Are David Ortiz’s early-season struggles due to overall decline or other issues?
At age 39, old man time is not on David Ortiz’s side. It’s no secret that he’s been struggling, but it seems to be a recurring theme each season before he turns it around. He’s currently sporting a low .232 BABIP, which is 22% lower than his career mark of .298. Does this discrepancy mean he is bound to get things rolling, or is it time for us to write off Ortiz? Let’s look at his profile and see exactly what is going on.
Looking at his batted ball statistics, Ortiz is hitting more grounders, which is sapping his fly ball numbers and thus lowering his power totals. To date, 44.7% of Ortiz’s balls in play were grounders, compared to a career mark of 36.1%. In general, remember that line drives go for hits most often, ground balls go for hits more often than fly balls and fly balls are more productive than ground balls when they do go for hits. Ortiz is known as a big slugger, and thus he should hit more fly balls than ground balls. That hasn’t been the case this year. 34.2% of his balls in play are fly balls, which is nearly 10% lower than his career mark.
With the basic batted ball statistics out there, let’s take it a step further and check out the quality of contact on those batted ball numbers. On his grounders, the hard contact (18.1%) is down from his career totals (26.2%). Remember, he faces the shift from opposing defenses a lot, so if he’s still pulling nearly two-thirds of his grounders (in line with career numbers), it’s headed right into the teeth of the shift, but a softer hit ground ball is in theory easier to field than a hard hit one. Shifting to fly balls, the hard contact is also down (34.6%) from his career totals (41.3%). It’s not a perfect science, but logic would tell you that a harder hit fly ball would have a better chance at leaving the park than a softer hit one, and thus we have the lowered homer totals to start 2015. While it would be easy to point to a 9.1% HR/FB rate to date (career is 17.5%), we have to take it a step further and conclude that the number is going to have a hard time correcting itself when there’s been a substantial shift from fly balls to ground balls.
In conclusion, I won’t deny that being 39 isn’t aiding Ortiz, but I am leaning towards mechanical issues vs. a total collapse due to age. His line drive statistics (21.1%) are right in line with career numbers (20.2%) and he hasn’t seen a decline in contact quality of those line drives. It’s worth noting that 70 of his 218 plate appearances have been against lefties and he’s been far worse (.118 wOBA) than his career mark (.344 wOBA). As I stated earlier, I wouldn’t discount his start to 2015, as it’s still too early to determine if this is all an age issue or if it is a mix of both age and mechanical issues. I am siding with the latter.
Adam Sutton is a correspondent at FantasyPros. To read more from Adam, follow him @DraftStars_Adam. You can find more of Adam’s work at DraftStars.net.
