It’s not hard to see that Byungho Park struggled for the Minnesota Twins in 2016. A simple look at his triple-slash line will suffice, as he hit just .191/.275/.409 in 62 games before he was banished to Triple-A Rochester and eventually saw his season end with wrist and hand injuries which required surgery.
It’s also not hard to see when Park started struggling. As we’ve noted earlier, Park cruised into early May with a batting line of .268/.351/.598 through 25 MLB games. Basically, through five weeks he was a one-man wrecking crew despite still striking out nearly 30 percent of the time. But therein lies the issue. Here’s a list of the qualified hitters who struck out more than 30 percent of the time last season:
- Chris Davis – 32.9 percent
- Chris Carter – 32 percent
- Mike Napoli – 30.1 percent
What do all of those guys have in common? No, they aren’t all named Chris — Mike Napoli sort of throws a wrench into that mix — but they all have significant power along with the ability to take a walk. They all possess the sort of ceiling one might envision for Park, but the issue is that of 146 qualified hitters — in other words, 3.1 plate appearances per team game played — only three batters reached that mark. It’s very hard to sustain that kind of strikeout rate and still get enough playing time to remain viable. Park didn’t exactly walk to the same level of these guys, but he wasn’t far off either, with an above-average rate of 8.6 percent in 244 big-league plate appearances.
Anyway, Park hit the skids immediately after that 25-game sampling. He hit just .143/.227/.293 — Napoli ended his season on a similar stretch — over the final 37 games and struck out 53 times in 150 plate appearances (35.3 percent). Park went down to Rochester, did mostly Park-like things like hitting .224/.297/.526 with 10 home runs in 31 games and ultimately saw his season end on Aug. 10.
Park told Mike Berardino of the St. Paul Pioneer Press in late August when he was in town to have surgery that the wrist and hand stuff had been bothering him for a while. “It’s been bothering me,” Park told Berardino in a column dated Aug. 24, 2016. “Not seriously, but the pain has been there time to time.”
Since we can’t be totally sure when Park was and wasn’t feeling the pain, we obviously can’t discount it. How to weigh it against something like, for instance, pitchers seeing what he could and could not hit and exploiting it is difficult to do. Basically, all that can be done is to break down his full season and see if there are any tendencies at play.
And in short: there sure are.
Baseball Savant is a wonderful website that MLB.com recently acquired, and it has a database search that permits users to find virtually any information they may desire. With it, we can deduce how Park fared on certain types of pitches, including what gave him trouble and what pitches he feasted on.
The primary worry with Park was that he’d struggle with high-end velocity, since that isn’t necessarily an attribute in abundance in the KBO. Many of the pitchers in that league thrive with deception and good breaking/offspeed stuff, which makes the heater a big hurdle to climb coming over to the states.
Park held his own against curves last year and did some damage on sliders as well. Here’s a breakdown of how Park fared against certain types of pitches last season:
- Breaking pitches (curves, sliders): .220 batting average, .542 slugging percentage
- Offspeed pitches (changeups): .143 batting average, .238 slugging percentage
- Fastballs (two- and four-seam and cutters): .189 batting average, .414 slugging percentage
It’s not surprising changeups gave him trouble — they’re tricky. But this gives us a pretty good indication of what we were looking for. Park struggled with fastballs but when he connected gave them a pretty good ride — based on isolated power (SLG-AVG) — but really thrived on breaking pitches.
But does this give us enough proof that Park struggled with high-end velocity, as was believed could be the issue? Not necessarily. Not all fastballs are created equal, of course. Fortunately, Baseball Savant also lets us break down how a player fared against pitches at certain velocities.
Let’s take a look at how Park fared against pitches at certain velocities (and up). So for instance, when it says “95 mph” it means pitches at that speed and higher (again, average and slugging percentage):
- 95 mph – .050, .200
- 94 mph – .103, .256
- 93 mph – .105, .211
- 92 mph – .133, .240
- 91 mph – .168, .316
- 90 mph – .165, .294
- <90 mph – .219, .533
Yikes. Worse yet, 90 mph isn’t even league-average velocity. More on that in a second.
Park was 1-for-20 on pitches over 95 mph, with a home run against Michael Pineda (see below) as his only hit against such pitches with seven strikeouts (35 percent rate). Basically speaking, Park feasted on below-average fastballs and breaking stuff when things went well, and was eaten up by average to above-average fastballs and changeups. That’s not a very good mix.
For one more test, let’s look at the AL average velocity as a dividing line. For four- and two-seam fastballs in the AL in 2016, Fangraphs.com has the average velocity at roughly 92 mph, for ease of rounding. Four-seamers were at 92.4 mph and two-seamers were at 92.
Here’s how Park fared on pitches above and below this threshold (AVG, SLG):
- Above average velo (92+): .133, .240
- Below average velo: (92-): .223, .504
Basically speaking, we can logically deduce that the fears of Park being able to catch up to MLB-level velocity were well-founded. Now, since we don’t know how much of that was due to injury, we can’t completely discount that even despite the fact that the findings are rather stark.
To the Twins’ benefit, they get to find out what Park is capable of in a larger sample size, as he’s cleared waivers and will remain in the organization. It’s probably not a terribly likely proposition that his bat will somehow quicken up, but weirder things have happened. If Park is a sunk cost at $9.25 million, at least the Twins will have the opportunity to find out what he’s capable of in a larger sample size with some time to get his feet under him in Rochester. But is it terribly likely that he can approach what he did in his first 25 MLB games over the long haul? It doesn’t look terribly likely.
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