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April is Jason Heyward’s Cruelest Month

It’s natural to categorize, sort, and label the things around us. In some ways, it’s our biggest defense mechanism against the world. We like to know what to expect, how something should work, or what someone’s going to do. It’s frustrating and jarring sometimes, when things and people don’t fit our category, label, or expectation. I think most of us have lived a life full of this, if we take the long view and allow ourselves to see it.

As neatly categorized as baseball can be—there’s a stat for everything now, you can track every pitch thrown and ball hit in myriad ways—it’s also wildly unpredictable. Sometimes David Ross hits one onto Waveland. Sometimes Jake Arrieta gets traded for Scott Feldman. Sometimes Chuck Knoblauch suddenly can’t throw to first and becomes a left fielder. We think we know what to expect, but then there’s always the 1969 Mets to remind us that baseball and life are both weird sometimes.

I thought I knew what to expect when setting out to write about Jason Heyward’s career performances in April. I had a T.S. Eliot reference in the headline and everything. The narrative was so tidy – “He’s a slow starter. April is always bad.” I accepted that idea and prepared to lay out my hypothesis as to why, but I did my research first, and sure enough, I didn’t see quite what I expected.

Yes, he’s struggled in April for the past four seasons now. No, April 2016 has not really been an exception to this rule. But, the surprise came when I really looked at monthly splits for his first three seasons. I’ll get to that in more depth in a bit, but I want you to see for yourself before I go further: 

Year wRC+ wOBA K% BB%
2010 138 .384 29.2 14.6
2011 141 .379 16.8 12.4
2012 111 .337 23.3 9.3
2013 53 .248 17.4 11.6
2014 76 .280 22.6 10.4
2015 67 .267 19.3 5.7
2016 78 .296 20 12.2

The 2013 season should jump out at us, but it’s important also to remember that he had an appendectomy that month, and played in fewer April games in that season than in any other. But, prior to that season, there was no reason to believe that he would one day be known as a “slow starter.” In fact, the first at bat of his career would strongly imply the opposite. The numbers outside of wRC+ and wOBA don’t offer much help, aside from a strangely low walk rate in April last year. For some reference, those two numbers are radically different in May, especially in the last two seasons (122 and 114 wRC+ in May of 2014 and 2015, and .346 and .336 wOBA in those months), but his strikeout and walk rate don’t change much.

One possible hint of an explanation might be his BABIP, which has pretty consistently gone up from April to May during the last few seasons. On the whole, he has a .290 BABIP in May versus .264 in April. Frustratingly, there isn’t a clear answer as to just why this happens, because BABIP feels like too easy of a scapegoat here: it might be the clearest reason, but it’s still somewhat unsatisfying.

I took a look at what Brooks Baseball might have to offer, and focused first on the batted-ball exit velocities from month to month for his 2015 season:

Month Line Drive Ground Ball Fly Ball Pop Up
4/15 88.88 94.53 88.86 90.00
5/15 86.25 86.92 94.75 67.00
6/15 90.43 92.33 92.38 58.00
7/15 95.44 93.43 84.60 81.00
8/15 88.62 91.96 96.13 74.33
9/15 94.67 91.48 90.60 85.00
10/15 81.00 92.29 95.00 69.00

Again, not quite what I was hoping for. I went on to whiff rates and swing rates, and still didn’t see anything that indicated a clear reason as to why Heyward’s numbers can be so different in April compared to May. So I went again to BABIP. Here’s April of 2015:

april babip

And here’s May of 2015:

may babip

There’s enough of a difference there for me to start to question my initial instinct to scoff at BABIP as the explanation. So I tested it against his 2014 season. And, sure enough, it’s very similar. I won’t trot out the charts, because I think you’re seeing where this is going. So far, his BABIP in April 2016 has been higher than years past, and perhaps it’s starting to reflect in a small uptick in his wRC+ and wOBA from the same month last year. Maybe he really has just had bad batted-ball luck in April.

The first two weeks of the season were brutal for Heyward, and after a string of games from April 20 to April 24 in which he had three multi-hit games, it started to look as though May was coming a little early. In his last two games, on Tuesday night and yesterday afternoon, he’s not gotten a hit, but his track record says the tides should start to turn soon.

This ended up being a harder piece to write than I anticipated, because the numbers were stubborn against a clear answer. Here’s my attempt to categorize, explain, and predict, though baseball resists.

In Stephen King’s 11.22.63, he repeatedly uses the word “obdurate” to describe a past fighting against being changed, and it feels a little apt here, too. Baseball feels a little bit resistant to clear-cut explanation sometimes. And of course, whereas King’s obdurate past was a fully knowable, understandable thing, baseball’s future is opaque to us. BABIP itself is a strange beast to figure out, as it can be hard to explain just why Heyward’s career BABIP goes up nearly thirty points from April to May and almost another thirty points from May to June. Whatever the case, as we watch the final days of this month and savor the wins that just keep coming, keep in mind that we have yet to see even close to the best of what Jason Heyward has to offer. History has shown, over the course of six previous seasons, that his numbers are going to spike as the weather warms and the season enters its second and third months.

But perhaps they won’t, and his numbers will stay low, and we’ll spend the rest of the season scratching our heads in frustration while trying to categorize, label, and explain the problem. But we’ll never quite find it, because maybe baseball is just a little bit obdurate, and a lot opaque.

Lead photo courtesy Jasen Vinlove—USA Today Sports

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