Avila on Pace for Historic Season

There have been many outstanding catchers in the long storied history of the Detroit Tigers.  Player/manager Mickey Cochrane led the Tigers to a pennant in 1934 and a world championship in 1935.  Bill Freehan was an important cog of the great teams of the 1960's including the 1968 championship club.

Big Lance Parrish was a key figure on the dominant 1984 team.  The underrated Mickey Tettleton put up some great numbers for the power-hitting teams of the early 1990s. Finally, Pudge Rodriguez had a big year in 2004 and contributed significantly to the 2006 pennant winner.    

In the first half of this season, Alex Avila's numbers match up quite well with any of the above catchers.  The 25-year-old receiver is currently batting .304/.373/.545 with 10 home runs in 64 games as the Tigers primary catcher.  He leads all major league catchers in slugging (.548), OPS (.918) and wOBA (.395).

While his offensive contribution is obvious, he has also been solid defensively.  He has thrown out 39% of opposing base stealers which compares favorably to the MLB average of 28%.  He is fifth in the majors with a Total Zone of +4 meaning that he has saved the Tigers an estimated four runs over the average catcher by throwing out base runners and pitch blocking (avoiding passed balls, wild pitches).  Catcher defense will be discussed in more detail in a later post.

Avila is clearly having a fantastic season this year, but it might surprise some people how well his season stacks up to past Tigers catchers.  Now, we can't use a statistic such as OPS to compare players from different eras.  Otherwise a hitter like Freehan, who played in 1968, the year of the pitcher, would be at a disadvantage against Cochrane who played in a period of high-octane offense.

So, we will look across years using OPS+.  OPS+ is a batter's OPS adjusted for ballpark and league average.  The league average hitter has an OPS+ of 100.  Anything better than 100 is above average.  Anything less than 100 is below average.   Only about 10% of batters have an OPS+ of 135 or higher.  The left-handed batting Avila has an OPS+ of 156, which is really really good.  In fact, it places him sixth among American League batters regardless of position.

The table below shows that Avila currently has a better OPS+ than any Tigers catcher has ever put up in a full season.  Next on the list is York, who had a 151 OPS+ in his rookie year in 1937.  He was not a very good defensive catcher though and was only playing the position because he was blocked by future Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg at first base.  Freehan took the third and fourth spots on the list with 145 and 144 in 1968 and 1967.  Tettleton, Cochrane, Rodriguez and Parrish also made the list. 


Table 1: Best offensive seasons for Detroit Tigers Catchers.  

Player	Year	PA	OPS	OPS+
Alex Avila	2011	246	.918	156
Rudy York	1937	417	1.026	151
Bill Freehan	1968	635	.821	145
Bill Freehan	1967	618	.839	144
Mickey Tettleton	1991	608	.880	140
Rudy York	1938	557	.995	140
Mickey Cochrane	1935	522	.902	138
Ivan Rodriguez	2004	575	.893	136
Mickey Tettleton	1992	654	.851	136
Lance Parrish	1982	529	.868	135

Now, most sabermetric writers would point out that Alex has an elevated BABIP and that he may be playing over his head. I'm not going to dwell on that here, but I will say that it's a long season especially at the demanding catching position. Avila is catching a lot and sometimes plays designated hitter when he's not behind the plate. So, it will not be easy for him to keep his numbers quite as high as they are now.

So far though, he is on pace for a historic Tigers season. 

Note: Some data for this post were extracted from Baseball-Reference.  

Offense Down Across MLB

If you have noticed a lot of low batting averages in baseball this April, you are not imagining things.  As of the end of yesterday's games, the MLB batting average is .251.  If that keeps up for the whole season, it would be the lowest MLB batting average since 1972 (.244).  In other words, it would be the lowest batting average of the designated hitter era.  The table below shows that batting average reached as high as .271 in 1999 and was still as high as .268 as recently as 2007.  So, batting averages have dropped more than six percent in just four years.

Some may be thinking that April is cold and rainy and not very good for hitters, so let's compare this April to last April.  The MLB batting average in April, 2010 was .256 (compared to .257 overall), so .251 is low even for April. 

It's interesting that batting average is as low as it's been in forty years but, but everyone knows it's important to look Beyond Batting Average.  The ultimate team offensive measure is, of course, runs scored.  Teams have scored an average of 4.32 runs per game in 2010 which is the lowest number since 1992 (4.12 RPG).  Runs per game reached as high as 5.14 in 2000 and was still 4.80 in 2007.  Thus, we have seen a drop of 10% in offense in just four years and 16% since the height of the "homerun derby" era.  The historical trend in runs scored is shown in the table below.

Looking just at April, we see that runs per game has dropped from 4.57 in April, 2010.  So, there has been a more than 5% drop from last year to this year.

There are a few potential reasons for the decreased offense over the last few years. The most obvious one is steroids testing, but it's not the only one and perhaps not even the biggest one.  After all, steroids help pitchers as well as hitters.

If not steroids then what?  Baseball typically sees a surge in offense whenever there is expansion. There were two teams added in 1993 and two more in 1998, so one would have expected a big jump in offense even without the alleged increases in steroid use.  

Finally, we seem to be going through an era of extraordinary power pitching.  In fact,figure 3 below shows that batters are striking out at a greater rate this year (7.08 K per game) than ever before.

Whether this year is going to mark another significant drop in offense remains to be seen, but the balance of the game is definitely shifting from hitters towards the pitchers pitchers in a big way.   

Data for this article were obtained from Baseball-Reference and ESPN.