Posted by Irvine Sign Company
Posted by Irvine Business Sign Company
Editor’s note: The story below is the Monday, April 30 edition of the Inside the Dodgers newsletter. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.
It’s hard to find a story about the state of baseball in 2019 that doesn’t mention the record home run rate. Homers have reached uncharted territory, eclipsing even the peak of the steroid era. Players are doing this despite omnipresent drug-testers in the clubhouse, with physiques that aren’t ripped from the pages of bodybuilding calendars. Tommy La Stella, a slight-framed middle infielder with 10 career home runs prior to this year, recently overtook Mike Trout for the Angels’ team lead in home runs. Tommy La Stella.
This newsletter isn’t concerned with answering what’s going on, but rather what’s going on with Justin Turner?
Turner hasn’t hit a home run in 2019. He slugged .530 in 2017, his last full healthy season. He slugged .619 in the second half of last season, around the time he was fully recovered from a fractured wrist in spring training. His slugging percentage through Monday was .300, easily his lowest this decade. No player has batted as many times this season without a home run as Turner, and the players closest to him on that list aren’t exactly sluggers: Rafael Devers, Jeimer Candelario, Brandon Crawford, Jackie Bradley Jr. Turner is two years removed from a 27-homer season.
It isn’t just his home runs that have disappeared, either.
Turner has exactly three extra-base hits, all doubles, along with 24 singles. That’s the kind of profile you might expect from a dead-ball era hitter – until you take a closer look. Because he’s still drawing walks to go along with his singles, Turner has a stout .370 on-base percentage. To find the last man to qualify for a batting title with at least a .370 on-base percentage and at most a .300 slugging percentage, you need to go back to Ron Hunt, a journeyman second baseman (and briefly a Dodger in 1967) who was good at avoiding strikeouts, drawing walks, getting hit by pitches and … not much else. The Cleveland Indians employed a catcher named Steve O’Neill who did this twice in the 1920’s. They’re the only two men to accomplish the feat in the 20th century. What Turner is doing was hard to do in the dead-ball era, and he’s doing it in the liveliest-ball era since, well, maybe ever. For a very different reason, that makes Turner’s start to the season about as impressive as Cody Bellinger’s, which I wrote about in detail yesterday.
So, what is going on with Justin Turner?
From an outcome standpoint, it’s pretty simple: he’s hitting the ball on the ground again. Turner’s average launch angle, which had risen every year in the Statcast era, has plummeted from 18.3 degrees to 12.8. His ground-ball rate is on pace to be higher than any year since 2014, Turner’s first season in Los Angeles. The grounders are resulting from a variety of pitches, and most are in the strike zone. There’s a more sophisticated analysis to be done there, but the bottom line is the same. We’re seeing a troubling trend for Turner. His profile has basically reverted to its pre-Doug Latta days.
To be clear, Turner is far from useless. A .370 OBP is well above average. Unfortunately it’s about the only thing Turner is doing well at the plate right now. His strikeout rate is up. His ballooning ground-ball rate has led to six double plays – four shy of his total from all of 2018. And his slugging percentage has gone the way of Ron Hunt, apparently without any kind of injury. That might be the least-expected development by any Dodger player in 2019.
-J.P.
Thanks for reading the April 30 edition of the Inside the Dodgers newsletter. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.
|
[Read More ...]
Posted by Irvine Sign Maker
For Free Sign Estimate Visit: Lighted Channel Letters Irvine ca
Posted by https://goo.gl/TXzGV5
No comments:
Post a Comment