Matt Holliday: Good Hitter, Baseball Player

Pop quiz, hot shot: Name Matt Holliday‘s best offensive season. Unless you’re a filthy cheater, or are strong of intuition and sense a bit of chicanery, then you probably answered something like: Oh, man, I don’t know, one of those Coors seasons. Maybe 2007? That was a long time ago. What am I, some kind of baseball encyclopedia? This is what the internet is for. Alright, alright, hypothetical reader/question answerer—you make a good point. That is what the internet is for. Good thing we’re all here. So we’ve had some fun, I’ve managed to fabricate this entire opening paragraph out of nonsense, and now it’s time for the answer. It’s this season, the one happening right now. Matt Holliday is currently on pace for the best offensive season of his career.

Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about some of his numbers and how we’ve come to believe what we believe about Matt Holliday’s current offensive season. Looking at some traditional stats—the stalwarts, the ol’ comfy reliables—the assertion that Holliday is currently out-batting his former selves might seem a bit strange. We’ll look at that vaguely rememberable 2007 season and compare it to what ZIPS believes Holliday’s 2012 numbers will settle at when all is said and done. To wit:

Matt Holliday 2007 – Hits: 216, HR: 36, RBI: 137, SB: 11, AVG: .340, OBP: .405, SLG: .607

Matt Holliday 2012 – Hits: 185, HR: 29, RBI: 107, SB: 7, AVG: .317, OBP: .399, SLG: .539

Looking at these numbers, it’s hard to imagine that 2012 will be a stronger performance. Literally zero current numbers meet or best the 2007 numbers, but again, I’m being coy. Let’s try a bit of context and see how that goes. I don’t know, it could be fun. Maybe. The MLB-wide offensive environment in 2007 was more favorable to hitters. More hitters performed better in 2007 than they are in 2012, so even while Holliday was admittedly raking, so were a lot of people. There’s also that pesky little detail of where Holliday played all of his home games, Coors Field. Only the most ridiculous and insanely beneficial ballpark for any hitter to make contact with baseballs in the history of forever. Humidor, no humidor, hitters like to hit there, and it has a very large impact on their raw numbers. It makes them look really awesome. So in order to combat all this confusing noise, really smart people have devised a couple of statistics that should help us make sense of all this. They are OPS+ and wRC+ and they attempt to normalize these offensive measures by accounting for league-wide and home-park adjustments. Consider wRC+ the wOBA version of OPS+. Here’s what 2007 and 2012 (no ZIPS projection) look like:

Matt Holliday 2007 – OPS+: 150, wRC+: 150

Matt Holliday 2012 – OPS+: 159, wRC+: 161

There we go. That’s making more sense. Once you take into consideration Holliday’s respective home ballparks, and do some fancy accounting for the league-wide offensive numbers of any given season, you start to see how impressive Holliday’s 2012 really is. His 2011 was also pretty amazing, with marks of 151 (OPS+) and 154 (wRC+) besting 2007 as well. The current smallish fly in the ointment is Holliday’s current batting average on balls in play, or BABIP. His 2012 BABIP, as of this writing, is sitting at .361. That’s pretty darn high. That means he’s been getting a few extra liners to drop in front of defenders and some bonus ground balls finding some fortunate holes through the infield. Some guys get all the breaks. So at the end of the season, will Holliday still manage to best the mythical 2007? I’m going to go with “Probably, yes, very likely.” Holliday’s career BABIP is an astounding .347, which is freakish and way higher than a normal batter and kind of totally nuts. If we limit our PA threshold (5,000) to guys have played and been successful for a long time like Matthew, the batters since 2000 who can hang with Holliday’s career BABIP are Derek Jeter (.350), Ichiro (.347), Miguel Cabrera (.345), Manny Rameriez (.342), and David Wright (.342). In other words, really, really good hitters. To image that Holliday can keep lacing hard hit baseball all over the diamond for a month or two more suddenly doesn’t seem that ridiculous. He’s been doing it at an above-average clip for years, and even accounting for a bit of regression, should still challenge and best his younger, more home-park aided self. The guy has always been an elite hitter, and he’s been getting better as he ages. What a freak.

It would be fun to get in some time machine and go back to 2007 and tell Matt Holliday about how his older self is still just raking and even doing it better in 2012, and then note the look on the face of 2007-Holliday. It would be fun, but it would also be a really strange and inefficient use of a time machine and time traveling technology. You have a time machine! Go check out some dinosaurs! Stop Hitler! Talk to Jesus! Why are you wasting this scientific miracle by going back to 2007 and talking to Matt Holliday? You need to reexamine your priorities in life because they are super weird and messed up.

Kyle writes baseball nonsense at The Trance of Waiting. You can follow him on Twitter @AgainstKyle.