Weekly Rotation: The most surprising small-sample-size quirks so far
If you’re the type who loves to pore over the daily box scores, whether it’s via the newspaper or internet, you probably enjoy the statistical oddities that emerge during the opening stage of the season. Since MLB features a 162-game season, there are infinite small-sample-size quirks that come together to form the cohesive single-season totals. Those little slices of data are frequently used to craft narratives for players and teams.
[Join a Yahoo Daily Fantasy Baseball contest now]
Weekly Rotation, brought to you by PointAfter visualizations, will not be aiming to do much of that today. Instead, let’s simply bask in the wonderful weirdness of five incredibly unlikely trends to materialize from the first week of baseball.
Note: All statistics updated through Wednesday morning, unless otherwise noted.
5. The redemption of Jean Segura
Jean Segura did not help the Milwaukee Brewers very much on offense last year. In fact, he ranked third-to-last in win probability added with -3.28 WPA. Arizona was roundly criticized when they acquired Segura during the offseason for a package headlined by Chase Anderson, a 28-year-old with a 4.18 ERA in 267 career major-league innings.
[Elsewhere: Zack Greinke has been bad and he knows it]
It’d be an understatement to say Segura’s value had precipitously slipped since his 2013 All-Star campaign. Of course, Segura entered Tuesday leading all players with 0.90 WPA for a team with two wins. He’s kept the Diamondbacks’ offense afloat in the wake of A.J. Pollack’s season-ending injury, slashing .387/.424/.806 with three homers in eight games after he belted six round-trippers in 142 contests last season.
It’s been a joy to see the 26-year-old speedster maintain his early-season success from years past. If Arizona is to live up to the expectations that came with their aggressive offseason maneuvers, Segura will have to continue to effectively set the table for Paul Goldschmidt, David Peralta and the rest of the D-backs.
4. Seattle’s simultaneously superb and awful luck
The Mariners have done an awful job of supporting Felix Hernandez in 2016, as is far too often the case. Their dismal BABIP (.224) indicates they’ve been an extraordinarily unlucky team. After all, only one player among 141 qualified hitters had a worse BABIP (batting average on balls in play) in 2015, and that was the notoriously slow Albert Pujols (.217). Seattle has persevered to be an average offensive team, ranking 18th in OPS (.672) entering Wednesday. But the results thus far could have been even worse, and probably should have been.
The Mariners have simply reaped what they’ve sown in the garden of BABIP, as they’ve recorded the lowest line drive percentage (14.9%) in MLB. Seattle has also benefited from a high 16.7% home-run-to-fly-ball rate, the eighth-highest rate in the Majors.
As one of only two teams without a stolen base in 2016 and a middle-of-the-pack outfit as far as contact rate goes, the Mariners don’t seem like a team that’ll manufacture many runs through small ball. They need to produce more line drives, because their home run luck will run out soon.
3. Gregory Polanco: Scrappy speedster?
Infield hits are wonderful, fluky things. Since they’re often the product of wacky deflections or sky-high choppers, the annual leaders in infield hit rate aren’t always the speedy suspects you’d envision. Last year, for example, Kris Bryant and Derek Norris (14.4 percent) were the leaders for infield-hit percentage. It’s the perfect statistic for those who love small-sample-size quirks.
[Elsewhere: Wow, this year’s MLB Home Run Derby jerseys are fantastically retro]
Still, at 6-foot-5 and 230 pound, Gregory Polanco doesn’t resemble the sort of player you’d expect to leg out a ton of infield hits. Indeed, he barely ranked in the top 50 of infield-hit rate last year, according to Fangraphs. But there Polanco is, tied with teammate Josh Harrison at the top of the leaderboard with three infield hits.
The 24-year-old hasn’t discovered the home-run stroke many expected him to develop (16 home runs in 996 career MLB plate appearances), but this year he’s showing he doesn’t need to rack up four-baggers to mature into one of the NL’s premier hitters.
Polanco hasn’t left the yard yet in 2016, but he boasts a slash line of .333/.514/.542 with three doubles and a triple through eight games. Perhaps more importantly, he’s also showcasing more plate patience, drawing 10 walks in 36 plate appearances. For reference, Polanco accumulated 142 plate appearances before drawing 10 walks last season.
Similar former mega-prospect Jason Heyward was occasionally slotted at leadoff during his tenure with the Braves to varying degrees of success. The Pirates already have a bunch of plate-setter types (Josh Harrison, Starling Marte) who will likely prevent Pittsburgh manager Clint Hurdle from doing the same — though Matt Joyce occupied the No. 1 spot for the Pirates on Tuesday, so who knows? Either way, Polanco’s current statistical output resembles a speedy leadoff hitter more than the middle-of-the-order presence many expected he would blossom into. And if that continues, that’s a-okay.
2. Minnesota can’t win, but they sure can whiff
The Twins are off to their worst start since 1904, when they were the Washington Senators. Even the deadlocked Congress in D.C. has accomplished more in 2016 than the Twins have at the plate.
The most strikeout-prone player of 2015, Chris Davis, turned in an even 31% strikeout rate last year. As a team, Minnesota has been punched out at a 31.9% rate this season. The team has more strikeouts (79) than hits (51) and walks (21) combined.
Even worse, the main culprits are a trio meant to form the core of Minnesota’s lineup. Byron Buxton, Byung-ho Park and Miguel Sano are tied for the worst strikeout rate in the Majors among players with more than 15 plate appearances, having all been struck out in half of their trips to the plate.
Buxton is 4-for-22 with 11 strikeouts and no walks. Park is 3-for-21 with 12 strikeouts, two walks and a homer. Sano is 3-for-22 with 13 strikeouts and no extra-base hits. Even stranger, Sano led the Majors with a 56% line-drive rate, according to Fangraphs.
If the Twins somehow rebound to make the playoffs, they’d be the first 0-7 team to do so in baseball history.
1. The Tale of Trevor Story
Troy who? Trevor Story has made Rockies fans forget all about their last homegrown stud at shortstop and hijacked all the National League Rookie of the Year hype from division rival Corey Seager by crushing home runs at a record-setting pace. Let’s run down some of the best statistical improbabilities he’s accomplished during his first week in the bigs.
• First player in baseball history to record seven homers in the season’s first six games — let alone the first six games of his MLB career.
• First rookie to record seven homers in any six-game stretch of any season
• First player to record seven homers in a span of nine hits (previous record was 12 hits, set by Richie Sexson in 2004 according to Baseball Reference)
• Halfway to record of 14 home runs in April, set by Albert Pujols (2006) and Alex Rodriguez (2007)
• On pace to log 189 homers, 324 RBIs and a 1.111 slugging percentage in 2016 entering Tuesday (all single-season records, naturally).
• First NL rookie to be named Player of the Week in season’s first week since Fernando Valenzuela in 1981
In case you were curious, it took Troy Tulowitzki 94 games to mash seven homers. And the guy whose job Story has surely stolen, Jose Reyes, hit seven homers in 116 games last season.
Reyes is the highest-paid player on Colorado’s roster. The Rockies certainly won’t be getting their money’s worth this season from Reyes for various reasons, but they can’t be too down in the dumps about it. Not when Story keeps lifting the spirits of the franchise’s long-suffering fans higher and higher.
Story’s run atop the home run leaderboard won’t last forever. Indeed, an 0-for-4 outing with three strikeouts on Tuesday night marked the phenom’s first stumbling block. But for now, he’s made Rockies games must-watch baseball for the first time in years. Their fan base should enjoy the unprecedented run while they can.
More MLB coverage from Yahoo Sports:
The StewPod: A baseball podcast by Yahoo Sports
Subscribe via iTunes or via RSS feed
Will Laws is a writer for PointAfter, a sports data aggregation and visualization website that’s part of the Graphiq network. PointAfter is a platform for shot charts, scatter plots and other data visualizations about NBA players, NFL teams and dozens of other topics. Follow him on Twitter at @WillLaws
