Life In The Cell

The Rise and Fall of Paulie Konerko

Star players are awesome. Every time they step to the plate, a home run feels near. That whole experience, the potential of every at-bat, is one of the most exciting elements of baseball to me. Paul Konerko has had that sort of aura. Four straight 30+ homer seasons will do that for a person. When Paul steps to the plate now, though, he inspires more worry than anything else. He had a decent June this year (.250/.321/.479) but has come back from his injury to have an atrocious July (.216/.286/.314). It seems we’ve been waiting for him to bounce back in varying degrees for the past two years. I decided to look in to the stats to see how likely such a bounce back really is.

Early on, I was encouraged by what I saw. Paul’s BABIP is awfully low. The lowest in the majors, actually. Normally, a hitter’s BABIP is expected to be .120 points higher than his Line Drive Percentage. The biggest single factor in getting hits is hitting line drives. Line drives become hits about 75% of the time. That’s far higher than the rates for fly balls and ground balls, which are both around 25%. Paul’s line drive percentage is 20.5% for an expected BABIP of .325. Compare that to his actual BABIP of .239. Job has better luck than that. So Paul’s fortunes should balance out, and he’ll make his return to Awesometown, right?

Kind of. The .120 points that are added to the line drive percentage come from the expectation that some of their other batted balls will also contribute to their offensive output. Fly balls do so a lot more than ground balls. While they both turn in to hits at about the same rates, few ground balls turn in to doubles and none turn in to home runs. Thus, fly balls are about three times more beneficial to offensive production than ground balls. Those .120 points assume a certain mix of ground balls and fly balls. Unfortunately, Paul is hitting a lot fewer fly balls. This year 36.2% of his balls in play are fly balls, compared to 40.3% for his career. Further, those fly balls aren’t going as far. Only 11.1% of his fly balls are leaving the park, compared to 16.8% for his career. As that is happening, fewer of his fly balls are even leaving the infield. 18.5% of his fly balls are of the infield variety, compared to 11.8% for his career. That is very bad.

In addition, he is putting fewer balls in to play. He has a contact rate of 81.43% for his career but is making contact only 77.76% of the time this year. That means his strikeout rate this year, 20.4%, is a good bit higher than his career mark of 16.2%.

All of these signs point towards a decline. They do not, however, point to as large a decline as he is experiencing. I cannot say with precision how much he will bounce back, but keep in mind: he has the worst BABIP in the league despite having a pretty decent line drive percentage and being only below average—not terrible—in his fly ball rate, strikeout rate and home run per fly ball ratio. He’s getting worse, but he’s not this bad. He should start showing that as the year goes on.