Aaron Kennelly

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Our three replacement-level acquisitions are our three best pitchers, so why not try a below-replacement level guy?

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/some-of-my-favorite-javier-baez-statistics/

Vaunted

Launch angle and exit velocity have pretty strong year-to-year correlations. They are predictive. Obviously a sample as small as Bote's isn't going to be very predictive at all. But I think this stuff is important and can help us better analyze small samples.

That's a pretty textbook example of counting the same thing twice. Not really -- e.g, Giancarlo Stanton. This is one the reasons Mike Trout is so good despite lower exit velocities.

He has not subsequently done a whole lot to warrant comparison to Rizzo or Harper. This kind of analysis is the modern version of "But he hits .312 in day games on Tuesdays." There are so many peripherals now that if you keep digging, you can find one that you like about the guy. Maybe it's exit velocity, maybe it's LD%, maybe he's due some BABIP luck, maybe you like the K/BB ratio, maybe he's got an above-average Z-swing% (RIP alcantara 2beautiful4thisworld), maybe his contact rate is too big leagues to ignore. There's always something. Maaaaybe David Bote is the next Ryan Theriot, and granted offensive output is so low these days that you basically just have to be not Rey Ordonez to be useful in the middle infield, but there was a time that stat-savvy fans knew what to make out of the guy with OK but not great numbers in AA and AAA who comes up and hits well for 82 plate appearances. I'd certainly never use raw exit velocity numbers to compare Jorge Soler or David Bote to Anthony Rizzo as overall hitters. The guy strikes out nearly 30% of the time. But Soler probably does similar damage to Rizzo when they both make contact. And exit velocity isn't just about average exit velocity. There's a lot more importance in hitting it hard when you get it in the air, how often you get it in the air, how high you can max out exit velocity at. But for some context for that quote you've chosen. At the time the author wrote it, Soler was hitting .175/.261/.275 with a .211 BABIP. The rest of that year he hit .272/.372/.524. And, I agree there are lot of things you can pick and choose from to make a hitter look good. Fortunately for Bote, he's been good at just about everything so far.

I also think scouts missed the boat on Bote's other attributes as a prospect, too. Just looking at Fangraphs, they have him with a 45 for speed and 45 field. I think he might be a little better than that. He ranks second on the Cubs behind Baez in Statcast Sprint Speed and he looks pretty good defensively. It's not hard to see them sleeping on his athleticism because he was older and a late round pick that wasn't putting up good numbers on offense, either.

One of the things they talk about in that article is that Bote didn't change his swing very much. The focus was more on his swing path -- i.e., they wanted him to go out and get the ball instead of staying back and letting it travel in on him. A lot of the fly ball revolution adopters have talked about this. Eno Sarris wrote a good article about it at Fangraphs last year. https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/power-hitters-should-make-contact-out-in-front/ Bote's changes weren't really about changing his swing. The article mentions that the Cubs still wanted him to have a line drive swing. They didn't want to turn him into a fly ball hitter. A lot of guys that craft their swing for maximum loft are selling out for power -- think Luis Valbuena or Todd Frazier. Those swings lead to a lot of lazy fly balls at high launch angles. It also leads to low BABIPs. Bote's main problem, the article says, was that he was just hitting everything straight into the ground. When you do that, it doesn't matter how hard you hit it. The Cubs wanted him to get his overall average launch angle up, while still focusing on hitting line drives. If you look at the leaderboard on average launch angle on ground balls, Bote is up near the highest average launch angle. This is strange for guys with high GB%. Usually ground-ball hitters pound the ball straight into the ground more often. High launch angle fly-ball hitters also generally have higher ground-ball launch angles. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/statcast_search?hfPT=&hfAB=&hfBBT=ground%5C.%5C.ball%7C&hfPR=&hfZ=&stadium=&hfBBL=&hfNewZones=&hfGT=R%7C&hfC=&hfSea=2018%7C&hfSit=&player_type=batter&hfOuts=&opponent=&pitcher_throws=&batter_stands=&hfSA=&game_date_gt=&game_date_lt=&hfInfield=&team=&position=&hfOutfield=&hfRO=&home_road=&hfFlag=&hfPull=&metric_1=&hfInn=&min_pitches=0&min_results=25&group_by=name&sort_col=launch_angle&player_event_sort=h_launch_speed&sort_order=desc&min_pas=0#results A couple things are probably going on. One, his GB% is probably higher than it will be going forward. Secondly, Bote has had a really low standard deviation of launch angle. It's at 19.53 right now. The lowest for a full season in the Statcast era is 19.76. Again, this is something that isn't going to stay this way. But a low standard deviation of launch angle correlates inversely to BABIP. The smaller your spread of launch angles, the higher your BABIP is going to be. Bote isn't just hitting every ball hard. He's hitting everything close to his desired launch angle.

Bote's other peripherals look solid so far, too. He's shown a good eye at the plate. His Swing% looks good. His Contact% is 73%, which isn't good, but is plenty fine for a guy hitting the ball that hard. He's starting to reach enough PAs where that stuff becomes more reliable, too. He had solid walk and strikeout rates in the minors. I'd bet his BB% goes down and K% goes up from where he is now. With how hard he swings, he's going to strike out. If he can keep it below 25%, that will play. His BABIP is really high right now, but he's also hitting a lot of grounders and not many fly balls, which will help that. He's also only had two of his seven "barreled" balls leave the park. For how hard he's hit it, you'd maybe expect a couple more of them to leave the yard. Say two of his barreled XBH turned into homers, his BABIP would be .373. Still crazy production, but he's hit it really hard. And he hasn't hit pop ups and lazy fly balls. Before tonight's game his wOBA was .414 and his xwOBA was .439. Plus, he's a right-handed hitter with speed, who is tougher to shift and can beat out infield hits. Obviously that stuff's all going to come back to earth -- it's just a matter of how much. It won't be anywhere near this, or he'd be one of the best ball players in the world. But he's probably good at this stuff. I don't think this is anything like Junior Lake randomly BABIP'ing his way to decent numbers for a couple months. If Bote really is an exit velocity freak, he's probably going to be a BABIP freak or hit for a bunch of power, depending on what launch angles he's hitting balls at. And he's looked good defensively at a couple of infield positions. I'm buying in. All the way in. I say he's better than at least Russell, Happ, and Almora going forward. I think he's a potential 4-win player. Somehow.

I think mainly people thought that Soler would hit for more power than he did in 2015, because he only hit 10 Ding Dong Johnsons and had a .137 ISO that year despite good exit velocities. And he has. His ISO since then is .185. Soler's avg. exit velocity by year, from 2015 on: 91.6 mph, 89.8 mph, 89.0 mph, 89.6 mph. So he hasn't hit it as hard since that first year of Statcast. But he has done well when he makes contact with the ball. His career ISO is .176. His career BABIP is .321. Both are above average and probably have something to do with him hitting the ball hard. But Bote is in a different realm with his exit velocities right now than Soler was even in 2015. He's at over 96 mph. The league average has gone up and down each year since 2015, but has been between 86.7 mph and 87.8 mph each year. From 2015 through 2017, the only batters that had seasons over 93 mph were: Miguel Cabrera (twice), Nelson Cruz (twice), Giancarlo Stanton, Joey Gallo, and Aaron Judge. Cruz and Judge were both over 94 mph once and are the only two above that mark this year, too. The guys up at the top of the league are nearly always high ISO and/or BABIP guys. I think Soler was a blind spot for a lot of us (myself included) because he hit the ball hard and had good minor league numbers. But he's struck out in 28% of his PA in his career and is one of the worst defenders in the league -- being a below-average corner outfielder. He's shown signs of putting it together in between DL stints. And I think he'll someday be a good hitter. But he's never going to be all that valuable. Bote is fast, has shown athleticism, and looked really solid playing in the infield, though. Exit velocity becomes reliable much quicker than a lot of other stats, too. The stabilization point is around 50 batted balls, which Bote has passed. That's not to say that he's going to be a 96 mph exit velocity guy going forward. He almost certainly won't. But it probably hasn't been very fluky so far. As Cubswin11 said, it's hard to fake hitting the ball hard. Hitting the ball hard is a very good thing, too. It correlates rather strongly to offensive success: That's a strong correlation, especially considering all the other things that go into offensive success, like speed and certain players being major shift candidates (usually both working against high exit velocity guys that are big and pull the ball). I think we'll see his exit velocity numbers drop. But even if he is at, say, 92 mph going forward, that bodes well for his future, much more so than his triple slash line right now.

haha shut up duke, you know perfectly well you've been doing it to be a smartass. why the f do i always fall for the bait

Fine, I'll start referring to it being crazy to bitch nonstop about a team "on a 94-win pace" instead of using "best record in the NL."

Sorry for not going full doom-boner when my favorite team has the best record in their league. this is a fair point, but it's also pretty disingenuous how you've used it like 10 times in the last few weeks. they could have the 6th best record in the league with a bad 3-4 days OK... when they have the 6th best record in the league, I'll start freaking out.

The same horsefeathers I've been saying since around the start of 2016, or back to the end of 2015. #wearegood I say it because we are.

Derwood, you're out of your element.

Sorry for not going full doom-boner when my favorite team has the best record in their league.

You were just begging me to join the dark side earlier tonight because of how much they were pissing me off.

Sorry, but it's true. not only is it delusional it's completely pointless. hey if the cubs played in a worse division they'd have more wins (unspoken point: they'd still be the same team regardless so .... cool?) My comment wasn't meant to make the Cubs look better. They are who they are. I was trying to show that the NL isn't some JV league while these AL teams are world-beaters. The gap is inflated by how shitty the rest of the AL is.

The NL is 114-98 in interleague play this year. The AL sucks outside of the top teams. Their records are inflated from all these horsefeathers teams they continually play. There are 10 teams in the NL that are multiple games over .500. It's hard to pile up wins when you don't get to beat up on horsefeathers teams every week. And despite the loss tonight, the Cubs are 9-2 when they've played non-Indians AL teams. If the Cubs were in the AL Central, they'd probably be 30 games over .500. youre just trolling me at this point lmao Sorry, but it's true.

Top of the NL is the JV this year compared to the top of the AL The NL is 114-98 in interleague play this year. The AL sucks outside of the top teams. Their records are inflated from all these shitty teams they continually play. There are 10 teams in the NL that are multiple games over .500. It's hard to pile up wins when you don't get to beat up on shitty teams every week. And despite the loss tonight, the Cubs are 9-2 when they've played non-Indians AL teams. If the Cubs were in the AL Central, they'd probably be 30 games over .500.

Not true. I spin positives as positive. Also I have been doing that for 3 years now because this team is awesome and there haven't been many negatives.

I'm sorry; are we playing a different sport two months from now? hmm hmm can you think of anything that has happened to the two teams since late june? Im trying to think ... i know a thing or two happened The Cubs took over the best record in the NL?