As we all should know right now (since the major media outlets love beating us over the head with information about STREAKS!), Andre Ethier of the Dodgers is in the midst of a 24 game hitting streak. He’s hit safely in 25 of the 26 games on the season, and is overall, having a pretty solid year. But really, is he having an AMAZING year so far? I really don’t think so. I’ve crunched the numbers, and come to a startling conclusion: aside from the high batting average, Ethier’s year hasn’t been really that unreal so far.
First off, we’ll get the batting average out of the way. Ethier’s .380 mark is fourth in the majors, behind Matt Holliday, Placido Polanco, and Lance Berkman. Berkman and Holliday are having vastly superior seasons in comparison to Ethier due to their power, while Polanco is his usual self: high batting average (higher than usual), and not much else. So out of those four players, I’d rank Ethier third in terms of in season performance. When you look at BABIP, which helps determine how lucky a player is in relation to balls put in play, Ethier’s mark of .455 is third in the majors, behind the aforementioned Holliday and teammate Matt Kemp. I’d argue that Kemp is also having a superior season to Ethier, due to his power.
I’ve been talking a lot about power so far, and when a guy gets a lot of hits, you expect him to sprinkle some extra base hits in there. Ethier…really hasn’t. His isolated power (defined as SLG – BA, a good way to determine how much of a hitter’s slugging percentage is derived from him actually slugging, as opposed to dropping in singles all over the place) is .180, good for 63rd in baseball. He’s behind such luminaries as Jack Hannahan, Nick Hundley, and Ben Francisco. So now we’ve established that Ethier’s high batting average is driven mainly by luck, and that he’s getting a lot of singles as opposed to extra base hits.
Ah, but Ethier IS smoking the ball, just not to the right places in the field. His 32.5% line drive rate is second in baseball, behind only David Freese of the Cardinals (gee, those Cardinals are hitting awfully well so far). The more line drives a player hits, the better his chance to get hits. Ethier really is scorching the ball, but instead of htiting it into the gaps, he’s hitting it over infielders’ heads. There’s another caveat to that too: Ethier’s five infield hits are among the most in baseball.
A high batting average driven mainly by singles isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not really a great thing. His runs scored and RBI totals really aren’t impressive (14 and 15 respectively), which means that he’s letting runners on base in front of him die, and he’s dying on base because of getting to first base so often.
One more stat before we go. Weighted on base average (wOBA) takes every way a player can reach base (hits, walks, hit by pitches, and errors), assigns a weight to each one, and puts it in a nice little basket for us to look at. Ethier’s wOBA is .434, a great number, but not something you’d expect from someone who’s gotten hits in 24 straight games in April. If Ethier starts getting more extra base hits, everything will get re-evaluated, and his overall numbers will look better, and at the end of the day, I’d rather have hits in 20 or 24 games with fewer singles and more extra base hits than a 24 game hitting streak powered mostly by singles.
