Last offseason, on the heels of Alex Rodriguez posting a career-low .341 OBP over 595 PAs (an OBP only .016 points above league average), I posited that Alex was a strong bet for an improvement on that mark for the 2011 season, and indeed, Alex turned in a .362 OBP over significantly fewer PAs (428). While that mark still falls well short of his career .386 OBP, it wound up being the third-best OBP on the 2011 Yankees, and was well above the league average of .321.
For the second straight winter, I think Yankee fans can realistically expect an improved on-base percentage from Alex next season. Now the obvious reason for optimism is the fact that Alex basically only played half a season in 2011. During his healthy first half, he was hitting .299/.377/.507 through the end of June. The seven games he played in in July before hitting the shelf for knee surgery didn’t do anything to help his cause, and his OBP fell to .366 as he went on the DL (with 33 walks and four HBPs to his name through 80 team games). Alex didn’t really do much of anything in the 19 games he played over the remainder of the season — though he still managed to get on base — putting up a .191/.345/.353 line (15 walks, 1 HBP) over his final 84 PAs.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that a healthy Alex would have managed to come close to doubling his first half walk total, finishing the year at around 65 walks, which is what he did in 2008, a season he OBP’d .392 in 594 PAs. Now, this hypothetical healthy 2011 Alex still might not have finished with an OBP quite that high, but he was also hitting .295 at the time of his injury with 90 hits. For comparison’s sake, he hit .302 in 2008 and had 154 hits. Without going too crazy with extrapolations, it doesn’t seem terribly unrealistic to expect a .290-ish-hitting A-Rod to post an OBP somewhere in the high .370s.
Of course, that’s all a bit too intangible, so I’ll expand on the idea some by looking at Alex’s plate discipline data. I gathered PD data for Alex going back to 2009 from both Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs, as it seems the general consensus has been that BP’s newly introduced data is superior to that of FanGraphs’ BIS-provided percentages and I was curious to see just how much the two data sets differentiated. For the most part, in the small sample that I culled, it appeared that the differences in the data sets were mostly on the order of 100 to 500 basis points — which sounds like a lot, except 100 basis points = 1% — with BP’s numbers generally coming in slightly lower. The major difference between the two sets is in the Swinging Strike%, as it appears that BP’s percentage also includes foul balls.
Anyway, I point all this out to show that yes, there are tangible differences, and eventually BP’s will probably be the more reliable go-to, but I’m going to go with FanGraphs for this analysis because the BP data isn’t backfilled/built-out enough yet, as it doesn’t yet allow you to slice and dice by month or compare against career numbers.
Anyway, here are A-Rod’s plate discipline numbers (per FanGraphs) from the last three seasons:
| O-Sw% | Z-Sw% | Sw% | O-Con% | Z-Con% | Con% | Zone% | Sw-Strk% | |
| 2009 | 21.1% | 67.4% | 42.6% | 58.8% | 84.9% | 78.0% | 46.6% | 9.1% |
| 2010 | 25.3% | 68.5% | 45.0% | 65.6% | 86.1% | 79.8% | 45.6% | 8.9% |
| 2011 | 27.0% | 66.1% | 44.0% | 61.7% | 83.7% | 76.0% | 43.4% | 10.3% |
| Car. | 21.4% | 67.9% | 44.0% | 53.0% | 83.2% | 75.7% | 48.7% | 10.5% |
It won’t surprise anyone to see that Alex’s lowest O-Swing% and O-Contact% of the last three years was in 2009, his last .400-plus wOBA campaign. Somewhat foreboding is Alex’s 27% O-Swing% in 2011 — up from 2010’s 25.3% and considerably higher than his 21.4% career mark — though his O-Contact% was down from 2010’s 65.6%, which was his highest percentage since the data started being collected in 2002. Still, the 61.7% O-Contact% was also a good deal higher than his career mark, and Alex swinging at more bad pitches and making more contact with them is probably not a recipe for OBP success.
However, the 2011 data set is a bit skewed by the fact that Alex only had 31 PAs in July, 19 in August and 65 in September.
Here’s his 2011 monthly breakdown:
| O-Sw% | Z-Sw% | Sw% | O-Con% | Z-Con% | Con% | Zone% | Sw-Strk% | |
| April | 20.1% | 64.0% | 38.7% | 60.0% | 86.2% | 78.4% | 42.5% | 8.4% |
| May | 32.9% | 63.9% | 47.2% | 66.3% | 87.7% | 79.6% | 46.2% | 9.3% |
| June | 26.0% | 65.0% | 43.7% | 58.8% | 83.0% | 75.2% | 45.4% | 10.5% |
| July | 40.4% | 72.2% | 56.6% | 61.9% | 74.4% | 70.0% | 50.9% | 16.8% |
| August | 23.9% | 80.7% | 46.8% | 54.6% | 92.0% | 80.6% | 40.3% | 9.1% |
| Sept. | 24.4% | 67.7% | 39.6% | 59.5% | 74.6% | 68.6% | 35.1% | 12.2% |
| Car. | 21.4% | 67.9% | 44.0% | 53.0% | 83.2% | 75.7% | 48.7% | 10.5% |
Alex’s two best months of the season were April (.422 wOBA; 16.3% BB%) and June (.423 wOBA; 11.9% BB%). May was his only fully healthy month of really poor (.328 wOBA; 4.8% BB%) play, although his May line was dragged down by one of the worst four-week stretches of his career, which I spent quite a bit of time documenting earlier this season. April was Alex’s most selective month of the season (a mere 20.1% O-Swing%), which makes it no surprise it was also his best month. His May O-Swing% of 32.9% along with a 66.3% O-Contact% underscore just how out-of-whack he was that month.
In June, his PD numbers were pretty much where you’d expect them to be given his outstanding month, as he basically matched his career averages in every category except — somewhat unexpectedly — O-Swing% and O-Contact%, though the latter was his lowest percentage of the full months he played in 2011.
I would expect a healthy Alex to be swinging more in line with his April and June 2011 rates, and in turn, better the .362 OBP he turned in on the season. The ever-optimistic Bill James agrees, and has Alex hitting .277/.373/.497 next season. That’s probably a bit aggressive, as much of that OBP is fueled by a projected 70 walks and 12.1% BB% — numbers he’s only eclipsed once in the last four seasons (in 2009) — although I’m also not sure I’d bet against a highly motivated Alex Rodriguez. He may be turning 37 next year, but a healthy year should go a long way in silencing some of the critics that wanted to blame the team’s playoff downfall on a far-from-100% A-Rod.
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