Tim Anderson is a befuddle actor. Over the last two-plus seasons, he has posted a 133 wRC+ despite a microscopic move proportion( 3.3%) that is the third lowest among all players with at least 500 layer figures, ahead of merely swipe hitters Jose Iglesias and Hanser Alberto. That positions a great deal of pres on his ability to produce on contact. So far, so good: In that same time frame, he has a. 390 BABIP, transcends among all hitters and a full eight tops above the next closest actor( coincidently, his teammate, Yoan Moncada ). The regular belief is that a BABIP figure that high-pitched is unsustainable, and the projection plans tend to agree. The FanGraphs Depth Charts pegged Anderson for a. 336 BABIP in 2021 and, correspondingly, a batting front time 3 percent better than organization average.

If Anderson is going to be a fertile hitter, then, one of two things needs to happen: He sustains a BABIP that is not just 100 stages above the conference norm but also one of the best people of all-time; or he improves in dish looks that do not end with a ball in play. So how likely is either?

Let’s begins with the BABIP. Anderson does not hit the ball peculiarly hard. In the last two seasons, he graded in the 33 rd and 40 th percentile, respectively, in hard hit rate, according to Baseball Savant. Last season he approximately doubled his barrel pace, going from 5.1% in 2019( 23 rd percentile) to a career-high 10.1%( 65 th ), but that 2020 digit constituted all of 16 batted chunks. Nor has he shown too much selectivity in his busines or discriminated against slopes within or near the strike area, as you can see in the sea of red below.

One thing working in Anderson’s BABIP favor is his speed. He is one of the fastest regulars in MLB, grading in the 92 nd and 87 th percentile in sprint velocity in 2020 and’ 19, respectively. Mike Podhorzer ascertained a slight positive equivalence between sprint speed and BABIP, though if you separate it out by left and right-handed hitters, I imagine it would be lower for the latter because of the extra bit of ground they have to cover exiting the batter’s box.

That helps explain how Anderson is able to outperform his BABIP, but not to the historic elevations he’s currently at. So I decided to build a general additive example — instructed on all batted missiles from 2019 and’ 20, with launching direction, exit velocity, and scatter angle as the inputs and whether the ball in play was a hit as the output — to see what his outcomes should have been.( One notation: This example did not consider fielder orientation or park consequences .) The make: Anderson produced the league in BABIP overperformance for all players with at least 250 batted projectiles the past two seasons, with a BABIP that was about 62 levels higher than expected based on the model’s constants. Faster musicians tend to do this; Adalberto Mondesi finished second in this experiment, followed by Delino DeShields, Raimel Tapia, and Trevor Story. Regardless, it’s clear that a good deal of good batted pellet rich has helped drive Anderson’s results.

Could substantial improvements to plate discipline help Anderson stave off BABIP regression? I’m skeptical. This will be his age-2 8 season, and at this site in a player’s career, strikeout and tread frequencies are relatively stable, if on the decline.

These phenomena are extrapolated and is not applicable to every player in the same manner, but expecting major changes( say more than a percentage point) in either Anderson’s walk and strikeout proportions would be wishful thinking.

Drilling down further into his waver decisions spawns me even more dubious of betterment on either figurehead. Anderson is among the most aggressive swingers on tars in and specially outside of the strike zone, and he does not compensate with higher-end contact rates.

In a vacuum-clean, routinely swaying at degrees in the strike zone and constituting contact at a click above average on those slopes is a good thing. That is not to say every pitch in the strike zone is worth swinging at for a hitter, but all else being equal, Anderson has been a positive in that department, lending seven operates over the past two seasons in the zone and shadow parts, per Baseball Savant.( I’m including the pall sphere because FanGraphs’ sheet punish stats consider a larger strike zone than our Baseball Savant copy .) The question with Anderson is that his aggressiveness extends beyond the strike zone: He is more swing-happy relative to his peers on moves outside but does contact at a below-average clip. Couple that with the fact that contact on those degrees generally produces worse answers, and you have someone actively hurting his batting line.

Anderson’s propensity to shake at bad pitchings has helped lead to a 14.5% swinging-strike rate in the past two seasons. A player’s overall strikeout frequency is often about twice that of his swinging-strike rate, but since 2019, for Anderson, it’s closer to 1.5 — a product of his extreme shaking profile.

There’s a simple justification now: Players who fluctuating frequently outside of the strike zone are frequently likewise going to be swinging a lot at tones in the strike zone, which have higher rates of contact. Because swinging-strike rate is capturing those out-of-zone moves, it is going to look high-pitched relative to a player’s overall strikeout pace since he is also putting a lot of those in-zone swings in play. This is all to say that Anderson’s strikeout charge should remain stable given his sway profile and his age. Any changes in his path proportion will require more patience, and we haven’t seen much indicate of that over the last 2 seasons.

One last-place interesting oddity worth impeding an nose on this season is Anderson’s success with two strikes. The league-average strikeout charge in two-strike plate looks was 42.5% in 2019 and’ 20; he was a shade over that frequency at 44.9. But while the league-average wOBA in those dish expressions was. 239, Anderson affixed a. 288 digit. The gap is that his wOBA in two-strike situations when he didn’t strike out was a sky-high. 519, almost 25% better than the rest of the league (. 416 ). That sort of result is generally not repeatable.

Digging through Anderson’s plate skills and batted ball chart leave me a bit pessimistic. I think he has real BABIP-inflating abilities, but his. 390 flesh is still exceptionally high. Worse causes on contact will impel him to make up ground when he does not throw the ball in play, and not only does the evidence at hand indicate this is a tall order, but it’s also worth remembering that even an above-average BABIP like his projected. 336 digit via Depth Charts reactions in a projected wRC+ of 104. In other paroles: Disallowing a total change in his approach at the plate, Anderson will live and die on BABIP.

But regardless of how likely he is to keep it extending, I hope he continues this high-wire act. Players who threw the ball in play and leverage their fast are incredibly fun to watch, and when Anderson steps up to the plate, he articulates push on the defense and is rarely cheated on lurches in the zone. Before the beginning of the 2020 season, Matthew Trueblood over at Baseball Prospectus summarized some of Anderson’s changes in the batter’s box that, together with his quick handwritings and excellent barrel command, have represented him someone who can succeed despite his warts. I cannot wait to see if he can continue bucking convention.

var SERVER_DATA= Object.assign( SERVER_DATA || );

Read more: blogs.fangraphs.com