Brett Gardner, His Slump, and Free Agents

Written by Greg Fertel | 12 August 2010

Brett Gardner has been slumping; there is no argument against this fact. It's easy for recent play to cloud our judgement and change our views of a player, because that is what is fresh in our minds. Yesterday, Ben Kabak discussed Gardner's slump over at River Avenue Blues. He starts with a very important disclaimer, that "It’s a dangerous exercise to split a player’s season into smaller bits and pieces and then draw conclusions from them. Small sample size issues abound, and a player is generally the overall sum of his parts by the team the season ends."

Honestly, I think that's the main take away from the entire post, but I thought it'd be worthwhile to look into the numbers a little bit more. Here are the splits Ben chose to use:

His line to start the season was inflated heavily by his BABIP, and it was very predictable that his numbers would drop. Over the next 40 or so days, Gardner continued to put up terrific numbers. Since then, he's been terrible for the Yankees. However, I don't think the downward trend is as bad as it looks.

I used The Hardball Times xBABIP calculator to calculate an expected BABIP for Gardner during each of these portions of the 2010 season. The three numbers I got were .323, .323, and .331 respectively. I then went on to "neutralize" Gardner's numbers with these expected BABIPs. Here are the new lines:

The major difference clearly is the increased strikeout rate, which should not come as that much of a surprise. Gardner wasn't known for having a great contact rate in the minors, and that was one of the biggest concerns in his skills translating to the major league level. However, there could be more to Gardner's slump, so I checked into the Pitch F/X data to see if there was anything of note there:

While the increase in whiff rate looks slight, he is actually swinging and missing at 50 percent more pitches in the third sample than the first one. He hasn't been swinging and missing more on fastballs; his whiff rate is up on cutters, changeups, and sliders. The data tells me he has been having trouble making contact on good offspeed pitches, which probably explains the increased strikeout rate. This could just be a sample size thing, though, as we're only talking about a handful of offspeed offerings here really.

Gardner has been bad since June 22, I'm not arguing that. I just don't see any reason to believe that his numbers since June 22 are more indicative of what we can expect going forward than his numbers from the entire season. In baseball, a larger sample is almost always better than a smaller one. Using Gardner's recent performance to evaluate him doesn't make much sense when there is more data at hand.

Kabak suggests that if Gardner continues to struggle, his playing time should dwindle and Austin Kearns should get more starts. I'm as big an Austin Kearns fan as anyone, but if you are going to look at recent performance, he is certainly not someone who should be in any starting lineup. His mediocre offensive line is entirely inflated by a very strong first month that was aided by a ridiculous BABIP.

Now is not the time to give up on Brett Gardner. He has already been worth 2.9 WAR, his defense is superb, and I still believe his offense should be close to league-average. The Yankees still control him for four seasons after 2010, and will be getting a bargain the entire time. If he is someone included in a trade, the Yankees better be getting another good player that is under team control. Trading Gardner and signing Carl Crawford probably won't be as beneficial as keeping Gardner and using the money saved on Crawford elsewhere.

If Gardner actually does struggle for the rest of the season, then we can begin to discuss Carl Crawford. Right now, though, let Gardner start, watch him rebound, and enjoy that the Yankees have a good and fun player to watch under team control for seasons to come.