Looking at Aaron Hill's stats from a glance will tell you this. The man was brutal with the bat last year. With an average barely hovering above the mendoza line, an OBP below .300 and a slugging bellow 400, he really blew. Now you have to be thinking, "really? he cant be that bad, I mean his OPS was .835 just a season ago". You would have a point, Hill had a league low babip of .196. That's insane, but there has to be something fuelling that incredibly low babip, right? If you take a look at Hill's advanced batted ball profile via fangraphs you'll see that his GB/Fb last year was 0.65, .32 points below his career average of 0.97, his line-drive rate was 10.6% this year as apposed to a 18.5% career average. He had a flyball% over 50% for the first time in his career. It appears that the only thing on Hill's mind this year was hitting homeruns. Although he did hit 26 he had to sacrifice everything that made him a decent hitter. I think if he dials back his approach and just tries to hit the ball hard, he could rejuvinate himself as a .270/.320/.450 player. If he doesnt i believe Hill won't be a Jay for long
Quickly on Adam Lind though, recently on Drunk Jays Fans I read that Lind was 5-167 against lefties or something fucktarded like that. Could that be a part of the 'pull everything approach' that Cito and Dwayne implemented, and Lind was opening up to early against lefties causing him to be more susceptible to the breaking ball? just a thought.
Hey Dawson,
ReplyDeleteI added a link to your blog from mine. You should e-mail some of the other prominent bloggers and ask them to do the same. Ian at the Blue Jay Hunter is very helpful, and the Southpaw linked me without even having to ask. Your posts are well-researched, and you put a lot of work into them, so it's worth getting people to check them out.
If you have a post that's really good, MLBTR does a weekly baseball-blog feature, you just have to e-mail them a link.
cool, thanks man, i'll do that.
ReplyDeleteI love your blog btw, inspired me too do this one