During the offseason, it was frequently brought up that Mets first baseman Lucas Duda has been a dreadful hitter against left-handed pitching throughout his career. This was first mentioned when speaking of a need to acquire a platoon partner for Duda, and then once Michael Cuddyer and John Mayberry Jr. signed, the idea of a platoon with those three was floated.
Now those critics have been silenced somewhat, with Duda coming out of the gate strong against southpaws, posting a .456 wOBA in his first 38 plate appearances against lefties. While the results have been great thus far, but Duda is far from having solved his woes against lefties and could probably still use a platoon partner.
Background
We know from The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin that a sample size large enough to give us a reliable result for the prediction of a left-handed batter’s skill against a left-handed pitcher is 1,000 plate appearances. That is to say, that at 1,000 PA, a lefty’s skill against same-handed pitching would be from 50% skill level and 50% league average factors.
In 2015 in nearly 2,900 PA, left-handed batters have posted a collective .295 wOBA against left-handed pitching. We will use this as our league average wOBA for all calculations moving forward for several reasons. The first is that the sample size is more than sufficient to determine the number’s accuracy. The second is that FanGraphs doesn’t combine year-to-year league average stats, and the yearly variations in the wOBA formula make it beyond my abilities to come up with a true average of multi-year samples.
Determining True Talent
Duda’s .456 wOBA against lefties comes 1.9% from his actual skill level, and 98.1% from the league average. What this means is that Duda is due for a substantially large regression back toward the mean of his true talent level. The question then remains what is Duda’s true talent against left-handed pitching?
By running a quick regression on Duda’s stats from this year, we get that his true talent level is that of a .298 wOBA hitter. We can reasonably expect that from this point on in the season, that Duda will see his wOBA against lefties regress toward that .298 mark. If he receives the same number of PA against lefties in 2015 as he did in 2014 (125), we can expect his wOBA to end up somewhere close to .346.
Of course, working with small sample sizes such as we have been is usually not a good thing. To get a greater snapshot of Duda’s true talent against left-handers, we will now look at his career wOBA against lefties and regress that to get a better handle on his true talent. In Duda’s career, he has amassed 507 PA against lefties, and owns a .289 wOBA.
Through this regression, we are able to estimate Duda’s wOBA skill against lefties to be .293. Using the same set of circumstances as two paragraphs ago, we can more accurately estimate that Duda’s end of year wOBA against lefties to be .342.
While that is nothing to scoff at in terms of an end-of-season result, it is of little value when trying to predict future performance. There is very little reason to believe – outside of the eye test – for us to think that Duda’s skill has changed at all against lefties, he’s just been getting more lucky relative to the league average.
Conclusion
Moving forward, we should expect Lucas Duda to have a wOBA skill of approximately .293 against left-handed pitching. In the 2014 season, six players with enough at bats to qualify for the batting title posted a wOBA from .290 to .296: Xander Bogaerts, Austin Jackson, DJ LaMahieu, Jason Castro, Elvis Andrus, and Adeiny Hechavarria. Not exactly offensive juggernauts.
If we can expect Duda for the rest of this season, and for future seasons moving forward to be a .293 wOBA hitter against lefties a platoon mate must be found. They might already have that player on the roster in Mayberry or Cuddyer, or he might be waiting in the minor leagues. Maybe it is a trade acquisition or a free agent. With a team that already possesses such a dearth of offense, weakening the lineup further by having Duda in the middle of it against a lefty is not an option.
Joe Vasile is the Assistant GM and Radio Broadcaster for the Fayetteville SwampDogs. He also is a contributor at Beyond the Box Score. Follow him on Twitter:
With all due respect my friend sabermetric analyses like yours though quite impressive, give me a headache.
You can obsess about Lucas all you want but it seems no matter what he does, he gets criticized for not being Lou Gehrig. If you don’t think that the primary problem with this team is the corner OF’s
your not paying attention.
And if you think Curtis Granderson is the problem – you haven’t been paying attention since the end of week 1.
Oh really. Please explain to me how much the 15 Million Dollar Man has impacted this team since he’s been here?If you wanted a mediocre leadoff hitter to get a few walks, you certainly could have spent alot less. Sandy could have combined the Grandy money and the Cuddyer money and actually gotten us an impact bat. Let me ask you, who would you rather have Grandy or Byrd? Don’t forget, your stuck with Grandy for 2 more years.
On the list of problems for the 2015 team, Granderson does not rank in the top 10.
Since the first week of the season, he has a .776 OPS. Since TDA went on the DL, he has an .852 OPS. Rational people don’t complain about those numbers. I’m not arguing about if Granderson is going to be worth his contract in 2017. I’m saying that right now, for the last 28 games, Granderson has been about the only bright spot offensively on the team.
And it annoys me when people say otherwise.
If you want to criticize the length of the deal, that’s an entirely different matter. But the reason the 2015 Mets are struggling has absolutely nothing to do with the performance of Curtis Granderson.
Grandy.
I have to agree with Brian here, Granderson is not the issue with this team offensively, and neither is Cuddyer. You can say they are overpaid, but having a black hole at shortstop is a far worse problem, and defensively up the middle this team is dreadful.
Also I don’t ever recall saying or even implying that Duda is the problem, or even a problem. I just said that batting him cleanup against lefties is a bad decision based off of how bad the team is offensively already.
The last 24 games (and this is before yesterday’s game) he has a .300 BA .379 OBP .506 SLG and an incredible 146 wRC+
Lol, sounds like a huge problem.
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OT:
great article on Mike Trout’s dad:
Great find, Peter. I really enjoyed that.
It was a small sample size that convinced people he couldn’t hit lefties.
Which is why I used a regression to try to estimate his true skill against lefties. I would be willing to bet much more money that says Duda is a true .293 wOBA player against lefties than he is a true .345 wOBA player. Or we can sit around for another five years and wait for there to be a large enough sample size to make a definitive conclusion.
Cuddyer is a gigantic problem… the eye test and the numbers say that he’s not hitting the ball hard.
Grandy will have a decent year—I expect OPS of 750-780. I would like to see some more Hitter Count aggression… he’s overdoing patience by a bit.
Obviously, the Wright and d’Arnaud injuries are showing their impact. BTW… I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the efforts of Dil and Plaw—not ready to carry a team, but they are competing ok for newbs.
Cuddyer’s Hard-Hit% is 29.2%. Last year it was 30.4%, in 2013 30.6% and for his career 29.9%. The numbers say he is hitting the ball just as hard as he ever has. His Medium% is down, and Soft% up, but hard% is virtually the same.
Well, if hitting the ball hard is not the problem, and he’s got a fairly normal BABIP — then what is the problem? Because we can’t pretend there isn’t a problem with Cuddyer.
Strikeouts are up a to a 23.7% rate from a ~18% career rate so that is a likely source of the issues. Also the medium-hit balls turning into soft-hit balls is certainly a factor as well.
This article is stupid. Look at his splits against lefties this year. Duda is not an issue. He’s having a very good season so far. The issue is not having Wright, D’Arnaud, and Lagares in the lineup. Flores is horrible as well.
Paragraph 2 contains his splits against lefties this year. The rest of the article explains why that is totally unrealistic.
Appreciate you reading and your comment.
+1
I do think there’s one thing that may have changed with his skill level versus LHP. Coming into this season, Duda had a 31.9 K% against lefties. This year it’s at 19.0%
I know we’re not close to where strikeout rates would stabilize. But I can say right now with 100% certainty that by the end of the year, Duda will not have a .483 BABIP versus southpaws. But I’m not ready to say anything about his strikeout rate.
Why post all this data to say something so simple? The law of averages is common knowledge.
The reason is two-fold. One is simply because many people seem to be running with the idea that Duda can all of a sudden hit lefties, which is pretty obviously false. The second is to find out what that average is. What good is saying “the law of averages says that he’s not going to stay that good” if we can’t then determine what level we can reasonably expect him to return to?
A .456 wOBA is extreme for all but the very best of hitters – Bonds, Ruth, Mantle, etc. But the average that the law of averages would say that batter would move to, what I call true talent in the article, is going to be very different depending on whether we’re talking about Lucas Duda against lefties, or Mike Trout against lefties. When we find the true talent, we can then better predict what is going to happen through the regression models.
Nice article Joe. I think Duda has made improvements against lefties, especially on the low inside pitches. While a regression is all but guaranteed, I think he’s started to set a new, higher bar for himself versus southpaws. I don’t think he needs to be moved out of the cleanup spot right now versus lefties. If the regression hits soon and hard, then maybe that could be necessary.
This was dumb.