I don’t have a whole lot of time because it’s Superbowl Sunday and I am busy making football cookies and jalepeno poppers but Lenny keeps nagging me to get chatter done so I figured I would share something interesting about Mike Moustakas and his 2017 performance I was convinced was very good.
I compared Jedd Gyorko and Mike Moustakas cumulative stats since 2015, and they are much more statistically similar than I expected. Eerie similar.
Let’s look closer at the season stats for both, thanks to Fangraphs:
Here is Moustakas :
Here is Gyorko
- Both BABIP are consistently lower than league average. They must run slow.
- Gyorko strikes out at almost double the rate of Moustakas.
- Neither walk
- They both swing at almost everything. Except Gyorko has always been swinging like a mad man while Moustakas’ eye was on a slow and steady improvement. Until 2017 and BOOM!!! Moustakas relapsed and swung at everything.
- Moustakas was also improving at holding off on pitches outside the strike zone. Relapse.
From a normal fan standpoint, Moustakas had a great 2017 right? The only reason we are talking about him so much is because there is a rumor going around that ‘two current free-agents, who are also all-stars, have received zero offers this off season.
Lenny mentioned Moustakas and I believe he is probably right.
It is troubling to find that while Moustakas improved all his surface stats in 2017, his underlying stats waved a big red flag at me..
Here it is again:
We saw him hit more home runs, bring more batters in and increased his batting average, in fact Mouse was improving across the board three straight seasons heading into 2017.
Here are the areas he got worse, and not just a little worse, but significantly worse:
- Strikeout percentage
- Walk percentage
- Swinging at pitches outside the zone
- Hard contact
- Swing percentage
- Contact
- Pull
I feel like it is safe to say I understand why teams are not jumping at the opportunity.
Enjoy Superbowl Sunday!!
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