Curious Case of Miguel Cabrera

The Curious Case of Miguel Cabrera

If you think of Miguel Cabrera what is the first thing you think of?  Me it’s a .300+ hitter with a .500 SLG and a .350+ OBP guy with 40 HRs and 120 RBI’s.  As of right now that is not the Cabrera that we are seeing, he isn’t hitting for AVG or Power and striking out way more than normal.  So lets take a look at what Cabrera is doing and see what the differences we can find between this year and last year.
I want to start off by saying I’m not here to solve why Cabrera is off to such a slow start since personally I think he’s suffering from the same abdominal injury that he has had in the past.  Now that we have that settled lets look at the numbers and see the differences between the first month of the season last year and this year.

Slash Line:

         We can see a pretty large difference between last year’s numbers and this year’s numbers, which I’m sure no one here is shocked to see.  The only thing that’s actually shocking about these numbers is just how shockingly average they are considering who’s they are.  These are the counting stats and really do have limited “telling” value but it is something to consider.  Each one of these stats has limited value in telling the future of a player since they can switch quickly and sometimes the player doesn’t have much control over them.  Lets look at something that he does have control over.

Swing Rate:

For those who don’t know what these are these are called the Plate Discipline stats on Fangraphs.com.  O-Swing% and O-Contact% are the percent of time a player swings outside the zone while Z-Swing% and Z-Contact% are the percent in the zone.  Swing and Contact percent should be pretty obvious.  So seeing the data what can we tell?  Well he is swinging less in the zone than this year, represented by the red bar, as well as outside the zone.  But its more balanced since he is still swinging about the same as his career numbers, represented by the green bar.  Cabrera is swinging about career levels and making normal levels of contact.

Saber stats:

We start to see the some of the weaknesses from Cabrera this year.  The BB% and K% rare way up from last year but the more disturbing thing is that BB%.  4% less that last season and his wOBP (weighted On Base Percentage) is way down from both last year and career.  His wOBA (weighted On Base Average) is also way down which makes sense seeing that his power or ISO (Isolated Power).  The fact that his BABIP is down can mean that his luck is not with him right now, his speed may be a factor but if he’s not driving the ball as he normally would be then it could mean that the balls he is putting into play are more playable.

Batted Balls:

Once again we see the trend that I stated before.  Cabrera’s rise in GB% and LD% means he’s getting under the ball more than he has in the past.  Having his LD% start to dip well below what he had been doing over the last few years could mean he’s not squaring on the ball.  The most telling thing that adds to the argument of him not hitting the ball hard is the HR/FB.  The increase in FB% and decline in HR/FB rate then shows how he doesn’t seem to be driving the ball.

Hot/Cold chart:

.250 .500 .400

.111 .444 .313

.833 .143 .167

This is the current Hot/Cold zone on Cabrera for 2014.  We can see that he seems to be having a bit of trouble turning on the ball up and in and just in side more towards the center of the plate.  He seems to have having a problem reaching to the outer bottom of the plate.  Comparing this to his Hot/Cold chart from last year where he only had issues getting to the up and center portion of the plate and down and away this is a big difference.

          So as I stated earlier we aren’t going to solve the issue of Cabrera in this article but we did learn and see a lot of things that can give hints.  Lack of patience might mean he’s cheating on fastballs trying to get ahead of them.  Maybe he’s trying to guess the pitches before he normally would see what pitch is coming.  All of these are just theories of course but the numbers do support it.