Kole's 2018 was a ton of bad luck

[WeatherWonk]

5 minutes ago, hangin n wangin said:

That’s kind of how I feel to be honest. Reality is, he has been inconsistent as F*ck offensively the past two years. Maybe he plays well this year. Either way, his time in an Angel uniform is limited and I’m hoping he plays well to build up some trade value.

Make no mistake. He must start in RF, IMO. We have no other good alternative that has as high a ceiling. And there are 11.5 million other reasons why he will be out there.

[AngelsLakersFan]

On 2/1/2019 at 3:11 PM, JarsOfClay said:

This is silly. The data says he was terrible for 6 months and good for one month, yet you insist the one month was real and the 6 months were outliers.

They were both real. Both were over large samples.

[greginpsca]

Just my observation. The first couple months, Kole's hips were too far open. With 2 strikes on him, if the pitcher threw a breaking ball or a change up on the outside corner, he couldn't reach the ball. Hands follow the hips. When he came off the DL, he was much more squared up. At the end of the year, he was falling back to having the hips open too much again. He just needs to keep himself squared up at the plate and hit the ball where it is pitched, not trying to pull outside pitches and rolling over ground balls to 2b, and he will be fine.

[Pancake Bear]

On 2/1/2019 at 3:11 PM, JarsOfClay said:

This is silly. The data says he was terrible for 6 months and good for one month, yet you insist the one month was real and the 6 months were outliers.

Uh, no. First, your numbers are incorrect (see below). You must not follow the news carefully. Fletcher pointed out that Calhoun made a conscious change to his approach at the plate to begin the 2018 season. He was trying to work on hitting more fly balls and line drives. This new approach went badly and resulted in weaker contact and a poor batting average (fueled by some bad luck as well, but the shift didn't help). 

While rehabbing, he worked on fixing his approach with the minor league hitting instructor (who is now the major league hitting coach). It changed things drastically. His directional hitting percentage (pull, middle, opposite field) didn't change much at all between the start of the year when he sucked and his new approach upon return, however is fly ball and line drive rate went up (you can see the numbers in this thread, they've been posted by others) and his ground ball rate went down.

At the end of the year, he had a bit of regression. After a ridiculous (and probably unsustainable) July, he cooled off slightly in August, but was still a well above average hitter for that month alone (119 wRC+, 100 being an average batter). Heck, even in June (only 42 PA), he had a 103 wRC+. So, June-August (about 260 PA's out of 491 on the year), he was average to above average at the plate.

So why were his overall numbers still so bad if he only sucked about half the year? Because in May he batted .108 (83 PA's) and .172 in March and April (102 PA's). Now, it's fair to ask about September/October (.125 AVG in 108 PA): His walk rate basically doubled from June-August to September-October (9.3ish to 16.7), but his BABIP dropped to a bizarrely low .153 (unsustainably low). I'm not sure how to check 

Looking more into the details: 

                    LD%    GB%    FB%    Soft%    Med%    Hard%
Sept/Oct:   21.3    45.9    32.8    13.1      42.6       44.3
August:      29.5    33.3    37.2    10.3      30.8       59.0        
July:           21.9     31.1   46.9      9.4       45.3       45.3

The biggest thing that sticks out: Kole's groundball percentage went up significantly in September and October. Also, his hard hit percentage is the highest and soft percentage is the lowest in those samples. Could be pitchers adjusting, could be ordinary regression, could be typical struggles with changing approach. We'll see soon. 

In any case, looking at the season only through May is inadvisable because Kole had deliberately changed his approach at the start of the season (that is, the beginning of that sample size) and adjusted it while rehabbing (the end of that sample size). In other words, March-May is not a particularly meaningful sample size for projecting Kole's likely results in 2019. On the other hand, if you want to make too much of his September-October, be my guest (although I wouldn't advise it - Aaron Judge fell apart spectacularly at the plate at the end of 2017 and came back just fine in 2018). 

 

[Jeff Fletcher]

My take on the September slump...

-Natural regression. For about 65 games he was OPSing about .950. No swing change makes you that good. You are going to due for a stretch when balls find gloves. He cooled off to where his post-DL OPS as a whole was .800, which seems very plausible and sustainable.

-Impatience. He was swinging at more bad pitches, which many hitters do when they get in a rut where they aren’t getting hits. 

-Umpires. He had about 5 very borderline to awful called third strikes, and when you’re talking about a sample of 70(?) PAs, that makes a difference. 

Bottom line: It is very reasonable to expect Calhoun to be something resembling the post DL version of himself. If not an .800 OPS, at least .760ish. Combine that with his defense, and that works for the Angels.

[Docwaukee]

It will be interesting to see if they lead him off vs. RHers.  I'm thinking they will.