Signal v. Noise.
It’s the tension we often feel when trying to make sense of a player’s performance.
In the Statcast era, few players have been as productive as Cody Bellinger was in 2023 (.307/.356/.525, 26 HR, 20 SB), while drawing as much skepticism about their ability to sustain it.
- The batting average was 49 points higher than his career mark (.258).
- The 6.1% barrel rate (27th percentile) was the lowest of his career.
- Not surprisingly, his 31.4% hard-hit rate (10th percentile) was also a career-low.
- Bellinger’s O-Swing% was 35.3%, right in line with his norms since 2021, rather than the sub-30% marks he posted from 2017-2020.
Suboptimal Statcast metrics and the prolonged stay in free agency caused his ADP to slip just outside the Top 50 overall for most of February. There were plenty of drafts — including mixed LABR — in which Bellinger dropped even further — he went 86th overall to your friendly neighborhood podcast host in that one.
In the four days since he re-signed with the Cubs, he’s moved up a handful of spots to pick No. 50 (ADP 51.23), but that might be a reasonably stable location for Bellinger through the end of draft season.
As noted on the show Monday, Bellinger was the 11th-best hitter in 2023 based on the FanGraphs auction calculator, but the skeptics still outnumber the believers.
In addition to handling left-handed pitching better than ever, Bellinger was very good in two-strike situations, as Sara Sanchez detailed in this thread.
Doing some Bellinger work & one thing I keep coming back to is that maybe the barrel/hard hit outage is related to his 2-strike approach b/c he dumped a lot of weak contact into shallow right last year. Those were outs before the shift ban, but a nice way to hit over .300 now🤔 pic.twitter.com/ftytr5uVm1
— Sara Sanchez (@BCB_Sara) February 27, 2024
While there is variance within a fresh batting average projection for Bellinger, his floor in that category is much higher if you believe this is a skill. A two-strike approach is undeniably real, but how reliable is one season’s worth of two-strike splits? Is it similar in value to lefty vs. lefty splits in a particular year? Even if we were to agree that there is a limitation of these splits, it seems foolish to render them meaningless.
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