Ichiro Without Speed

After finishing my posts on luck vs. skill, I decided to look at a couple more individual players who would have very interesting regression lines. The first one that came to mind was Ichiro. He came to MLB from Japan in 2001, and since then he has had 10 straight 200 hit seasons and never hit lower than .303. However, this year he is hitting .256, and only on pace for about 177 hits. There has been a lot of talk about what is wrong with him, including this article on Fangraphs which shows his BABIP on different types of hits.

Clearly Ichiro is an outlier in the regression model. We know that even before looking at his luck and skill, because his unique hitting approach allows him to get hits on balls that almost every other major leaguer would be out on. Since 2002 (the first year advanced batted ball data was available, unfortunately we cannot capture his rookie season), Ichiro has 407 infield hits, by far the most in MLB, and has the highest infield hit % (IFH/GB) in baseball. As such, although his batted ball data may not look all that impressive, he still manages to get a ton of hits.

However, although we expect him to be an outlier, his batting average graph is still very surprising.

Ichiro AVG, 2002-2011

Ichiro's career .328 batting average is much higher than any of his predicted averages, and until this year his actual averages were also always quite higher. The most incredible season, 2004, he had a predicted batting average of .263, which would mean his "skill" cost him 65 points relative to his career average, yet his luck accounted for 109 points, leaving him with an incredible batting average of .372. It's impossible for a hitter to hit .370 over an entire season by just getting lucky, yet that's exactly what this graph is showing. So obviously there is something going on.

The difficulty in predicted Ichiro's average relative to league average is easy to pinpoint. His speed gets him hits, and until this year that speed made up for any sort of batted ball statistics that he had in any year. An interesting way to look at it is that if Ichiro had league-average speed, his batted ball statistics show him to be about a career .260-.270 hitter. In actuality he is a .328 career hitter, so that speed has increased his batting average by about 60 points. So what is happening this year? Has he lost a step, or maybe just gotten slightly unlucky?

There are a couple of ways we can determine if he has lost a step. He has stolen 16 bases so far this year and only been caught 4 times, which are not far off from his 162 game averages of 39 steals and 9 CS. So at first glance, he does not seem to be any slower. But if we look further into the statistics, we can see an interesting trend. His infield hit % is down over 5% this year compared to last year and 2.5% off his career rate. This has already cost him about 17 hits this year, which would bump his average up about 22 points to .278, still not .300 but much closer.

Does this decrease in IFH% due to luck or skill? Unfortunately, we can't exactly quantify the differences, but we do see that over his career, his IFH% has fluctuated between 9.5% in 2005 to 16% in 2009. That is a huge difference, and one major reason why he had his worst batting average of his career (.303) in 2005 and his second best (.352) in 2009. So maybe ground balls are just not quite finding the holes that they normally do. This is plausible, but we are getting into a large enough sample size (300 PAs) that the IFH% should start regressing towards the mean. If it doesn't, then he has definitely lost a step.

One other contributing factor is that Ichiro has yet to hit a home run this year. He has never been a big power guy, but he has hit at least 6 homers in every season, and is currently looking like he might not hit more than 3 or 4. With his FB% at 20.8%, the lowest total since 2004, he looks like he is becoming even more of a pure singles hitter. This could be resulting in outfielders playing even more shallow, taking hits away that used to drop in front of them as they are not afraid of balls going over their heads.

So why is Ichiro having such a poor season? We can see that although he may be getting unlucky, it is also due to age slowly creeping up to him. It is affecting both his power and also probably slightly affecting his speed. Ichiro may bounce back the rest of the season and end up hitting .300, but it is much more likely that he will end the year hitting .280-.290. Unfortunately, the regression model does not help much in predicting his batting averages by season, but it is very interesting to look at what type of player he would be with just league-average speed.