<img class="aligncenter" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Red_Sox_094_Jacoby_Ellsbury.jpg/500px-Red_Sox_094_Jacoby_Ellsbury.jpg" alt="Red Sox 094
Last week, Darryl Johnston wrote an outstanding piece on Adrian Gonzalez‘s ability to smash fastballs. After watching the Sox light up fireballer Brandon Morrow for eight runs on eight hits, two of which were homers, I wondered how the Sox offense as a whole, including A-Gon, was doing against the heater this season.
Simply put…Amazing.
As a matter of fact, according to advanced stats from FanGraphs, the Sox are the best team in baseball when it comes to crushing fastballs. Four batters of the team’s regular batting order have been worth 20 or more weighted runs above average against the fastball (wFB) this season (check out the stat primer here). The Yankees — with the most runs scored in bseball — on the other hand, only have one batter with over 20 wFB (Curtis Granderson) and the only other team with two players with 20-plus wFB is the Tigers (Miguel Cabrera and Alex Avila).
Adrian Gonzalez leads the Sox with 35 wFB (before Wednesday’s games), which is currently the second best wFB in baseball behind Joey Votto. Next up is Jacoby Ellsbury, who has been worth 25.1 wFB, a huge jump from 3.6 in 2009, his last healthy season before this one. Not far behind Ellsbury is Dustin Pedroia with 22.8 wFB, also a big jump from an average of 14 wFB from 2007 to 2010. David Ortiz follows with 20.8 wFB, which is not such a jump from last season (17.9 wFB), but well below where he was in his prime year against the fastball in 2006 (47.3 wFB).
Aside from those four, the Sox have Kevin Youkilis (11.7 wFB), Josh Reddick (6.8 wFB) and Jarrod Saltalamacchia (3.7 wFB). All together, seven of their nine regulars in the batting order have had positive wFB this season.
All of this is very interesting to me for two reasons:
1. It solidifies the season long “eye test” that culminated with this recent crushing of Brandon Morrow
2. It makes me wonder if this was an approach/adjustment/whatever that was put in place by hitting coach Dave Magadan before the season.
Of course, it could simply be a case of a bunch of hitters coming together on the right team at the right time, but I don’t really buy that. While I have found throughout my scouring of stats that there is no real correlation between year-to-year weighted runs above average on any particular pitch for any particular player — that is to say, it’s not very predictable — I think there has to be an underlying reason that this is happening for this particular group of hitters.
If it is all the work of Dave Magadan, then I solute you sir. If not, he surely has played a major role, so I solute you anyway.
The bottom line: These guys can hit the heat.