12eight

There has been, as per usual, a great deal of back and forth about the performance of one Mark Christian Bellhorn - on message boards, blogs, and (I'm presuming) around water coolers New England-wide.  Most of this discussion is centered on strikeouts: Are they bad? Are they not bad? Are they awesome?  Does he do it too much?  Does he put the ball in play too little?  What would happen if he didn't? Should he be shot?  If he tried to shoot himself, would he miss?

I've discussed the issue of how damaging a strikeout really is elsewhere, and I don't want to do it again here.  What I do want to do, though, is talk about Bellhorn's performance this year more intensively.  Regardless of his K rate, Bellhorn's performance has been down noticeably; as of the end of the game yesterday, there was a .100 difference between his 2004 OPS - the highest among 2B's in the AL - and his 2005 OPS, which ranks him 7th on the same list.  In other words, something this season has made Mark Bellhorn, in 2004 one of the absolute top-tier offensive 2B's in the game, mediocre.  Why?

To try and figure this out, I took Bellhorn's stats from 2004 and 2005 and broke them down, result by result.  When a batter steps to the plate, at least generally, you can break down the possible results in a number of ways.  The first is the most simple: getting on base vs. not getting on base.  The second is whether or not a player makes contact.  These two things can be subdivided; what happened when he made contact (hit? out? extra-bases? grounder? fly?), or by which method did he not make contact (K? BB? HBP?).  We can also look at things like what types of hits he gets when he makes contact - single, double, triple, homer.  There are also about 9 trillion other things you can do with a stat sheet and Excel, but I didn't do those.  I did the above, and what they told me gives me an idea of hat things have and what things have not changed for Mark Bellhorn this season.

As far as the first - on base vs. not on base - obviously Bellhorn's OBP is down somewhat.  in 2004, he had an OBP of .373, in '05 it is down to .353, which meas that over the course of this season, as compared to last year's rate, Bellhorn has gotten on base about 5 fewer times.  Yes, I said 5.  As in five.  As in this many: * * * * *.  Not a lot, huh?  And we can break that down a little further to find that Bellhorn has actually walked 2 more times than he would have at last years rate, but has gotten hit by a pitch 2 fewer times.  He has collected 5 fewer base hits.  In fact, to equal his rates from last year, Bellhorn would have only to collect 5 more base hits, exchange 2 walks for HBP's, and strike out 6 fewer times.  So, that's not a stunning difference.

So let's take the second set of splits.  First, contact and non-contact.  In 2004, Mark Bellhorn made contact in 56.5% of his plate appearances, or around 350.  This year so far, Bellhorn has made contact in 53.9%; a definite difference (though it mounts to merely 6 PA's over the course of this year).  We'll look more deeply into his contact numbers in a moment, but first, I want to address his non-contact numbers.  Of the 43.5% of his PA's in which he didn't make contact last year, 32.6% resulted in walks, 65.6% in strikeouts, and 1.9% in HBP's.  This year, in the 46.1% of his PA's in which he didn't make contact, 32.7% resulted in walks - virtually identical to his rate last year.  He has seen a slightly higher rate of K's at 67.3%, ad an equal decline in his HBP rate (Bellhorn has not been hit by a pitch this year).  So, yes, there's a slight uptick in K's.  Very slight.

Now for the bread and butter.  When Bellhorn made contact in 2004, he got on base (obviously not counting errors or fielder's choices) at a .394 clip; this year he s doing so at a .376 clip.  To break that down further, let's look at the kind of hits he's getting. When making contact, Bellhorn is hitting singles at approximately the same rate (23.1%/23.2%), and has doubled somewhat more frequently.  His triple rate is different, but triples are rare enough so that this is a flukey stat.  HR, on the other hand, are not.

In 2004, Bellhorn homered in about 2.7% of his total plate appearances, and in 5% of his contacts. In 2005? Bellhorn has homered in .3% of his plate appearances, and in 2.5% of his contacts.  In other words, Bellhorn's homerun rate is approximately half of what it had been.  It is the most consistent drop between his contact totals and his PA totals, and suggests a legitimate power problem.  Let's assume, then, that we equalize Bellhorn's contact stats for 2005.  We will give him 5 additional base hits, and make 3 of them homers, and one of them a triple (approximating last year' rate).  The results?  Bellhorn's OBP rises to .375, 2 points higher than the one he posted in 2004.  His Slugging rises to .444- identical to last years.  So, that's all it took to make Mark Bellhorn 2005 into Mark Bellhorn 2004.  17 total bases.

So what conclusions can we reach here?  First, yes.  Mark Bellhorn is making contact slightly less frequently than he did last year.  Second, the drop in OPS can be whittled down to exactly 5 plate appearances: one in which he should have tripled, 3 in which he should have homered, and one in which he should have singled.

On the surface, that doesn't sound like a lot, and it might not be.  However, it could also be indicative of a power drop.  The point is, at his point in the season, it is extremely difficult to tel which.  If Bellhorn were to go 5/10 over the next two days, with two homers, all of a sudden th gap in his OPS nearly halves itself.  And even the most strident Bellhorn haters can't say it's impossible for Bellhorn to do that.  That's the thing about baseball stats.  We have to look at them; they're on the screen every AB, they're in the newspaper in the morning, jackasses like me plaster them all of the internet... but slight changes - changes that could be as explainable by chance as they could be by an actual problem - can alter those stats dramatically. 5 hits, and 17 total bases; that is all that is separating this year's Mark Bellhorn from last year's.  The fact that Bellhorn makes contact in a relatively small number of PA's, and has a remarkably stable OBP when he doesn't, means that contact results become more glaring.  As poster 'teddykgb' wrote over at Royal Rooters,

Basically, Bellhorn walks the most marvelous and tenuous line we've ever seen an MLB player do. When you think about how perfect he has to be at everything he does as a hitter to be a high quality 2b in spite of his shortcomings, it is astounding.

He's got no margin for error. I worry for his BABIP. He can't afford to suffer a dip in BABIP, or we get the results we saw earlier in the year or worse, along with the traditional "Bellhorn sucks and i've always said he sucks because he strikes out too much" garbage we're forced to read every month or so.

And he's exactly right.  That dip in BABIP - or, more appropriately, his BA when making contact (BABIP removes HR from the equation, and as we've seen HR are a very important aspect of Bellhorn's production) - is what we've seen this year, along with a more pronounced drop in his SLG on contact.  These are the things that make Bellhorn 2005 a league average 2B as opposed to one of the very best in the American League.

So, there.  Can we shut up about Mark Bellhorn now?