Skin Blues wrote:Went and looked through the individual plays this morning sorted by xwOBA, and it's what I expected. Yes he's gotten way under some fly balls and even when he hits those 105MPH+ the xwOBA is almost zero, so his xwOBA does not stem from hard-hit pop ups or easy outs. It's the 105MPH balls hit at 21 degree launch angles that aren't falling in. He's hit 5 balls 100MPH+ between 20 and 40 degree launch angles that have been caught. The expected batting average on those 5 was .650 and to give it a more recognizable value rather than an abstract xwOBA, it's the equivalent of missing out on 1 HR, 3 doubles, and 1 flyout. You get the idea. Those are just the 5 most unlucky balls he's hit, there are alot more where he's gotten really bad luck, including a few grounders and a line drive. And it's not like he's getting good luck to balance this out, which you'd expect to happen over the course of a season.
It wasn't a shot at Grichuk, it was a comment on the fact that he's operating in the deep end of the variance pool. Those high-angle, hard-hit flyballs are monstrously variable for two reasons: one, they're pretty close to all-or-nothing, because unless they hit the wall they're likely to either be caught or leave the park, and there's a huge amount of variability in expected outcome
between launch angles. A ball hit with a 100mph EV at 30 degrees has about a 50% chance of being a home run, per previous results; at 37 degrees, that drops by half, and at around 40 degrees it's halved again. Grichuk has a
lot of those high-angle, hard-hit balls, so he's absolutely getting unlucky that most have stayed in the yard, but that's part and parcel of operating in the swingiest bit of the expected results pool, and magnified by a smaller sample than most hitters would have at this point given that 40% of his PAs have ended without the ball in play.