As 2019 comes to a close, what’s been your favorite Phillies (or r/Phillies) moment from the last decade?
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Cheers and happy new year!
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Posted: 01/03/2020 05:00:02 AM EST, Update Interval: 5 Minutes
Decided to take a break from the pitcher breakdowns for a bit and focus a bit more on some hitters.
The jump Scott Kingery made from 2018 to 2019 was incredible. Kingery ended up slashing .258/.315/.474 with 101 wRC+ in 2019, a huge improvement from .226/.267.338 and 61 wRC+ in 2018.
His O-Swing dropped from 39.4% to 33.7%, while still not great, is a huge improvement. He got much more aggressive at swinging at pitches in the zone, with a Z-Swing up to 73.4% from 64.6% in 2018. This didn't sacrafice with making contact on those pitches either, with his Z-Contact staying pretty much the same from 2018, 81.5% to 80%.
Perhaps the most encouraging thing about his 2019 is his batted ball profile. His soft contact% dropped from 23% to 14%, and his hard contact% increased from 26.6% to 45.9%(!!!).
But there is still a lot of room for improvement in 2020.
Scott Kingery has an incredibly aggressive approach at the plate. It works when pitches are in the zone. It works when the pitch is the strike zone. According to Statcasts Pitch Highlighter, Kingery is batting an incredible .318, slugging .621, has a wOBA of .390, and an EV of 90.9. All of these are incredible numbers. But this aggressive approach affects him greatly when it comes to pitches out of the zone.
The same Statcast highlighter has him swinging at 31.2% of pitches out of the zone. Slightly different than Fangraphs, but within the margin of error. In general, it isn't an awful rate. Fangraphs has the average usually around 30%. But where he struggles is with the contact.
On these pitches, he is whiffing at a rate of 49.8% and his K% is over 41%. If he's lucky to make contact, he is hitting a measly .129, slugging .163, a wOBA of .232, and an EV of 77.6. Not great! Fangraphs has the average of O-Contact at 66%. He was at 53.9%. I think this aggressive approach on pitches he doesn't hit well led to his inconsistent months. May aside where he was dealing with injuries, his worse months were July (60 wRC+ and 36.6% K%), and September (55 wRC+ and 32.2% K%). Pretty brutal months.
So I was enjoying a pair of posts by u/AssassinPanda97, where he evaluated Pivetta and then Eflin. Regarding Eflin he concluded with:
As of right now he's a #5 pitcher at best and not the #3 we all want him/need him to be.
I agreed with that assessment, but I was also thinking about what does it mean to be a #3 as opposed to a #5. I see people talk about it all the time "this guy is a #1""no he's a #2", but it's usually done without any real context.
So I thought I'd compare Phils 2019 SP staff with the rest of the NL to see where we ranked #1-#5.
Plan
I kind of followed along with u/AssassinPanda97 by using FIP as the stat to use. I ranked each staff according to FIP, then took the median of each SP slot #1-#5.
I limited this to SP with 15 or more starts. A number of staffs, including the Phils, did not have 5 SP with 15 starts. IMO that doesn't really matter as there would be a combo of pitchers taking the role and in general their stats were at #5 FIP value and usually worse.
Phils
It's been a few months, but I had managed to forget just how god awful the Phils SP were last year. Our #1 Nola had a down year, more in line with a #2. The rest of our SP all had a higher FIP then the median of the #5!
I kind of slotted Smyly (12 starts) and Vargas (11 starts) into our #4, but you could us Pivetta (13 starts) instead, but really everyone was so bad that it doesn't matter.
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