A few weeks ago, we took an inside look into Aaron Judge’s breakout year at the plate so far with some help from the guys at PDS baseball. Aaron Judge has been great. The Yankees have been great (so far). Aaron Judge is not the only reason these Yankees have been great.
With a stronger rotation (Pineda & Severino have thrown well), the classic Yankees dynamite back-end bullpen, and some hot starts at the plate, New York has greatly increased their odds of making the postseason, which you can find here.
This post isn’t about the entire Yankees lineup. It’s about a guy who has also changed his approach for the better: Brett Gardner.
Before we dive into the numbers, if you haven’t heard or checked out Brett Gardner’s path to the next level, I would strongly advise you to read this.
Now, to Mr. Brett Gardner, 2017 Edition. First, let’s look at the top left fielders in baseball as of this writing:
| Player | WAR |
| Corey Dickerson* | 1.9* |
| Brett Gardner | 1.6 |
| Marcell Ozuna | 1.5 |
| Michael Conforto | 1.4 |
| Justin Upton | 1.2 |
*Spends most of his time as a DH
Seeing that Dickerson spends most of his time as a DH, we get to give Brett Gardner the BLFIBSF (Best Left Fielder in Baseball So Far) Award. Congrats Brett!
Last year, Gardner finished the season with a 2.5 WAR, which was 9th best among left fielders in the MLB. This year, he is already over halfway to his production in only ¼ of the time.
What’s caused this jump? How do you go from 9th best to the best? Gardner is hitting for a lot more power, and doing a lot more of this:
[leadplayer_vid id=”5920A2F311966″]
Homeruns are cool. So far, this year, Brett thinks they are cool too: he already has as many homers as he had last year and again, we are only a ¼ of the way through the season.
Here are some other numbers to back up his breakout year at the plate:
| Year | OPS | wOBA | wRC+ |
| 2015 | .742 | .327 | 106 |
| 2016 | .713 | .317 | 97 |
| 2017 | .892 | .383 | 145 |
Brett Gardner has gone from being a speedy outfielder who made up for lack of production at the plate with good base running and defense to a great hitter on top of those skills.
I’m not just writing this to convince you that Brett Gardner is a great player now, I think that part is easy. I am more interested in what he’s doing to get there. Seeing that his mechanics haven’t changed that much, let’s look at some more numbers that tell us a little bit more about his approach.
Here are Gardner’s walk and strikeout rates from the last 3 years:
| Year | BB% | K% |
| 2015 | 10.4% | 20.6% |
| 2016 | 11.0% | 16.7% |
| 2017 | 12.8% | 21.2% |
Brett’s plate discipline has been improving every year, which we talked about being a factor in a hitter’s overall improvement year-to-year in my post on exit velocity.
What’s interesting is that in 2016 Gardner significantly improved his strikeout rate and started to put the ball in play more often. Usually we’d think this means he saw even better results at the plate; This is baseball we’re talking about here, so of course he didn’t.
2016 was his worst season in the past 3 years by far, so what has he been doing so far in 2017? He’s okay with striking out again. Strikeouts aren’t a great thing for a hitter, but they’re not always a bad thing either. If a speedy 5’11 corner outfielder isn’t losing any sleep over strikeouts, you shouldn’t’ either.
More walks and more strikeouts at the same time mean one thing to me, a hitter is becoming more selective and knows where he can do damage. With some tools from Baseball Savant, I did some digging to see if this was true:
And now so far in 2017:
Voila! He is in fact being more selective and swinging at better pitches to hit. And when he’s swinging at these better pitches he’s seeing better results…
This season, Brett used this refined selection and got back to focusing on the quality of his contact rather than the quantity of his contact. I am beginning to sound like a broken record here, but pulling the ball more and avoiding ground balls really does work for most guys! One more table (last one I promise) with the proof:
| Year | Pull % | Groundball % | Hard Hit % |
| 2015 | 34.9% | 45.3% | 26.2% |
| 2016 | 33.6% | 52.3% | 25.8% |
| 2017 | 41.2% | 40.2% | 34.3% |
The guy who some coaches think is supposed to try to put the ball on the ground: the speedy, left-handed, under-sized outfielder, has a career high hard hit % and is having his best season at the plate all while putting the ball on the ground less than he ever has.
Now let’s address the elephant in the room: as a left-handed hitter, Gardner is at an obvious advantage hitting at Yankee stadium half the time. Before this year, he never fully took advantage of it.
This year, Gardner is slugging .619 at home vs .414 on the road and 5 of his 7 homeruns have come at Yankee Stadium.
I’m not sure whether Brett finally realized these advantages of hitting at Yankee stadium as a lefty on his own or someone tipped him off to it, but kudos to Brett for taking a sip of the Kool-Aid.
For reference, here are the 15 best parks to hit homers in for lefties, via FanGraphs:
Brett Gardner will never win a MVP award, but he’s been a huge part of the successful start of 2017 for the Yankees. Gardner isn’t opposed to striking out or taking a free base if he doesn’t get a pitch he can do damage with. The pitches he can do damage with? He hasn’t been missing them up to this point and is taking advantage of the short porch in Yankee Stadium.
Would Gardner be having all this success, say somewhere else outside of New York? That’s a different post for a different day. But for now, let’s all enjoy Brett Gardner at his best.
If you’re headed to the Big Apple anytime soon to catch a Yankee game, be sure to buy some seats in right field and bring a glove. That porch is a great place to catch a souvenir from Brett Gardner, a 2017 edition.
