well that’s just about the most awesomely Zen thing in the history of things. While Ichiro’s self-awareness may trump most of his counterparts in MLB, his 2011 season was nothing short of a disaster when contrasted to his usual sterling efforts: .272 batting average (!), 0.2 WAR (!!), and a -6.7 UZR/150 (!!!). Let’s dig into the numbers a bit in order to confirm what may end up being an unfortunately obvious point.
We can get any “advanced” stats guy’s best friend out in the open right way and gesture to Ichiro’s precipitous drop in 2011 BABIP as reason for his uncharacteristic performance, but I would like to delve a little further into his peripheral numbers on BABIP: his Ground Ball % (GB%) and his Infield Hit % (IFH%). When I began my Fangraphs data mining from my mom’s basement (tired jokes wheeee!) on this project I was expecting to see Ichiro’s numbers in GB% as being at its peak in 2011. I was mistaken. Oddly enough his 2011 totals were the second highest to his 2004 season:
2004
IFH%: 14.1%
GB% 63.7%
2011
IFH% 10.0%
GB% 59.9%
All balls on the turf are not alike though so I was hoping to find some sort of trend in the “quality” of pitches that Ichiro was hitting. To the graph paper!
Strangely, his overall contact% in 2011 was right in line with his career marks; however, what the above lines show is that Ichiro has been swinging at more pitches outside of the zone and making contact with them at a higher rate to boot. While his change in plate discipline hasn’t been as dramatic as Ryan Braun, the fact that he’s hitting “crappier” pitches onto the ground is going to have an undoubted effect on his BA (and his OBP by extension since his average is so high). This effect is going to be magnified more so than ever because Ichiro is not exactly the same youthful hitter he was in 2004. He will be 38 years old for the 2012 campaign and it will be hard sell indeed to say that his ability to leg out balls on the ground will improve as he gets older.
The aforementioned blogosphere has been strangely quiet on Ichiro’s marked one year decline. This can probably be written off as most of us being in denial. While the data confirms that people get old and ineffective I, for one, will not be in a rush to stick a fork in Ichiro because he has been so awesome. Look at that, a stats nerd with feelings!
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