Courtesy of the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club
When the 2020 season wraps up in a few weeks there are going to be plenty of players moving on to an uneasy offseason. Across the sport, teams are going to have to decide how to evaluate players who struggled during this abbreviated campaign as they build their rosters for 2021. Some teams may decide to write this year off as an outlier and stick to their plans from before, while others may feel like they saw enough during these few months to make changes that could alter the trajectory of a player’s career.
There are plenty of people who will worry this winter, but Christian Yelich should not be one of them. As they stand right now, the numbers on the back of Yelich’s baseball card would suggest his 2020 season has been a disaster. After going 0-for-10 in the Cubs series his batting average has dipped back below .200, less than a year after he won back-to-back batting titles. As recently as last week broadcasters were still sharing the narrative that he’s missing pitches he used to destroy.
A closer look at the numbers, however, divides the story into two parts: He opened the season with a 1-for-27 road trip, but once the calendar flipped to August he launched a 33-game stretch where he batted .254 with a .401 on-base percentage and .535 slugging. Until Saturday he had reached base in 29 consecutive games, which is tied for the tenth longest streak in Brewers franchise history.
After the Slump
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The narrative of Yelich’s season has been set at least in part by the timing of the sequence of events. A 1-for-27 streak would be alarming for Yelich at any time, of course, but it was magnified in this case because it continued to weigh down his statistics even after he started performing well. From August 3 through August 18, for example, Yelich had a stretch where he batted .277 with a .433 on-base and .638 slugging. Because it came after his slump, however, the scoreboards around baseball still showed him as a .189/.318/.459 hitter overall and the narrative that he was struggling continued. The storyline might have been entirely different if those two stretches were flipped, and Yelich had gotten off to a torrid start before cooling off.
Yelich’s season might also look significantly different with better luck on batted balls. Through Sunday’s game Yelich is batting just .244 in at bats where he puts the ball in play (BABIP) this season, down from .354 last year. Even splitting the difference between Yelich’s normal rates and his 2020 BABIP would give him six extra hits on the year, which would be enough to raise his batting average by 40 points. A deeper dive into the numbers shows that Yelich’s batted ball output hasn’t changed a lot: He’s hitting the ball on the ground a little more often but he’s still using all fields well and, per FanGraphs, he’s making much less soft contact than he did a year ago. He’s just not being rewarded for putting the ball in play.
In baseball statistics circles there’s also some debate on the value of “lineup protection,” but Yelich’s 2020 season could also be submitted as evidence that it matters. Last season Yelich had the benefit of having hitters like Yasmani Grandal, Mike Moustakas and Eric Thames batting behind him but with all of them gone and much of the Brewers’ offense struggling, opposing pitchers have increased incentive to pitch around him. FanGraphs’ data shows that just 35% of pitches thrown to Yelich this season have been in the strike zone. He’s on pace to set a new career high by walking in 16% of his plate appearances, but Yelich is also missing out on opportunities to do damage when pitchers are comfortable putting him on first base and facing the hitters behind him instead.
When the time comes to preview the 2021 season, Christian Yelich’s disappointing 2020 numbers are almost certainly going to be a frequent topic of conversation. A closer look at the numbers suggests that Yelich isn’t just a “candidate to bounce back” next season, he’s a player who already did.
To read more Brewers On Deck Circle columns by Kyle Lobner, click here.
