RADIO
Welcome to part two of my pre-season series on 2021 barrel rate risers and fallers. In the first part, I looked at the players who showed the biggest barrel rate improvement in 2021 and broke down whether or not we should believe that success will carry over into 2022. In this article, I'll look at the players whose barrel rates fell the most in 2021 and discuss whether or not we should be concerned by their performance or use it as a "buy low" opportunity.
As I mentioned in part one, for my money, a hitter's barrel rate is one of the most important stats for a fantasy manager's toolbelt. It may be a little "old school baseball," but when I was playing, I always knew that if I was finding the barrel consistently, good things were going to happen. There are a lot of things that can dictate whether or not a hitter is able to square the ball up and hit it on the barrel. A hitter consistently finding the barrel can mean his bat path is perfect, his eyes are locked in, or his timing is right on. When all of that is firing at the same time, it usually means sustained success, not fluky production.
Hitting the ball on the barrel consistently is a challenging skill at any level. Only the best hitters are the ones that can do it regularly, and when you notice somebody beginning to do it more consistently, it's usually time to take notice. Good things are bound to happen when hitters start feeling that utter weightlessness of squaring a ball up perfectly. With that out of the way, we can dive into the actionable info.
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Falling Barrels
Below is a table of the 20 hitters who decreased their barrel rate most in 2021. However, as with any rate metric, we need to keep in mind how many events there were so we're not working with too small a sample size. For the purpose of this article, I only included players who had 300 batted ball events in 2021. I also dug into a few of the most intriguing names on this list to try and make sense of how this information should impact our fantasy decisions.
It's also important to address that some of the hitters who are on the table still have elite barrel rates. For example, despite not matching 2021 highs, C.J. Cron had an 82nd-percentile barrel rate in 2021, Jorge Soler had an 86th-percentile rate, Miguel Sano had a 98th-percentile rate, Juan Soto had an 88th-percentile rate, and Matt Chapman and Teoscar Hernandez both had 90th-percentile rates. You're obviously not concerned about guys finding the barrel at that rate, but it's important to note these numbers may be more realistic than the short 2020 season.
Wil Myers, OF San Diego Padres
2021 Barrel Rate: 7.7%
Barrel Rate Decrease: -7.2%
If we're not going to address C.J. Cron, then the hitter who experienced the most actionable decrease in barrel rate was Wil Myers. When you dig under the hood it becomes pretty clear that the COVID-shortened 2020 season was an outlier for Myers. Almost everything in his 2021 profile looks similar to his previous numbers. We can start simple with the batting average, strikeout rate, and walk rate being in line with 2016-2019. His average exit velocity was also down from a career-high in 2020, and his barrel rates match 2016-2018 as well.
What's more, the biggest fluke number appears to be his home run total in 2020. In the short season, Myers hit 15 home runs in only 55 games, but he was also sporting a 27.8% HR/FB rate, which was in the 96th-percentile in home runs per plate appearance (HR/PA). In 2021, he fell to a 15.2% HR/FB rate, which was 52nd-percentile and in line with his 2018 and 2019 numbers. Part of this could be that Myers' launch angle dropped to 10.6-degrees after being at 13.4-degrees in 2020, but the 10.6-degree number is also more in line with his career numbers. As a result, his groundball rate rose back up to 45% and his Air rate (percentage of fly balls and line drives) dropped almost 10%, which (stop me if you've heard this before) is more closely in line with his career rate.
In addition to the home run numbers in 2020 appearing fluky, Myers' contact profile in 2021 did not match up with the hitter he's been in the past. In 2021, he was only in the 59th-percentile in the rate of barrels hit over 100 mph, but he hasn't been below 67th-percentile in five years. Similarly, in 2021, his average exit velocity on balls in the air (fly balls and line drives) was 92.6 mph (38th-percentile) but he was in the 87th-percentile in 2018, 94th-percentile in 2019, and 74th-percentile in 2020. Considering that Myers' pull rate has been dropping for three years, it's possible that, at age 31, he simply doesn't have the bat speed that he had before. That bears out in the fact that his xwOBA on contact was a career-low .362 (47th-percentile) and his .370 xSLG was the lowest of his career.
I think we need to view Myers' 2021 season as closer to who he truly is than the 2020 improvements. Considering he will be 32 during the season and certain power metrics have been trending down, it's fair to wonder if we ever see "peak Wil Myers" again.
Dominic Smith, 1B/OF New York Mets
2021 Barrel Rate: 6.5%
Barrel Rate Decrease: -6.9%
Dom Smith is an interesting case. He was a high-average hitter for the Mets during his minor league career but seemed to sell out for more power as he got his first taste of the big leagues in 2017. However a swing change prior to the 2019 season allowed him to recapture some of his prospect shine, and then he broke out in 2020, hitting .316/.377/.616 with 10 HR and 42 RBI in 50 games for the Mets. Many were expecting another step in his progression in 2021, but he was on the bench for the first game of the season, and it all seemed to go downhill from there, with Smith finishing off the season hitting .244/.304/.363 with 11 HR and 58 RBI in 145 games.
As is to be expected, there are some clear warning signs. For one, Smith seemed to forget how to hit secondary pitches. After sporting a .323 xBA and .532 xSLG against breaking balls in 2020 and .288 xBA against offspeed pitches, he plummeted to a .243 xBA against offspeed and .246 xBA against breaking pitches. However, his whiff rates on both were nearly identical to 2020 and he actually improved his whiff rate by almost 6% on offspeed pitches. So if he wasn't doing worse because he was swinging and missing, it must mean that he was making worse contact. That could have to do with pitchers changing their sequencing against him in his second season, but it also could connect to something I noticed in the swing profile.
In 2021, Smith's launch angle jumped up to 14.9-degrees, which is in line with his 2019 numbers but a four-degree increase from his breakout 2020. What's more, his launch angle actually rose to 16.1-degrees during the second half of the 2021 season. This makes it seem like Smith was trying to elevate the ball intentionally; considering his poor average on breaking pitches, he was likely either rolling over the top of them or popping them up since his infield fly ball rate also rose. We can also see that because his average exit velocity on balls in the air was 92.6 mph in 2021 (38th-percentile) after being at 94.9 mph (79th-percentile in 2020). Even if we bring his HR/FB% from his 2021 mark of 9.1% to the 20% that was essentially his career mark before, you still have a 15 HR performance.
The truth of the matter is that Dominic Smith has never crushed the ball. Even in his best MLB seasons, his average exit velocity sits below 90 mph and the percentage of balls he hits in the air over 100 mph is average at best. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that his best season was when his launch angle was lower and his pop-up and infield flyball rates were lower as he focused more on driving line drives to the gaps. Perhaps that's the hitter Dom Smith needs to get back to being, even if that caps his home run upside.
Trent Grisham, OF San Diego Padres
2021 Barrel Rate: 5.2%
Barrel Rate Decrease: -5.9%
I guess we're really piling on the Padres today, but it was a pretty disappointing season for them. After taking strides forward in the short 2020 season, finishing with a .251/.352/.456 season with 10 HR and 10 SB in just 59 games, Grisham's progress seemed to stall in 2021, hitting .242/.327/.413 with 15 HR and 13 SB in 132 games. He reverted back to his 2019 HR/FB rate of 12% and had a career-high groundball rate while pulling the ball 6% less. Overall his zone swing rate and zone contact rate were higher and his SwStr% was lower, so he wasn't chasing bad pitches, he simply wasn't making good contact on the pitches in the zone that he was hitting. That's concerning.
When we look under the hood, a few things stand out. For starters, he lowered his launch angle for the second season in a row, to a career-low 12.3-degrees, but that alone isn't too much of a concern. He also really struggled against all fastballs in 2021, hitting .218 with a .361 slugging percentage after hitting .286 with a .571 slugging percentage in 2020. He saw more fastballs in 2021 as well, so it's possible that pitchers learned they could beat him with heat.
The second issue for Grisham is that his barrel rate fell pretty drastically, as did his percentage of barrels over 100 mph, which went from 77th-percentile in 2020 to 31st-percentile in 2021. Considering his average exit velocity has never topped 89 mph, it's possible that Grisham simply won't ever pack the power that many hoped he would back when he was a minor leaguer. He has high groundball rates, low pull rates, and low exit velocity on balls in the air, so he may have a ceiling as a 20 home run bat. That isn't nothing, but perhaps not what people expected when he hit 32 home runs across three levels in 2019.
However, there is some potential hope that Grisham's struggles in 2021 were injury-related. He came out of the gate scorching, hitting .300 with 4 HR with five SB in April and followed that up by hitting .303 with a pair of homers and steals in May. However, he injured his heel in early June and, despite a brief hot streak in August, never seemed like the same hitter. It's hard to see how a bruised heel would have done so much damage, but Grisham was banged up a few times during the year, and it's possible that his swing was impacted by the bumps and bruises. His speed certainly was since he stole five bases combined from June on but had five steals in April alone.
One interesting thing to note was that Grisham had an exit velocity of 94.5 mph on balls in the air during the first half of 2021 (71st-percentile), but it fell off to 91.8 mph (29th-percentile) in the second half. That first half hard contact also coincided with a career-high HR/PA stretch. However, those numbers don't line up with anything we've seen from him in his MLB career, and his barrel rate and hard contact rate were average or below for pretty much all of the season.
As a result, I'm inclined to believe that Trent Grisham may simply be a true .250 hitter with 20 HR/15 SB upside. That's not bad to round out your fantasy outfield, but maybe not somebody I'm taking at pick 130 when guys like Jarred Kelenic, Alex Verdugo, Eddie Rosario, Avisail Garcia, and Alex Kirilloff are going later.
Randy Arozarena, OF Tampa Bay Rays
2021 Barrel Rate: 8.2%
Barrel Rate Decrease: -5.7%
I was the low man on Arozarena last year, and I'm OK with being there again. Yet, I'd like to differentiate between being "low" on a player and being "off" of a player. Arozarena is clearly a valuable fantasy asset. Anybody who has a 20/20 season with 94 runs scored is valuable. I was just cautious coming off his playoff outburst, and I still think people are quick to praise his bright moments without keeping in mind the bigger picture.
His 2020 regular-season sample size was only 23 games, and it was relatively solid but not spectacular production. Then he went ham in the playoffs and our expectations rose. In 2021, he was far closer to his 2020 regular season self than the postseason one. We already knew that his 46.7% HR/FB rate in 2020 was a fluke, and the 16.7% rate he put up in 2020 is closer to what he did in his minor league career. His FB% dropped in 2021 and his GB% rose close to 50%, which is where he was for the majority of the time in the minors. His rate of barrels over 100 mph dropped by over 4% from 2020 and his xwOBA, xBA, and xSLG were all in the bottom 20th-percentile in all of Major League Baseball, with the batting average potentially being the biggest concern going forward.
So now that we established that Postseason Randy is not the real Randy, there is some cause for optimism. Arozarena made some clear gains in his contact profile in the second half. He seemed to get less aggressive, cutting down on his Swing% and SwStr%. He actually was in the 16th-percentile in swing rate in the second half, which means he could have actually been too passive; an idea backed up by the fact that his strikeout rate jumped up 3%. However, he also hit the ball much harder. His barrel rate jumped from 6.8% to 10.5%, his exit velocity on balls in the air went from 49th-percentile to 86th-percentile, and his rate of barrels over 100 mph went from 42nd-percentile to 73rd-percentile.
All of which is to say that Arozarena's improved SLG, OPS, and ISO in the 2nd half seems real. However, his home run totals were identical, and his HR/PA rates, pull rates, and groundball rates didn't change, so we shouldn't expect a massive power surge to come from his improved contact unless Arozarena drastically changes his profile to become more of a pull-oriented fly ball hitter; something he has never been in the past.
Harder contact but not a true home run profile could mean that Arozarena ends up as a better batting average hitter than his profile suggests, but I still have some worries. Arozarena hit .308 in the second half, in large part due to the aforementioned changes that he made to his contact profile. However, even in that hot second half, he was in the 10th-percentile in contact rate in the entire league and as mentioned before, the 16th-percentile in swing rate; yet, he only walked 8.9% of the time in the second half. What that means is that he was a relatively passive hitter, who didn't make consistent contact, and also seemed to be looking at a lot of strikes since the BB% went down and the K% went up. That could be a big reason why his xBA over that stretch was .229.
That's a MASSIVE difference from .308. Part of that can be explained by his speed, and I imagine he will always outhit his xBA, but his overall approach is a bit concerning to me, and I think that Arozarena could be a true .260 hitter with 25 HR/20 SB upside. That's a good player, but is it one that we should be taking over Tyler O'Neill, Eloy Jimenez, Ketel Marte, and even Bryan Reynolds? I'm not entirely sure.
Nick Castellanos, OF Cincinnati Reds
2021 Barrel Rate: 10.6%
Barrel Rate Decrease: -5.4%
I wanted to put Castellanos on here because I think where he ends up signing could have more of an impact on his production than people think. The popular narrative right now is that Castellanos' season changed when he fractured his wrist after getting hit with a pitch at the end of July. However, Castellanos was actually over-performing much of his underlying metrics during the first half of the season. Despite hitting .331 with 18 HR, 59 RBI, and a .969 OPS in the first half, Castellanos had just a 10.1% barrel rate (76th-percentile) with 76th-percentile average exit velocity on balls in the air and 75th-percentile rate of barrels hit over 100 mph. All of which were improvements over his 2019 numbers but not close to his 2020 metrics.
So while his batting average seems to have been more earned, his power totals appear to be propped up by and 92nd-percentile HR/PA rate. Considering he also played his home games in one of the most hitter-friendly environments in baseball and had only 25.6% of his home runs be no doubters, the HR/PA rate and xHR rate of 28 on the season makes me think that Castellanos could go back to being a 25+ HR bat in most ballparks, which would be a slight knock to his previous value.
Ke'Bryan Hayes, 3B Pittsburgh Pirates
2021 Barrel Rate: 5.1%
Barrel Rate Decrease: -4.2%
2021 Ke'Bryan Hayes is more real than 2020 Ke'Bryan Hayes. I want to end by discussing that really quickly. In 2021, Hayes hit .257 with six home runs and nine stolen bases in 96 games, which was a far cry from the .376 average with five home runs he hit in 24 games during his MLB debut in 2020. However, his 2021 numbers are similar to the defense-first player he was in the minors, and the player most scouts thought he would be.
In 2020, Hayes had a 25% HR/FB rate, a 47.7% FB/LV rate, and .578 wOBA on contact. In 2021, he came nowhere near any of that. His 8.6% HR/FB rate is identical to what he had in AAA in 2019, which was the highest mark of his minor league career. In 2021, he had a .351 wOBA on contact (41st-percentile), a 30.3% rate of balls hit in the air over 100 mph (53rd-percentile), and an average exit velocity on balls in the air of 93.5 mph (55th-percentile), which was down two mph from 2020. What's more, his launch angle fell from 7.4-degrees to 2.6-degrees, he hit 8% fewer balls in the air, and raised his GB% by 10%. He also only pulled the ball 21% of the time, which makes it hard to hit for power.
At the end of the day, I think this is who Hayes is as a player. He makes a decent amount of contact (58th-percentile) but is an overly patient hitter with a 43.5% swing rate (17th-percentile), who doesn't elevate the ball that often or hit it overly hard in the air when he does. In a full season, he could be a .270-.280 hitter with 15 HR/15 SB on a mediocre offense. That has some value, but it's not too different from what we got from Mark Canha (260 ADP) and Amed Rosario (180 ADP) in 2021, and Hayes is going as high as pick 117 in NFBC drafts. Don't reach that high.
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