Miguel Cabrera is in the middle of the worst full season of his major league career. And while most people — normal humans and professional baseball players alike — would kill for Cabrera’s worst season, it’s been disappointing for someone whose ticket to Cooperstown is already punched.
Cabrera was hitting .262/.357/.452 to start the week, which is good for a Weighted Runs Created plus (wRC+) of 113, indicating his offensive performance has been roughly 13 percent better than league average per plate appearance. For reference, Cabrera’s career average sits at 152 wRC+, which is exactly what he produced in 2016. His previous low-water mark came back in 2008 when he delivered a 129 wRC+. Cabrera’s lack of foot speed and average defensive abilities mean that he needs to hit in order to contribute in a meaningful way, and the fact that he isn’t hitting like himself is one of the most important reasons the club finds itself eight games back of Cleveland at the halfway mark of the 2017 season.
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Part of what has made Cabrera one of the best players in the game for more than a decade, in addition to his preternatural hitting ability, is his talent for staying on the field. This year, however, Cabrera has made a trip to the DL for a groin strain, has missed time with an oblique injury, and is currently battling through a back issue. He left Tuesday’s game with tightness in his left hip but returned to the lineup on Wednesday. And while he’s started to hit for a bit more power since the middle of June, his production is still down overall.
From the beginning of the season through June 10, Cabrera hit .263/.369/.406 (106 wRC+). Since June 11, he’s slashed .260/.329/.558 (131 wRC+). There’s been more power lately, but he’s been on base less often, dampening the impact of the extra homers. But even those last 20 games fall short of where you would want Cabrera to be. By his standards he’s struggling, and while injuries are likely driving a fair bit of the trouble, it’s worth diagnosing exactly where the problems have been for the Tigers slugger.
You can essentially carve up Cabrera’s struggles into three separate but related problems. He’s making less contact, he’s getting fewer hits when he does put the ball in play, and he’s not gathering extra base hits as frequently.
One aspect of 2017 Cabrera worth noting is that he’s swinging more often overall, but he’s swinging less often on pitches on the inside part of the plate and just off the plate inside (via FanGraphs).
Additionally, he’s making less contact overall with a particular deficiency at the top of the zone and on the outer third.
One of Cabrera’s calling cards has always been his remarkable plate coverage, so if he’s not getting to pitches away and is less aggressive on pitches closer to him he’s given away one of the things that’s made him so great over the course of his career. He has the highest strikeout rate and lowest contact rate (contact per swing) of his Tigers career this year.
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However, less contact isn’t necessarily a bad thing. All else equal, you’d rather not swing and miss, but for an aging player whose skills are declining or for an injured player who is physically limited, you wouldn’t necessarily mind a swing and miss because a swing and miss might extend the plate appearance where a weak ground ball to second would end it. So that turns our attention to the quality of Cabrera’s contact when he makes contact.
Cabrera’s hitting a career high number of line drives this season courtesy of a near-career-low fly ball rate.
In terms of production, Cabrera is performing worse on ground balls, line drives, and fly balls this season relative to the his 2014-2016 averages.
He’s delivering a lower average and a lower slugging percentage across all three batted ball types, but the most interesting change is the decrease in power on fly balls. One way to measure power is to look at a player’s isolated power (ISO), which is simply the number of extra bases they collect per at bat. You can see that while Cabrera’s getting fewer hits on ground balls and line drives this year, he’s still getting extra base hits at the same rate relative to his overall hit rates. That isn’t happening on fly balls. On fly balls, Cabrera is getting fewer hits and those hits are collecting fewer extra bases still.
In other words, even if we set aside the fact that he’s making less contact, he’s producing less even when he makes contact. This problem is especially pronounced when he puts the ball in the air.
Data on hit speed and batted ball launch angle are available publicly thanks to MLB’s Statcast dating back to 2015, so we can look behind the results a bit for the last couple of seasons. Keep in mind Statcast is still developing so the data is a bit imperfect, but it should be good enough to give us a decent sense of what’s going on. I looked at Cabrera’s batted balls that had a launch angle of 20 degrees or higher (a rough definition of “fly ball”).
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Among those batted balls, Cabrera’s average hit speed is actually higher in 2017 (93.5 miles per hour) than it was from 2015 to 2016 (92.9). But this is one of those cases where averages might not tell the whole story. One way to look at this would be the percentage of fly balls that were hit 95 mph or higher, but that percentage is also up this year to 54 percent from 50 percent. In theory, that should line up with better production not worse. He is hitting fly balls harder this year but has less to show for it.
If you carve the data up once more and look at average launch angles, you find that Cabrera’s weaker fly balls (less than 95 mph) have an average launch angle of 42.7 degrees compared to 40.3 degrees for 2015-2016. Cabrera’s well-hit fly balls (95 mph or more) are leaving the bat at roughly the same average angle (about 30 degrees), but the weaker hit balls are going a little bit higher on average.
This might not sound like much but it could be a relatively important finding if you think about it in the right way. Hit speed and launch angle work in tandem. There’s sort of a sweet spot at 95 mph or more and between 20 and 35 degrees where you have the best odds of an extra base hit. There’s nothing magic about these values, but the early research has shown that the returns that fall off quick if the ball is hit just a bit slower and with just a bit more elevation. In other words, the difference between a great piece of contact and a routine fly out isn’t that large.
For our purposes, the fact that Cabrera seems to be getting under his weaker contact a little bit more this year could be the difference between good production and bad. Cabrera may be hitting the ball just as hard on average, but if he used to get a certain level of production on his weaker hit balls and now he’s putting those in the air a bit more, that weaker contact production could be falling off.
I don’t want to make too much of this because it’s still a relatively small sample of batted balls for 2017, but it might simply be the case that Cabrera was sort of living on the edge where if he hit the ball a little less squarely he was bound to lose a fair number of extra base hits. This isn’t the whole story, but it’s interesting.
In general, Cabrera’s 2017 is a story of a bunch of small issues rather than one big one. It’s not one hole in his swing or one single pitch type that he forgot how to read. He’s covering a little less of the plate and while he’s still squaring up fly balls at the same rate, the ones he’s not squaring up appear to be a little less likely to fall in for hits than in recent years.
All of this tracks well with the most straightforward explanation, Cabrera is playing through some injuries. That’s a conclusion that cuts both ways, because while it’s reassuring that Cabrera probably hasn’t forgotten how to hit, these aren’t the kinds of injuries you can chalk up to a fastball off the wrist or an awkward slide. Cabrera’s hurting because he’s aging and while plenty of great players have held onto their skills as they’ve aged, their peak abilities do eventually slip away.
It’s too early to declare this as a turning point for Cabrera as he heads into his decline years, but this is unfortunately what such a turning point might look like.