A Study of Second-Half Surges

The Red Sox will start their second half on Friday night as a division leading team. They have combined an average offense with strong pitching and defense to win games. It hasn’t always been pretty or even exciting, but wins are wins, and the Red Sox have many of them. The reliance on pitching and defense this year is different from years past, when Red Sox squads tended to win primarily with their offense. The current high-contact, low-power approach is different, but has been enough to get the job done. Over the last few months I have written about several aspects of the team’s offense, and considering these got me wondering about what we can expect from the offense the rest of the way.

One place to look into this is half-splits. In doing so we can get a sense for how the current lineup of Red Sox hitters have fared over the two halves of the season– callously defined as the blocks of games before and after the All-Star break. These splits are not necessarily the most predictive tool to use, but we can look to see if the 2017 group of Red Sox players is teeming with guys who typically perform better as the weather gets warmer and they have had a chance to get 300ish plate appearances under their belts. Or, if instead this is a group of players whose performance has been more apt to succumb to the powerful grind of a long season.

Before getting into first-half/second-half comparisons, it is worth noting that by FanGraphs’ wOBA, which I will use throughout because I can more readily reconstruct it from raw data than BP’s TAv, many of the 2017 Red Sox just completed a first half above their typical first half standards. These are players who accumulated at least 75 plate appearances this year with the Red Sox and 75 PA total across all of the first halves of their career.

While they are a below average offense, many of the individual performances have been better, even if only slightly in many cases, than in these players’ past first halves. That is not the cleanest comparison, as the sample size of plate appearances can differ wildly for some guys, but it is worth noting. As far as the Red Sox offense is concerned, the obvious problem is that a couple of the key cogs in the offensive machine, Hanley Ramirez and Dustin Pedroia, have underperformed relative to previous selves, and the over-performance of some players (e.g., Sandy Leon and Christian Vazquez) still leaves a lot to be desired. A sub-.300 wOBA is simply not good.

Getting back on track with the original question of interest, here are career-up-to-2016 first-half to second-half comparisons for these same players:

Four guys have tended to be worse in the second half, steady old Pedroia is the same beast everyday, and six guys have tended to be better in the second half. If Mookie hits better as the season goes, as he has the last few seasons, we are in for another treat. The troubling thing you will note about the table is that the everyday guys, Hanley, Pedroia, Xander Bogaerts, Mitch Moreland, and Jackie Bradley Jr., all tend to be basically the same or worse in the second half. The ‘everyday’ part of that sentence likely underscores why that is the case. Being in the lineup day-in and day-out is very hard. If all those guys trend downward in the second half as they have done in the past, then the pitching-and-defense side of this team is going to need to be even better than it has been to keep things pointed at the top of the standings.

Given all the expectations and suggestion of a second-half resurgence from Hanley Ramirez, I was surprised to see that for his career he has been basically the same guy before and after the All-Star break. If the idea is that this year the four day reprieve from baseball will help his ailing shoulder, then he probably should have taken a trip to the 10-day DL before now. I suspect it is not that, but rather a melange of wishful thinking and recency bias after last year when he hit 22 of his 30 home runs in the second half. But overall the data do not really support the idea that he is about to take off:

His career has second-half outbursts as bookends, but in the middle there are more instances of poorer second halves (6) than better ones (3). Even if you toss out 2015, in which his second half was derailed by injury, the story remains that he has been, on average, the same player regardless of the All-Star game having been played or not.

I really don’t mean this to come across as doom-and-gloom and picking nits about a first place team and its slugger. Rather, I am highlighting a characteristic of the players that might suggest the offense is not about to become a standout strength for the next three (and hopefully four) months. If they add or promote a competent third baseman – Manny Machado is capable of letting bygones be bygones, right? – that will certainly help production. If Xander and JBJ’s up-to-now lesser second halves have primarily been a function of young players not totally knowing how to handle the demands of a long season, then perhaps, in their third and fourth seasons, respectively, they are better equipped to hold their first half performances. But then even suggesting that idea makes me worry about Andrew Benintendi.

In the end, this 2017 team is good, and will start the second half with a 3.5 game lead in the division and all projection systems giving them strong odds of a postseason berth. If that comes as it has in the first half, with a combination of average-ish offense and strong pitching and defense, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is if they win, and it looks like they will.