Evaluating Changes In Contact Rate

In almost every circumstance, April performance means little or nothing. Last year’s April stars included Placido Polanco, Brett Wallace, and Sam Fuld, each of whom would see their numbers come crashing back to reality as the season wore on. Over the course of 100 plate appearances, nearly any player can produce good or bad results.

However, there are some statistics that do have some predictive value, even in very limited quantities. Velocity, for instance, stabilizes extremely fast, as you’ll just never see Jamie Moyer fluke his way into throwing a 95 MPH fastball. On the offensive side of things, the closest equivalent to pitcher velocity is contact rate.

Adam Dunn swings and misses a lot, while Juan Pierre puts his bat on the ball nearly every time he swings. You don’t need to see many games before it becomes clear which guys make contact regularly and which guys do not. In fact, contact rate has the strongest year to year correlation of any offensive metric, and it is the most consistent skill possessed by any hitter. Sustained significant changes in contact rate are rare, and can generally be identified much faster than a change in some other skillset.

To show how quickly contact rate begins to matter, I looked at 125 batters who were full time players in both 2010 and 2011, and played nearly every day last April. As noted in the previous link, the correlation of contact rate between years is 0.9 (where 1.0 means that the two data sets would be exactly the same). However, by just adding in (at equal weight) the contact rate of these hitters in April of 2011 to their 2010 contact rate, the correlation with their 2011 contact rate rose to 0.96 – in other words, you could come very close to precisely predicting a player’s full season contact rate by just taking the average of his prior year contact rate and the mark he posted in the first year of a given season. Using this model at the beginning of May last year, you could have accurately projected the significant improvements by guys like Prince Fielder and David Ortiz while picking up on worrisome trends from Bobby Abreu and Shin-Soo Choo.

While we don’t yet have a full month’s worth of data for 2012, we are seeing a handful of players who are making more contact than they ever have before. While it is still too early to make any definitive declarations, these improvements in contact rate are more likely to be real than any other April performance, and could signal that these hitters have made legitimate steps forward at the plate.

Evan Longoria: 2011 Contact Rate – 79.6%, 2012 Contact Rate – 91.4%

After striking out in nearly a quarter of his plate appearances a rookie, his strikeout rate has been trending down every season since, and last year he only struck out once every six trips to the plate. Through his first six games, Longoria’s keeping up with the trend, as he’s only struck out twice in his first 26 plate appearances. In general, the only players who can sustain a contact rate over 90% are guys who slap the ball on the ground with regularity, but if Longoria can even push his contact rate in the 80-85% range, he could be in for a true breakout season. Very few players in the game can be both elite contact hitters and still drive the ball over the wall, but Longoria has the chance to put himself in that category.

Josh Willingham: 2011 Contact Rate – 75.4%, 2012 Contact Rate – 85.6%

From 2008 to 2010, Willingham was the epitome of consistency when it came to making contact, posting marks between 80.2% and 81.1% in all three seasons. Last year, his contact rate dropped to just over 75%, and the resulting spike in strikeouts at age 32 led to questions of whether he was headed for a steep drop-off in productivity. Instead, Willingham has come out of the gates thumping the baseball for the Twins, but he’s not just swinging for the fences either – he’s showing that he can still cover the plate at the same time. Given the Twins investment in him and their need for offense, his strong first week is as positive a performance as they could have hoped for.

Kyle Seager: 2011 Contact Rate – 84.5%, 2012 – 97.6%

As a diminutive infielder with moderate power who doesn’t draw very many walks, the only way for Seager to be a productive hitter is to put the ball in play as often as possible. During his rookie campaign in Seattle last year, he swung and missed about as often as an average hitter, and given his lack of other strengths, that looked like it could be a long term problem. However, he’s showing premier contact skills in the first week of 2012, and his performance is likely going to force the Mariners to keep playing him even after Mike Carp returns from the disabled list. Given the Mariners lack of offense in general, they can’t afford to bench any productive players, and Seager is giving some reason for hope that he can perform better at the plate than he did a year ago.