Brett Lawrie, You've Been Sabermetric'd

Aaron Levenstein, a former business professor at Baruch College, once said “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” This has long been the understanding of stats; they can pretty much prove whatever you’d like them to prove, and because of this they are the lifeblood of debate and discussion. In no sport is that more evident than baseball. Glorified recently by the movie Moneyball, baseball is numbers. Percentages, tendencies, averages; these aren’t just used by bar patrons to argue the value of their favourite player or fantasy gurus giving insight to their eager disciples, but by managers to set infield alignments and even by players to turn their careers around.

There’s an old notion in baseball that everything evens out after 162 games. This is mostly true, the rare Brady Anderson-like anomaly notwithstanding. Essentially what this means is that early season stats should be taken with a grain of salt, because, whether good or bad, the inverse will happen by season’s end. The problem is fans are impatient, especially when it comes to players as anticipated as Brett Lawrie.

 Looking at Lawrie’s current .286/.321/.408 line; everything actually appears to be in order. He has two home runs, a team leading nine RBI. It all seems to add up to a good or, at the very least, above average start, but this is anything but the case. Sometimes stats lie. Sometimes were just looking at the wrong stats. Last season the young Canadian’s splits were .293/.373/.580. Vastly better than this season, yet the batting average remains nearly unchanged. In just 224 career at bats Lawrie has proven that whether with speed of bat or foot, he’ll get his hits. The difference between this year and last is what those hits are producing. In 2011 Toronto’s third baseman had an ungodly isolated power, a measure of a hitter’s raw power and extra base pop, of .287. To put that in context, a league average ISO is roughly .145. This year Lawrie’s ISO sits at .122, due mainly to 12 of Lawrie’s 14 hits being singles. One factor contributing to this is Brett’s ground ball to fly ball ratio which currently sits at 3 to 1. He’s just not squaring up pitches so far in 2012.

The RBI are also misleading. In fact RBI are the hitter’s equivalent of a pitcher’s win total. They’re flashy stats. They’re well-known stats. But in the context of player value, they mean nothing. RBI are nothing more than a representation of two factors: a player’s position in the line-up and the strength of that line-up. Discounting home runs, in which a player drives himself in, RBI are a product of situation. Now, Brett is hitting .375 this season with runners in scoring position, however his OPS in those 16 at bats is just .796.  Compare that to 2011, where he batted .289 RISP, but with a .966 OPS, due to the fact that 45% of his hits in these situations were of the extra base variety. Essentially, Lawrie isn’t hitting badly in these opportunities his team is creating for him; he’s just not taking the same advantage of them.

            Again, this is 12 games into the season with a man who’s played just 55 in his career. Comparing 2011 to 2012 is literally like comparing apples to slightly smaller apples. However this trend is concerning, not just because it’s happening, but because people are unaware. Sometimes stats hide the truth and the truth is: Brett Lawrie is struggling this season.