FanPost

Red Flags from Dom Brown's 2013 Season


Dom Brown is terrible. We all know that after being forced to watch him trip over himself in the outfield this whole trainwreck of a season. But I've been going through his all-star 2013 season, which is really more like an all-star month of May, trying to figure out how we (or perhaps good old Rubes) could have seen this coming, especially considering the Dom Brown trade rumors last winter that involved guys like Giancarlo Stanton and Jose Bautista.

First thing's first, I'm gonna ignore his fielding for this post. It's awful, we all know it's awful, and I don't need to throw around advanced stats to illustrate it, although they can and do (very much so). If you want an illustration of his fielding have a laugh at some GIFs of him misjudging flyballs like he's in the LLWS.

But let's look at his performance at the plate. They very first thing that jumps out from his 2013 season is his HR/FB%. At 19.3% it ranked 11th in MLB for 2013 and it's nearly twice his MLB average excluding 2013 (10.1%). HR/FB % is an extremely mean regressing stat, so it shouldn't come as a shocker when his HR/FB rate dipped to 7.9% in 2014. Never having shown any specific skillset that indicates a higher HR/FB% would be sustainable, this was almost certain to drop. I wouldn't have predicted that extreme of a drop, but there was certainly room for a good amount of regression.

His 2013 wRC+ of 123 is actually a bit lower than I would have guessed. As wRC+ is league, park, and, and context adjusted, we can compare his to guys like Stanton and Bautista, who stood at 135 and 133 respectively. While Stanton ranked even higher than Dom in HR/FB% during 2013, he has demonstrated an ability for sustaining that rate throughout his career, averaging a Ryan Howard-esque 25% of his fly balls resulting in HRs throughout his career. Bautista's HR/FB% has fluctuated a bit more, but his career rate of 16.4% indicated that he had a fairly average 2013 in terms of homer luck (17.3% in 2013).

I have no idea if there truly were offers for Dom Brown involving Stanton or Bautista. If there were, they probably included Phils prospects, etc. but still RAJ obviously screwed up (shocker). But there were most certainly offers we never heard about that teams which invest more money into their advanced stats departments would have been much more attentive to, maybe even trying to shop him around.

This was also just a real quick look through his 2013, I might dig a little deeper when I get some time. I'd be curious to see if you guys found any other things that stood out that would indicate Dom's 2013 was a flukey year.