Scouting Report: Chris Carter

Scouting Report: Chris Carter

            Not to long ago I was listening to the Astros play a spring training game I heard, to me, the oddest sentence I’ve heard in a while. “Chris Carter is a patient hitter and takes a lot of pitches which leads to a lot of strike outs.”  This seemed so counter intuitive that I had to take a look and right as I decided to make it my first scouting report of the year.  So with that lets take a look at the 1b/DH for the Houston Astros, Chris Carter.

Batting:

            To start Carter’s slash line last season was .223/.320/.451.  In fact this isn’t a terrible slash line minus the very low BA; the OBP is just league average but the SLG is actually very good.  Lets look at the BA first; it’s not going to get any better from this point.  He tends to swing more than most players at 46% Swing% which is only 1.5% higher than the league average, which is fine, but the problem is the contact rate.  League average Contact% is 80%, Chris Carter is sitting at 65.4% which means he swings and misses much to often.  In fact Carter struck out 36.2% of the time last year, no player is able to hit for a high BA if he is striking out that much.  But there is a good side to this; in the last 5 years the average BB% is 19% and Carter career BB% is at 12.1 meaning he’s actually very good at taking a walk.  While this seems to be counter intuitive it does make some sense, remember he striking out from swings but they are quality swings.  In fact Carter swings at pitches outside the zone about 2% less often than the rest of the league and in a game of inches that’s a big gap.  So from what we can see Chris Carter is patient at the plate but has many holes in his swing that pitchers can exploit, he doesn’t swing at bad pitches as often as others but he doesn’t make as much contact either.

            Well this explains his BA and OBP but lets take a look at the power, which Carter has no lack of.  The average SLG and OPS for the last five years has been .404 and .727 and Carters SLG last season was .451 and OPS was even more impressive at .770 both a 50 point gap from league average and that’s a lot of power.  In fact Carter also has a wRC+ (weighted Runs Created+) of 113 meaning he’s created 13% more runs than the league average last year, which is quite impressive given the team he is on.  Last year his ISO was at an astounding .227 and the league average is sitting at .148.  Almost a full 100 point gap between the two so that just shows you how much power Carter can generate.  All this amounts to one simple thing; if Chris Carter could start making better contact with the ball he would be a beast.

Bottom line when it comes to Chris Carter it really looks like a pitch recognition problem.  He can see the fastball fine but he struggles very much with curves and sliders, sliders even more than the curve by a wide margin.  That could actually be because sliders tend to look like fastballs then break and since Carter is great with fastballs he could be fooled easily.

Fielding:

            Bottom line is he’s below average in many ways not just his glove.  Carter was originally a LF but he had to be moved to 1B because his glove, range and speed just didn’t make him a good fit.  According to Insider Edge Carter was only able to make 25% of plays they deemed “likely” when the average range is close to the 60% range and he made all the routine plays.  His UZR last year sits at -3.1 saying his range is very limited and he costs the team more runs in the process.  Theres not much else to say here other than Carter needs to stay at the DH to be of any worth to the Astros.

Final Thoughts:

            I came into this report looking to pretty much bash Chris Carter saying, “oh he doesn’t hit, strikes out a lot but he can hit home runs.”  Well I’m still right but it goes deeper than that, he takes more walk’s and shows more patients than one would think but at the same time has less pitch recognition than most players.  In the end Carter is a power machine but considering last year his BABIP actually says he was kinda lucky I don’t see him all of a sudden hitting .250; he’ll mash 30 HR’s and could hit for a lot of RBI’s but never for BA.