Austin Riley and the price of a walk
I love a walk as much as the next guy, as long as we are talking about baseball.
Without runners on, a base on balls is worth the same as a clean single, a hit by pitch, a catcher’s interference and sometimes even a strikeout, unfortunately for John Means: it’s just a little, square base.
What a BB encompasses though, unless it’s an intentional one, is that the pitcher who gave it up must have thrown at least 4 pitches, which may not sound like a lot but it is: for a regular starter is around 4% of the fuel in his tank, for a reliever it’s closer to 20–25%, not to mention that it’s not an out so a walk guarantees at least another AB and more pitches for the opposing hurler.
When I have my daily look at box scores a walk is like potatoes for some good meat: a perfectly fine side dish that can make everything more delicious and elevate your common cut of beef to a delicacy. Given 4–5 ABs for a player in a game, if he gets on base 2+ times I’m completely satisfied with his job, no matter how he did it.
Sure, you can go all knocks and bombs, I wouldn’t mind if one of my guys would channel his inner Carlos Delgado for a day or two, but I’m all in for a base hit and a couple of walks. There’s also the “rare” no-hit performance, where a player gets on base more than once via walks, HBPs and others but not thanks to his bat.
Plate hawkeyes such as Carlos Santana, Joey Votto and Max “Muncyball” Muncy, a Bryce Harper when he is feared as a God and whatever 2021 Yasmani Grandal is, are the kind of hitters I’m expecting such a feat of patience and discipline, but as of late I noticed a guy that doesn’t belong to this fraternity.
If anything, he’s on the other side of the room: a young and coming slugger, one that has 30+ HR potential, a tendency to swing early and often, a proneness to whiff and collect Ks along with a cannon for an arm.
What’s going on, Austin Riley?
Plate discipline is hard to teach, believe it or not! You can’t just decide to not chase anymore and only hit pitches in the zone while having a perfect cognition of the Shadow realm not to fall for painted breaking balls. That is, unless you’re Yuli Gurriel.
Austin Riley is not, but he’s also much younger. Being able to speak to Freddie Freeman everyday could have made him improve his selectivity at the plate, also seeing more and more Major League caliber offerings could have made him more used to spins and velocities the Minors don’t have, so after a first couple of not-full-seasons he’s now geared to battle MLB and its historically nasty pitching.
Well, that’s not the case though!
That is what you’d expect from Austin Riley: above average offensive production with Barrels and HardHits, a copious amount of strikeouts, whiffs and chases and a hard time on the defensive side, for lack of reactions and range rather than what is a plus arm.
There are a couple of data points that are off though: one is the BB%, an unbeknownst 77th percentile in walks that you wouldn’t tie to such a free swinger, and a worrying 27th percentile in avgEV, even stranger when the maxEV is worthy of Riley’s slugger badge of honor.
Riley is doing a couple of things differently, with mixed results and all ending up to mirror his career averages if it makes sense.
From the big elephant in the room: Austin walks a ton in 2021…why?
Here we go: he is not swinging anymore! First pitch? A -14% cut from last year. Z-Swing? 12 percentage points less than 2020. Sure, he’s also chasing less and whiffing a tad behind his 2020 outcome, still it’s not a selective approach, rather a unified decision.
Riley is holding up his bat more than ever, while pitchers are attacking him in the zone almost 50% of the times. What he’s doing, and also Grandal on an even greater scale, is trading outs and contact for more TTO (Three True Outcomes) in the form of walks and strikeouts. Yes, because while he’s walking much more, he’s also striking out more of the same:
Clean as a whistle: +4% in BB% to a +4% in K%! As you can see all of his inactivity at the plate has changed the way he’s getting his production but not the amount of it: xStats are in line with 2020, apart from a high wOBA that smells of inflated BABIP.
Still, his newfound aversion to swinging his bat is not the big deal as it would seem like. There’s another aspect of Riley’s strange 2021 that confounds me, and not in a good way. That low % in avgEV is bothersome, even more for a slugging third baseman who should play first. Let’s dig!
Wait a second: Austin Riley, groundballer!? We are into something: Riley is grounding almost half of his balls in play, pulling less and going oppo a time out of three. That is not what you call a LA power-driven approach: Riley is barreling less and making a disgusting amount of weak contact, four times what he did in 2020, but at least he’s not getting under the ball so much, a -6% descent from last year.
It all points to Launch Angle, and the absence of it: his avgLA in 2021 is less than 10 degrees when he was at more than 15 in his career before. What gives?
Whoa! In this first month and a half of the season Riley has set his sight low and is sending pitches to the worms populating the infield. Note that such a stretch of avgLA has already happened so he could air it back on and over the MLB average in the upcoming games. What about the pop though? Why is he having such a dismal avgEV?
There’s all the good and the bad: he is demolishing at 5 and 20 degrees, liners and longballs at a good rate of his ABs, but there are a lot of ocean-blue rollers on the left, with balls hit softly at freezing LA. OK, gotcha, he needs a little more loft in his swing and all is good, right? Eh, not so fast!
Now this is weird: Riley is being assaulted by the heat! More than 60% of the pitches against him are fastballs of some kind, a Yermin 3–0 homer level of disrespect if TLR had a say in it! Remember, we are talking about a guy with prodigious, 450 feet pop, not a light hitting outfielder a la Miles Straw.
Are pitchers onto something?
Seems like they are: Riley is crushing the offspeed to bits, whereas in 2020 he was absurdely bad against changeups and co. On the other hand, he’s now being troubled not only by the usual breaking stuff, but he’s also not catching up to the heat. On the face of things, this is not that bad, as testimonied by a solid .383 xwOBA: Riley can do some damage on fastballs, but not all of them
That red dot on the upper part of the zone sticks out: Riley is late on the 2020s’ greatest hit, the fastball up high, and that’s not a good place to be when pitchers are just going right after you with gas:
It’s the old “give some to get some” mantra that baseball follows as a whole: Riley gave up swings and contact for more walks, but also got more Ks in the deal, so he must have got something for his troubles with the high heat…maybe?
This is the hard life of a RHB against breaking balls: they are down and away and you are bound to get struck out. He’s no exception, as he’s getting pestered by sliders and curves frisbeeing away from his bat, but hey:
He’s not whiffing on the corner! Good job Austin, that’s why you allow yourself to be a little late on the heat, now you are more in synch with breaking and offspeed stuff, so you can cover a wider array of pitches and zones…in theory!
While Riley is doing a much better job down and away, he’s somehow being flummoxed by a hitter’s best friend: the cement mixer. That is due to his passiveness: by swinging less he’s getting a lot more called strikes, a 16.7 CStr% that is 5 percentage points higher than 2020. Oh and all those sliders that he’s now not whiffing at? He’s hitting them as follows:
That pictures all the hardships Riley is having against breaking balls: he’s whiffing less against those away, putting them more in play on the ground with middling results, but he’s paying for it on middle-middle presents, where he’s getting under or frozen for backwards Ks.
What Austin Riley is doing in 2021 encapsulates the difference between change and improvement: the latter requires the former, but not all of the formers lead to the latter!
Austin Riley changed his whole approach in this season so far: he’s swinging less, letting more pitches go by whatever the count/type/situation, and that is translating into less contact, more walks but also more strikeouts.
Not only that, to deal with his 2020 demise he’s hunting offspeed, with great results: by doing so he’s also whiffing less on breaking balls down, although not getting much out of the additional ground-directed contact with them, on the other hand he’s late on the heat, a battle he’s losing way too often as pitchers are challenging him with more fastballs in the zone, and he’s being fooled by those center-cut breaking balls he should send to the bleachers.
What did it all amount to? Nothing much! Riley is having a fine season on paper, but behind the scenes his level of production is that of last year: his xwOBA is on par but is now made less of hits and more of walks, his contact is being less, and less loud than the past, but he’s supporting the cause with more free bases. He’s swinging and missing less but getting rung up more to, you guessed it, a CSW% of 28.3 that is exactly his career norm.
In the immortal words of an Italian poet: “How brief was our long journey”. Austin Riley went for a ride, mixed up all the things, took all the different routes and sidewalks and here he is, back to square one, without a clear progress, tired after such a marathon. All of that for a smidge of xWOBA, that is the price of Riley’s walks.
All stats are updated to May 21st. Graphs, heatmaps, diagrams and percentile rankings thanks to Baseball Savant.
