It’s Not Traditional, But Happ Working Atop the Order

There are a lot of things that aren’t working in the Chicago Cubs offense. But I’m not here for that noise. You can share those posts on your social media accounts all you want, I’m sitting here looking for the bright spots. Right now, Ian Happ *leading off* is a bright spot.

Yes, when you look at Happ’s traditional stats you immediately look at his batting average. I’m not gonna sit here and sell you on an idea that a .155 batting average is good. But, I will dive into this a little more later. Is his .207 SLG good? I won’t sell that bill of goods either right now. Rather, I want to discuss his on base percentage.

Look, batting a ball to get on is the best case scenario and it does the most to help a ballclub. When you are atop an order, you want that guy to be able to work counts and get on. When they do so by batting a ball, that puts more pressure on an opposing pitcher and defense. But, reaching via the walk works just as well.

Going into Thursday, Happ has an overall OBP of .338, which is right around the mean among lead-off hitters. But diving further into his performance we see how effective he’s actually been. When Happ has led off an inning, he’s getting on-base at a .367 clip. When he’s the first better off the game, that jumps to .438!

This is what you want, that’s elite level OBP and is setting up the offense.

Looking further into Happ’s performance, there’s a bit of bad luck that’s come along in his game.

I like to look to BABIP as a measure of how lucky or unlucky a player has been. BABIP, or batting average on balls in play, tells you how often a player reaches base safely on any ball struck that doesn’t result in a home run. We know, over the course of thousands upon thousands of games, a league average BABIP is .300. Anything above that mark [can] suggests you’ve had a little luck thrown your way and a little below suggests a bit of unluckiness. (The third option is you created more or less luck throughout the season).

BABIP alone (like any metric) doesn’t tell the whole story. There are other factors, like hard hit % or how often a player hits a ball with a high average expectancy into a shift. BABIP can’t account for balls that are hit 110mph that a player made an incredible play on, or the soft dribbler that squeaks through a hole.

In 2021, Happ has a .222 BABIP. Over Happ’s career, he owns a .322 BABIP.

So, what does this tell us? One of two things, he’s either very unlucky in 2021, or the contact he’s making isn’t giving him a chance at reaching base. So, how do we decipher these things? Well, a couple of ways. First, let’s look at how often he’s hitting the ball hard.

In 2021, Happy has a 33.3% hard hit rate and is hitting 52.8% of the balls at a medium rate. These are both just a bit different from career norms (35% hard and 48% med). So he is hitting the ball less hard (weird verbage) but it shouldn’t be enough to tilt the scales of BABIP so much so that he’s 100 points below his career norm or 72 points below league average. Even at his lower hard hit rate, Happ rates in the 80th percentile of all MLB hitters.

So… What’s next?

We can look at barrels, but I find a lot of similarities between barrels and hard hit. When you barrel a ball you more than likely hit that ball hard.

So I look towards wOBA and xwOBA.

Oh boy, another metric… (confused face emoji, disgruntled face emoji, angry face emoji). Essentially, wOBA is an all encompassing offensive stat. xwOBA is the expected results considering his efforts (essentially tying in things like hard hit rates, launch angle, sprint speed,, etc.)

Happ currently has a .263 wOBA with an expected wOBA (or xwOBA) of .349. If you factor the 2015 season through the 2019 season, Happ’s .349 xwOBA would be 60th in baseball. But more importantly, over the course of a full season these two numbers traditionally fall pretty close to each other. With Happ’s actual wOBA sitting 86 points lower than his xwOBA, it suggests Happ has been a victim of bad luck.

In this game, throughout it’s history, luck almost always finds a way to turn around. When you are hitting the ball as hard as he is, and you see other metrics (BABIP and xwOBA) suggest he’s performed better than his results.

Of course, there is the swing-and-miss factor in Happ’s game. In 2021, Happ is striking out 28.8% of the time. This is his highest rate since his 2018 season, and only 1.5% higher than his 2020 rate – when Happ was all the rage amongst Cubs fans.

The flip side, Happ is walking at a rate higher than he’s ever had (17.8%). While the fans will scream out to their little leaguers that “a walk is as good as a hit” they don’t seem to share that narrative when watching professional baseball. Regardless, expanded across 650 plate appearances, Happ is on pace for 115 walks in 2021. That would eclipse the 95 walks Kris Bryant had in 2017, and represent the most since Sammy Sosa’s 116 in 2001.

In 2019, the last full season, Happ would have edged out Mike Trout with his 115 walks. Anytime you edge out Mike Trout in anything you’re doing something good.

Really, fans get so uber focused on the traditional and easy to understand stats. Things like batting average is easy to understand. We know .300 is good, .155 is bad. No advanced metric will tell you .155 isn’t bad, it is. But when you look at the actual goal of a lead-off hitter – to get on-base – Happ is doing that, especially when literally leading off a game or inning.

And that’s the most important part, right!? Getting on in your first at bat, or starting off an inning getting on? He’s doing that at, or near elite levels so far this season. Sure, he strikes out, he will always strike out at a high rate. But he’s doing the other things, and he’ll start getting rewarded for doing it. This is why so many people tell the naysayers to have patience.

Baseball isn’t a game like football, there isn’t instant gratification in this game. You don’t practice all week to have a perfect performance on Sunday. In baseball, you work incredibly hard to perfect your skills – and you can still get poor outcomes when you do. The beauty of the game is, over 162, things almost always turn around.