Braves Need 2016 Freddie Freeman Again, Will They Get It?
Looking at these stats, the one that really jumps off the page is an insane .370 BABIP that also tends to lead to a narrative of instability. Braves fans know this all too well, after Chris Johnson hit an unreal .394 on balls in play that almost led to a batting title back in 2013. But just because Chris Johnson is actually a bad hitter (just look at his numbers since that season; man, am I glad the Braves are out of that contract) doesn’t mean that much for Freddie.
- High BABIP are often present in good hitters with a high strikeout rate (once again, kind of obvious), since a huge chunk of their outs are made without putting the ball in play. Mike Trout’s career BABIP is .360 with a 22% strikeout rate. If getting out 65% of the time is considered good, it really doesn’t matter all that much if more than a third of your total outs are being made via the strikeout. Especially when you’re the caliber of hitter that Freddie Freeman is.
But just what is that caliber? I’ve laid out why objectively this is Freddie’s best season to date, and I hope no one tries to dispute that. But is this performance sustainable? That is the $135M dollar question.
There are some reasonable arguments to be made that this might be Freddie Freeman adopting a new approach at the plate that just happens to coincide with Freddie beginning to approach his prime, which is typically regarded as starting around 27-28 years old. Fangraphs covered this back in June, just as Freddie was beginning to really start making baseballs cry again.
There were also reasonable arguments to be made about Chris Johnson after 2013. After all, he was hitting the ball roughly as hard as he ever had, but he was hitting more line drives and less fly balls, and he was beginning to show consistency in driving the ball more evenly across the field. But Freddie is a bit more complicated than that (and obviously more talented).
Strikeouts – The Main Culprit of Doubt
Since his rookie season, it’s been obvious that Freddie was a 20 homer power threat. The lowest amount of extra base hits he’s ever hit in a season where he qualified for the batting title was 52, also the last time he received serious MVP votes, coming in 5th that year. He’s no Mark Trumbo or Jose Bautista in terms of raw power, but he does have a tendency to hit balls really high in the air, especially to the opposite field. That’s good news, especially when you notice that Freddie posted his lowest rates of contact both in zone (Z-Contact %) and outside of it (O-Contact %) for his entire career.
But maybe that can be attributed to a mental state, with him being more aggressive than normal, as he spent a majority of the season as the lone above average offensive threat in the lineup. There was also the injury factor, as Freddie was still trying to prove the health of his wrist following his injury shortened 2015 and an offseason narrative of how complicated the recovery was. Interestingly, two of his three best months (June, August, September/October) featured his highest strikeout rate (June, 27.86%) and his lowest (August, 21.77%). It’s notable that his strikeout rate returned to 24.36% in Sept/Oct, but it seems that the addition of Matt Kemp might have taken some mental pressure off of Freddie. After all, that August rate is right in line with his career average of a 21.5% rate, which was 20.76% entering 2016.
The Bottom Line?
Freddie just flat out didn’t make as much contact on his swings as he normally does. It wasn’t even particularly close. But when he did hit the ball, he hit it harder and deeper than ever. Granted, the man still hit over .300, making us scratch our heads at just how weird his season was. Fantastic, but weird.