Not Silky Smooth – Brian Dozier

Photo courtesy of Keith Allison.

Brian Dozier should not be on your fantasy baseball team.  But if you are stuck in an AL Only league with 12 teams, you might just have him on your bench as an emergency option.  If you find yourself in that position, this might just help you squeeze some value out of him.

Before the 2012 season began not many fans (even among the most tuned in Twins fans) knew who Brian Dozier was. And then, fresh off the heels of a hot-start in Triple-A Rochester, the Twins promoted Dozier to the Big Leagues and let him loose at shortstop. From there, Dozier played through struggles for much of the year before finishing the season back in Rochester, being sent down just before rosters expanded in September, and would not return until 2013.

This year Brian Dozier is back in the middle infield, but he’s on the other side of the diamond, manning second base and playing pretty good defense. Unfortunately, the offensive skills that made Dozier the Twins’ Minor League Player of the Year in 2011 have not been consistently on display in Minnesota, and though his first  139 games he’s hitting just .233/.284/.340, almost exactly what he’s hit though 48 games in AAA (.232/.286.337).  He has not shown that he has made an adjustment to MLB pitching in his second year in Minnesota, raising his OPS+ from 67 to just 72 (where 100 is league average).

To get a better idea of what that looks like, here is Brian Dozier’s heat map compared to an average MLB player (reds and oranges represent positive value (good), blues and purples represent negative value (bad)).

In the past two seasons, Dozier has a batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of just .268.  If he had a track record of success you could almost write this off as an extended string of bad luck, since about 30% of all balls put into play fall for hits, but it is more likely that Dozier is struggling to make solid contact with big league pitches, and ends up with more than his share of weak contact, leading to more outs.  On pitches out of the strike zone, Dozier is swinging 31.1% of the time, while swinging just 42.5% of the time at pitches inside the zone, which means he’s swinging at more balls and less strikes than an average player, which probably contributes to the weak contract and low BABIP.

When I think about weak contact, I think about breaking balls, mostly curve balls and sliders. These are pitches that are meant to deceive the hitter; pitchers try to get hitters to swing in once place while the ball goes somewhere else.  Let’s take a look at Brian Dozier’s heat maps, again compared to an average player, but this time we will break the pitch types out to include only fastballs (top) and only curve balls and sliders (bottom).

Essentially, if you throw Brian Dozier a fastball in the strike zone, he knows what to do with it.  He will use his above average contact skills to put the bat on the ball and on occasion, like this past Sunday, he will deposit the baseball in the outfield seats.  But if you throw him a breaking ball, even if you throw it right down the middle of the strike zone, Dozier cannot do a thing with it.  Suddenly his contact skills are working against him, he’ll make just enough contact to put the ball weakly into play, if at all.

What all of this means is that against pitchers with mediocre breaking balls and off-speed offerings, Brian Dozier might be worth a look (you know, against the Jake Peavy, Joe Saunders, and Doug Fister types).

Defensively he’s been much better at second base than he was at short stop, above average in both Total Zone Fielding and by BIS Defensive Runs Saved. But unless you are playing in a league that tracks advanced defensive stats, he will not be doing you any good.

*Brian Dozier has been in a band named Silky Smooth since high school.