Comments on: Cubs Player Profile: Starlin Castro

By: Ken H

Ken H — Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:36:56 +0000

What I saw at the end of the year was a sharp increase in TWTW. Any numbers that can back that up?

By: Sahadev Sharma

Sahadev Sharma — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:38:55 +0000

The idea that Castro had a good April is a bit misleading. Sure, he hit .325 for the month, and that’s certainly encouraging since we know that much of Castro’s worth comes from his ability to put the ball in play and hopefully survive off a high batting average. However, the peripherals showed that what he did in April wasn’t much better than what we saw the rest of the season outside of Sept/Oct. Right off the bat, we see that he had a meager ISO of .085, meaning he was just singling the hell out of the ball. Perfectly fine for certain hitters, but he put up three extra-base hits for the month and even those singles were pretty lucky as I’ll show.

It was encouraging to see Castro get off to the ‘nice’ start in the hopes that perhaps it would lead to more solid, hard contact, but the fact is the writing was on the wall for what we saw the majority of the summer months from him. April was his highest month for GB% (64.3%!!), infield-hit rate (a ridiculously unsustainable 15.6%, especially for a 50-ish runner like Castro. Speedsters like Dee Gordon, Mike Trout, and Billy Burns didn’t even post those types of numbers for the season), and soft-hit percentage (30%). It was also his lowest month for hard-hit rate (15.6%), so clearly things were a little lucky for Castro. For him to be good, he needs a little luck, for sure. But April was almost *all* luck for him. Sept/Oct was completely different: 13 XBHs, 28.8% hard-hit rate, and 38.9% GB rate. So to suggest April was good ignores that fact that it was heavily reliant on luck. Yes, Castro does needs some luck, he needs a strong BABIP because he’s not going to take many walks. But he also needs to hit some doubles and knock the ball out of the park occasionally, hit liners over grounders (though the seeing-eye singles are a part of his game, hence luck being important), and just generally go with pitches, instead of just rolling everything over to the shortstop. The difference between April Castro and Sept/Oct Castro is significant.

By: Norm

Norm — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 16:17:49 +0000

It was actually only the first 3-4 weeks of April, to the point where there were blogs posts of “Castro putting up MVP type numbers so far”.
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Anywho, I don’t see why an opposing pitcher would EVER throw him a pitch on the inner half. Keep the ball outside half, or even a little off the outside corner, and Castro will keep hitting weak grounders.

By: Nate Greabe

Nate Greabe — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 15:53:08 +0000

Even though he was hitting the ball harder in May, Castro actually had better results in June (he hit .221 in May as opposed to .245). This is likely a BABIP issue in a small sample size, but it does show that Castro had some bad luck early in the year before his prolonged slump. You’re right that the *really* bad part of his year only lasted two months or so.

I didn’t notice anything specific in the transition from May to June, but I will say that the inflated groundball rate was present right from the start of April. This suggests that the underlying problem (whatever it was) might have been there the whole time.

Thanks for reading!

By: Bill Thomson

Bill Thomson — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 14:07:00 +0000

People forget that through May, Castro was pretty good at the plate. It was June-early August that was terrible. Did you notice anything in the transition from May to June?