Reasons For Hope For Ryan Braun in 2015

There’s a pretty easy narrative to regurgitate about Ryan Braun. It goes something like this: After a disastrous 2013 that ended in July with a 65-game suspension for violating baseball’s performance enhancing drug rules, Braun came back in 2014 and had his worst full season, setting career lows in all three triple-slash stats, wRC+ and WAR. For many, it’s easy enough to connect the dots and leave it at that, arguing that Braun can’t perform when he’s “clean,” however you define that.

But coming back from PED suspensions hasn’t prevented Nelson Cruz or Melky Cabrera from performing well, and clearly Braun’s own actions have left him without the benefit of the doubt, which is no one’s fault but his own. But to merely take the 30,000-foot view and assume that Braun’s time as one of baseball’s best hitters is now over because of what’s happened over the past 18 months risks glancing past some very positive signs for Braun, ones that indicate he could still be a very productive player in 2015.

There are two very important things to note about Braun’s “bad” 2014. First, while his 114 wRC+was easily the worst of his career, that number represents that he was still 14 percent above league average. This isn’t Vernon Wells collapsing with the Blue Jays or Andruw Jones falling apart with the Dodgers, big-money players performing so badly that their teams desperately tried to dump them. This is a hitter who still hit better than Pablo Sandoval, Yoenis Cespedes and Evan Longoria in 2014. Braun’s worst year would be a career year for plenty of other hitters.

Secondly, it’s somewhat overly simplistic to look at Braun’s down year, assume that he was consistently below his norm all year long and make the connection that it’s all an aftereffect of his 2013 troubles. Braun was actually quite productive the first two months of 2014, with a 153 wRC+ that was even better than his career numbers; for the first half, his 136 mark was tied with Hunter Pence and Justin Upton. So far, so good, right? But in the second half, that mark dropped to a mere 85, down in the level of light-hitting middle infielders such as Donovan Solano and Adeiny Hechavarria. Over the season’s final two months, he hit only .227/.299/.357.

That slide brought his overall year down to the career-worst level we’ve discussed, but there’s a tangible issue that caused Braun’s troubles. Even before his 2013 suspension, Braun spent nearly a month on the disabled list because of an injured right thumb, and because he had an “extended” offseason prior to 2014, Braun opted for rest rather than surgery, reasoning that so many months off would heal the injured nerve. While that seemed to have worked out well for the start of 2014, as the injury got progressively worse — Braun recently said he was essentially “swinging one-handed” for much of the year and couldn’t properly grip the bat — so did his performance.

If that’s true, we should be able to see it in the data beyond just the raw stats, and it’s clear that he was being bothered by it as the season went on. The chart below shows both the distance in feet of every fly ball Braun hit in 2014 (in blue), as well as a rolling average of the previous 10 fly balls (in orange).

 

It’s not hard to see that after holding steady for the first half of the year, the distance of Braun’s fly balls sank in the second half, and since the ball tends to go further when the weather warms up, this is a pretty good indicator that aligns with Braun’s comments of the increasing issues that the thumb was giving him.

Let’s look at it from another perspective, this time from the batter’s box. The two charts here show Braun’s RAA/100P (Runs Above Average per 100 pitches) for various areas of the strike zone in 2012, his last full excellent season, and 2014. (We’ll skip 2013 because it was truncated.)

 

As you can see, in 2012, there weren’t many good places to get Braun out, but your best bet was to pitch him outside, and heaven help you if you let him get a swing on a pitch low anywhere on the inside of the plate. In 2014, the plate was suddenly a weak area, which is consistent with a player without full use of his hands.

For a hitter, a bad thumb can affect every part of the game, and that’s true for Braun. For example, his O-Swing%, the percentage of swings outside the strike zone, which indicates plate discipline, jumped to a career-high 39.0 percent, well above his 33.3 percent career average. As Braun explained to a Milwaukee newspaper, the thumb impacted his bat speed enough that he was forced to swing earlier than he’d like, leading to offerings at pitches he might otherwise have held up on. Without being able to grip the bat as strongly, Braun was forced to go to the opposite field more often.

Put all this together, it’s clear that the thumb was the major source of Braun’s issues, at least probably more than anything else, even if there’s a nonzero component to being without chemical assistance.

Braun underwent a cryotherapy procedure on the thumb in October, an experimental course of action in the sense that it’s almost certainly the first time an active professional ballplayer has tried it. Now two months later, Braun has swung a bat and is saying he’s “pain-free for the first time in two years,” and that activities that had previously caused him pain — even daily items like writing or shaking hands — were no longer a problem.

That’s exactly what the Brewers would hope to hear, though there’s obviously a huge sense of “let’s see what it feels like when spring training starts” attached. For the Brewers, who back in 2011 gave Braun a five-year, $105 million extension that doesn’t even start until 2016, there’s no single bigger impact to the future of their franchise than whether Braun’s thumb responds and he can resemble the hitter he once was.

He doesn’t need to be the superstar he was from 2007-2012 to be useful, of course. Steamer projects him for a .278/.345/.480 (126 wRC+) and 26 homers, which Milwaukee would happily accept. Even if he does that, Braun is never going to win back the hearts and minds of fans who feel betrayed, and that’s more than understandable. But it’s also important to remember there’s more to this situation than poor decisions and worse public relations. There’s a real injury situation that prevented Braun from producing, and if the cryotherapy treatments work, there’s no reason he can’t again be one of baseball’s better bats.