DJ LeMahieu: Can he keep it up?

Analyzing DJ LeMahieu's offense so far in the 2019 season. Can he keep it up or will he end up being a fluke?

When DJ LeMahieu signed with the New York Yankees for $24 million over 2 years, it seemed that a reunion between Machado and the New York Yankees was improbable. Fans of the Bronx Bombers took their anger to Twitter, berating the Yankees for missing up on the chance of a superstar player. Troy Tulowitzki was supposed to be the Yankees’ every day starting SS while LeMahieu was supposed to be a super-utility defensive infielder. Given that Tulowitzki had a prolific injury history, it was assumed that LeMahieu would get a few games to play while some of the players were injured or needed rest.

Fast Forward until the all-star break and DJ LeMahieu has become the Yankees’ MVP (yes even better than Sanchez), posting a leading WAR of 3.5 (0.9 WAR away from his career-high in Colorado) for the Yankees and has the highest wRC+ of 2nd baseman (142) out of all 2nd baseman in the entire MLB. His wOBA of .385 also leads all 2nd baseman in the entire league and got the nod as the starter of the all-star game in Cleveland. Tulowitzki has been nothing but a memory for Yankee fans and the next super-utility infielder has been Gio Uresha, who has been nothing short of salient in the Yankees team.

When the tables were turned against the Yankees, facing a plethora of injures from Hicks, Judge, Sanchez, Stanton, Severino, Betances, Andujar, Bird, German, etc. (god there are so many), the few remaining had to step it up or the dreams of another Yankee championship will go up in flames. Yet, despite the odds, they performed and the person leading the charge has been DJ Lemahieu.

DJ LeMahieu has not won many awards throughout his career. He has 3 gold gloves, 3 all-star selections, and a batting title. Although, if he continues at the pace he is going at right now, it is very likely that we will see DJ win another award.

Let’s take a look at DJ’s stats and see what has made him such a great hitter.

Plate Discipline

One thing that we like to see in a player’s improvement is their approach to the plate against pitchers and how that has allowed him to see the ball better or hit the ball more consistently. For the first part, we are going to be looking at the OBP, BB%, and the K% to get an overview of how he is doing.

Here are the tables for the mentioned statistics above.

Like all great hitters, DJ LeMahieu has been showing signs of improvement on all of the statistics relating to plate discipline. His K% has decreased although it is not at an all-time low, and his BB% has increased throughout the years as well. This should be a clear sign that these two aspects are not a product of Coors Field and that DJ has improved these aspects of the game through sheer skill. DJ’s OBP of .392 and K% of 14.00% does not record lows, but an OBP of .392 is the 2nd best in LeMaheiu’s career and the K% is the 3rd lowest of DJ’s career. An increase in his walk percentage combined with a decrease in his strikeout % has contributed to his high OBP. (His BB% is less impressive as it is only the 4th highest in his career.)

In addition to less K’s and more BB’s, DJ LeMahieu also boasts one of the highest BABIP in baseball (.372!) that allowed him to reach on base frequently and obtain one of the highest averages in baseball (.344). Considering that DJ LeMahieu relies on a high BABIP as a ‘contact’ hitter and his ability to get walks is lacking (compared to other hitters), it shows that DJ is fulfilling that role and will most likely thrive for the rest of the season.

Here is a graph below of DJ’s BABIP.

DJ LeMahieu’s BABIP has been trending upward, albeit very slightly throughout the entire career. Although his BABIP has decreased from his 2016 year, he increased it again in the Bronx during the 2019 season, signaling a good return for DJ. Although the trend looks to be very high and promising for DJ LeMahieu who relies on his BABIP to produce results, we cannot assume that he will always maintain this high BABIP and that it can vacillate between good and bad.

Despite these optimistic metrics that show how good DJ LeMahieu is, there are also other metrics that can showcase DJ’s approach to the plate and how much damage he has done. DJ LeMahieu has gotten much fewer pitches in the zone this season, only seeing 49.3% of pitches in the zone. However, he has swung much more in the zone (65.9%). He is an aggressive hitter, posting a career-high 18.7% on 1st pitch swing%, a 46.6% swing rate, and a 27.8 chase% rate. Despite the high chase rate, he has also produced one of the highest chase contact%, posting a 70.7% chase contact rate, the third-highest since the start of Statcast. He whiffs quite a bit, posting his 2nd highest whiff rate of 14.7%.

Overall, DJ LeMahieu seems like to have returned back to his old prime self when playing back in the Bronx instead of Coors Field. The walk %, K%, OBP, and BABIP have seemed to reverted back into prime DJ when he won the batting champion in 2016 and although he has swung more, whiffed more, and chased more, his contact ability has allowed him to outweigh his defaults when it comes to his batting approach and maintain at a high level of performance.

Overall Grade: A-

Harder Hitting = Better Hitter

As the title suggests, we are mainly going to analyze the hitting of DJ LeMahieu and whether his swing has enabled him to hit better (when we mean better, we mean harder). First, DJ LeMahieu is posting his highest exit velocity season average (91.4) and his highest barrel rate as well (6.3%). As if that wasn’t an indication that DJ is back to prime form, his hard hit% is 45.20%, his second-highest rate (right behind his 2016 record).

Let’s take a look at multiple graphs to see if we can notice any trends from his past performances.

DJ’s trend of continuing upward should be a very bright sign for all Yankee fans that DJ is the real deal and not just a flash in the pan. His ability to maintain and even increase his exit velocity and barrel% shows that he is making good contact and as a result, he is going to put the ball in play frequently. Despite the increase in these statistics, however, he doesn't seem to increase or decrease his xwOBA, a sign that he makes trade-offs. Although he has posted a high barrel rate, his strikeout rate has been the highest in the last couple of years and his walks have decreased, leading to the conclusion that the xwOBA he posts will be consistent year to year.

In terms of where DJ LeMahieu has hit on the field, his approach to where to hit the ball has not changed significantly although there are a few notable changes. The biggest thing to note is his increase in Pull% as it increased by about 5% from his 2016 season. His hard hit% is also at a season-high, posting a 37.60% hard hit% as opposed to the 35.20% hard-hit rate from the 2016 season. He decreased his medium% by 6.5% from 2017 and kept his soft% relatively stable.

But what is the point of hitting the ball hard if it doesn’t carry or get over the fielders for a hit? Never fear, because we can also look at DJ’s LD% and GB%. DJ’s ability to hit line drives is up from 21% last season (24.70% this season), but it is not a career-high. What is impressive is that DJ LeMahieu has kept his GB% the lowest in his career (49.10%) while also increasing his FB% from the 2017 season (26.20%). As a result of hitting more flyballs, his HR/FB% is also the highest in his career (with 17.10%).

If we were to correlate these statistics with hitter tendencies, we could make the conclusion that DJ is definitely gaining some power as his ability to hit harder shows his faster bat speed, and his higher LD% shows a better barrel rate and slightly higher launch angle than in the past.

Grade: A-

Consistent or Haphazard?

In this section, we are mainly going to go over DJ LeMahieu’s splits and see whether his ability to hit has been greatly fluxed by one team or performance or that his ability to hit well has been consistent throughout the entire season.

First, we are going to check the splits for DJ LeMahieu and see whether his performance greatly decreases when he is going against a right-handed or left-handed pitcher, against the shift, and in high leverage or low leverage situation.

**The data I am going to post below comes directly from Fangraphs, so I just wanted to make sure that I give credit where it is due*

Okay … , but BA doesn’t tell us the entire story. We need more numbers to make DJ LeMahieu’s case much stronger. Let’s take a look at the advanced analytics for DJ LeMahieu’s case.

Looking at the statistics above, DJ LeMahieu has no particular location problem or situational problems when playing in the MLB. He is so dominant as the advanced analytics has corresponded with the increase in batting average. Managers must be frustrated knowing that whatever left-handed or right-handed pitcher they choose against LeMahieu, he will dominate as shown by his 152 wRC+ and 139 wRC+ respectively. In addition, Yankee stadium has shown to have no significant problem to DJ LeMahieu’s hitting ability, hitting a 152 wRC+ at home while posting a 130 wRC+ at the road.

(One thing I would like to note about Yankee stadium is that it does not significantly help hitters as many people on twitter have commented. If we check the park factor on the New York Yankees (101 btw), the ballpark does not really help enhance a player’s ability as does with other ballparks such as Coors Field).

However, the real gem at looking at these statistics is how clutch DJ Lemahieu has been with runners in scoring position. Usually, when players are on base, there is more stress on the hitter to get the runs in and as a result, it would cause a decrease of ability for the hitter. However, DJ LeMahieu has shown the opposite, increasing 0.038 points in the wOBA and having a 79 point difference in the wRC+ with runners in scoring position. In the New York Yankees, we give him the nickname of the “Machine”. He has certainly lived up to his name, as shown with his ability to get runners scored and being a key part of this 2019 New York Yankee team.

The next section will explore DJ’s ability to hit certain types of pitches and how one particular type of pitch may or may not be a weakness to him.

Taking a glance at LeMahieu’s statistics, we notice that DJ LeMahieu is regaining his former dominance against fastballs and curveballs (especially fastballs which allowed him to hit a career season when he played in Colorado during the 2016 season). However, an interesting thing to note from all of these statistics is that LeMahieu is actually hitting career highs when going against sliders and cutters, a sign that he is adjusting or he is getting good luck. Indeed, if we want to find out whether DJ is adjusting to these pitches or is having some good luck, we need to analyze his expected stats and compare it to his real statistics.

Taking a look that these statistics, we can see that DJ LeMahieu continues his dominance with the fastballs and OffSpeed pitches (although offspeed encompasses a lot of the pitches), so we know that DJ LeMahieu has returned to form at least in terms of hitting against fastballs. The thing to note about here is DJ’s wOBA against Breaking pitches, which is significantly higher than his expected wOBA. By taking a look at these numbers, we can evaluate the although DJ might regress a little bit, he is still going to continue to be a great hitter for the Yankees and a great asset. His consistency across multiple types of pitches shows that pitchers can’t truly rely on one pitch in order to get him out. (although he would probably perform worse if he were to go against pitches that had a sharp curveball).

Overall Grade: B+

Conclusion

Although defense and fielding is an important aspect to analyze, this article mainly looked into the hitting of DJ LeMahieu, which constituted enough of your time before you got bored and move on to something else.

My thoughts: DJ LeMahieu, in my opinion, this year was not supposed to be good. No offense for DJ fans, I thought he would be average to below-average noticing his below-average production from the last years. In my eyes, I would have taken Manny Machado over DJ LeMahieu due to his superb defense that makes Machado slightly consistent. (His hitting is good, but I am not sure how good his peak is compared to other hitters like Freddie Freeman and how consistent he can play like that). His average from the last few years have been marks down involving everything including wOBA, SLG, and wRC+ because he has been playing in Coors Field. I know some people still hold on the belief that he is a consistent hitter and that he will bring production to wherever he goes. But I was skeptical, especially because he couldn’t match the numbers didn’t match to other superstars such as Aaron Judge or Giancarlo Stanton. However, my ideas of DJ LeMahieu slowly began to change as I began to follow his day-to-day performance and noticed that he always got a hit. I would see him on TV a few times and noticed the way he hit the ball, hard, but not hard enough to get a home run. He makes a good leadoff man and whenever a RISP appeared, DJ would (most of the time) drive them in with his superhuman ability.

I am not sure of how DJ LeMahieu will play in the future, but one thing is sure. I am sure going to enjoy the show that DJ puts up with the Yankees this season.