A Slump Just a Matter of Perspective

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

One idea that people who have read a lot of Bill James and his progeny take for granted about baseball is that most hot and cold streaks are really illusions, more the result of the artificial ways we choose to look at time than anything else. As the line of thought goes, more or less any endpoints we can choose are arbitrary and do little good because they limit the amount of information we’re looking at, when actually the more information we have the better.

To put it more concretely, take David Wright’s recent play.Wednesday’s grand slam was his first home run in 101 at-bats over 28 games, the longest such streak of his career to this point. The cold spell was enough to bring his season numbers down quite dramatically — at the end of July his batting line was a robust .315 BA/.389 OBA/.563 SLG, numbers impressive enough that most observers thought the already dominant Wright had actually improved this year as a hitter. After the cold streak (which, as many have noted, began right around the time he signed a fat contract extension), entering last night’s game, his line was .298/.373/.523, pretty much exactly what he hit last year.

How exactly, though, can you tell that Wright is cold? In his last 22 at-bats, covering seven days, going into last night’s game, he’d hit .318/.370/.545. That doesn’t sound cold. On the other hand, if the cold streak is limited to the 28-game homerless streak, how to explain that he hasn’t been hitting at all since the All-Star Game? His line since then has been .262/.345/.403 — not very impressive. Maybe it was the chemical air of Pittsburgh’s three rivers, and not his contract extension, that ruined his career!

The point here of course is that in trying to isolate any one point at which Wright went cold, you run into problems, and end up picking a point that has no demonstrable meaning.We take it for granted, even if we don’t much think about it, that in clouting a monstrous grand slam Wright broke out of his slump and will henceforth hit as he always does. What if he doesn’t, though? It’s, again, a random and arbitrary point to choose — he could well hit .175 with no home runs for the rest of the year. Then the story would change from, “promising young player in slump” to “promising young player forgot how to hit for several months.”

Of course we have to impose some order on the random and chaotic sequences of events that comprise a baseball season, and it’s entirely natural to look for narratives where there really are none. There’s nothing at all wrong with that. The only problem is when it actually begins to affect how we view players’ abilities. The most likely case for Wright is that he’s going to hit somewhere around .301/.372/.523 for the rest of the season — that’s his career line. While in a philosophical sense it’s impossible to know how good Wright really is, that’s about as close as we’re going to come to being able to tell. It won’t have anything to do with anything if he hits that — .301 hitters hit .237 for a month sometimes, as Wright did in August, and they’ll also hit .378 in a month sometimes, as he did last August.

The other problem in looking too closely at these kinds of streaks and especially in assigning them some proximate cause is that we focus only on offense, because it’s quantifiable and because it’s easy to access the information. Defense, though, matters too. In the specific case at hand, Wright has been visibly more sure-handed at third base, less prone to overthrowing and charging the ball more confidently. I’m quite certain he’s been better defensively since the All-Star Game than he was before it; probably he’s been better since signing his contract than he was before. If his game has gone down because of either of those things, how to explain the defensive improvement? Did it come at the cost of offense? Is it happening randomly? Is he turning into a Gold Glover?

Again, the truth is that he’s within the range of what someone with his demonstrated level of talent is going to do — no matter how he’s played over the last few weeks, he’s a physically gifted but somewhat erratic third baseman prone to botching the routine play and overthrowing a bit, but also improving because he’s young. If you expressed a fielder’s ability as a batting average, he’d probably be at .250 — and like a .250 hitter will have months where he hits .200 and those when he hits .300, so will a .250 fielder.

None of this means that Wright and the Mets shouldn’t be, or aren’t, looking for causes for his below-par play.Tiredness, a need for adjustments, lack of focus, bad luck — all, some or none might play a part, and a player and coaching staff need to look at them. But absent injury, there’s probably nothing special for the fan to discern from studying when a player stops and starts hitting; from the stands, it’s as random and unpredictable as the way weighted dice fall.Which is to say that whether he hits .237 or .378 the rest of the way, Wright will be just what he is when it counts, which is one of the best and most consistent players in the game.


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