Dance with Disco Dan

On September 18, 2017 Byron Buxton owns a .258/.320/.430 slash line for the Minnesota Twins. While there's little to write home about a .749 OPS, it's well past time to take note of what the hometown squad's centerfielder is doing. Despite a September surge in 2016, we haven't seen anything like this from Buxton before, and he's already vaulting himself into the conversation of the best the Twins have ever seen.
 
Looking at his 2017 as a whole, it's easily apparent that everything has been watered down due to such a slow start. What's less apparent without digging under the hood, is just how incredible he's been since. Rather than getting words in the way, let's allow the numbers to speak for themselves:
Since May 14: 99 G .284/.341/.481
Since the All Star Break (July 14): 46 G .323/.369/.622
Since August 6th: 40 G .333/.375/.653

What we see here, is an incredible surge over a relatively decent sample size. Extrapolating Buxton's numbers from the All Star Break over 162 games, we arrive at 21 doubles, 18 triples, 39 homers, 106 RBI, and 35 stolen bases. In other words, Buxton sustaining a 46 game second half over the course of a full season has his walking away with an MVP award (and that's even before considering his defense).
 
While it's fair to still hold out for a little more of a sustained sample, this isn't simply a replication of a September 2016 performance against watered down competition. Buxton has been raking against good pitchers, across multiple scenarios, for multiple months. Over the course of 2017, working with new hitting coach James Rowson, the Twins centerfielder rebuilt his swing at the big league level while never taking a trip back to Triple-A. The long and short of Buxton's transformation has been nothing short of incredible. Now reaping the fruits of his labor, he's flashing all of the tools that made him the top prospect in all of baseball.
 
It wouldn't be fair to solely focus in on Buxton's offense, even if that's where the most growth has come from. In the field, he's all but ran away with the American League CF Gold Glove award. Leading all fielders not named Mookie Betts in DRS, Buxton has bailed pitchers out with both his arm strength and his range. Looking at Baseball Savant (Statcast), Buxton still tops the charts across MLB in 4 star outs. With a catch probability registering between 26-50%, Buxton has had 27 opportunities, converting 26 of them into outs.
 
Things get even more nutty as you look at the newly introduced Outs Above Average metric. With 24 OAA, Buxton's individual total comes in ahead of every single team in the big leagues, with the closest number being the Rays 20 OAA. On balls Buxton can make a play on, he's been deemed to have an 86% expected catch rate, and in turn, has owned a 92% actual catch rate. When balls are put in Buxton's vicinity in the Twins outfield, he's added a 6% catch probability. Over the course of 2017, that in part, goes to illustrate why Twins pitchers have seen an uptick in their own numbers.
 
Simply put, Buxton has been the premier outfielder in all of Major League Baseball for virtually the entirety of 2017. When he's in centerfield, it's impossible not to see him as a game changing asset. What's changed, is that since the middle of the year, he's also become an incredible threat at the plate (and in turn on the basepaths). Instead of simply being a Gold Glove winner on an annual basis, this version of Byron Buxton is in the Most Valuable Player realm.
 
At just 23 years old, there's probably more to Buxton than we've seen thus far. For everyone else across the league, that's a scary thought to wrestle with. For those in Twins Territory, the only appropriate result is Buck Yeah!
 
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The other day, I was watching Moneyball, one of my favorite films. My favorite scene is when Billy Beane is in the room with a bunch of scouts saying the team should sign a bunch of questionable players. His response, as I'm sure most of you know, to all the criticisms he receives is "He gets on base." This got me thinking, how important is it to get on base?
 
Using Fangraphs, I collected a bunch of data from last season, focusing on the team as a whole rather than individual stats. My goal was to see which aspects of hitting (OBP, OPS, wOBA, etc) had the largest impact on the number of runs the team scored. Some of the stuff I found seemed obvious, other stuff was quite surprising.
 
For each statistic I ran a linear regression between total runs(y) and that statistic(x). I have reported the slope and correlation coefficient for each one:
AVG: slope=4.76(r=0.81)
OBP: slope=4.96 (r=0.89)
SLG: slope=2.91(r=0.90)
OPS: slope=2.04(r=0.94)
wOBA: slope=5.00(r=0.94)
BB%: slope=4.18(r=0.48)
ISO: slope=2.87(r=0.60)
HR: slope=1.47(r=0.53)
SB: slope=-0.08(r=-0.03)

It comes as no surprise that wOBA has both the strongest correlation and the most runs per percentage point of all the statistics I looked at. If anything, all this means is that wOBA truely is a great way to measure offensive value. In addition, the fact that OBP has a slightly larger impact than AVG indicates that getting on base via BB, HBP, Error, FC, etc. does create more run-scoring opportunities. However, the correlation between BB% and total runs was quite weak. Now that I think about it, this may be because a team can walk less and hit more and still recover their OBP, so this is really no different than AVG having a lower r-value than OBP. I'm surprised that SLG and OPS have a smaller impact than AVG and OBP, but I think this just exposes the weakness of those stats compared to wOBA. The fact that ISO has such a weak correlation with total runs further emphasizes that hitting for extra bases does not tell you as much as simply getting on base. I figured ahead of time that using HR and SB would provide weak correlations since they are counting stats, but it was interesting to see there is no correlation whatsoever between stolen bases and total runs scored.
 
I guess I didn't really learn all that much from doing this, but I can say the simple act of getting on base is more important to scoring runs than the business of how one gets on base (OBP vs AVG or BB%), and that wOBA is an awesome and useful statistic. So I guess Billy Beane was right, if a player gets on base, he's worth having on your team.
 
I'm new to Twins Daily and this is my first blog post! I love numbers but I also love the other aspects of the game, so as I continue to publish I promise not everything will be quite this dry
 
Thanks for reading and feel free to share your own thoughts and analysis!