2016 was not terribly kind to the flamethrowing reliever. He posted his highest walk rate since his rookie year, and he only had 20 innings pitched in 2010. There were more line drives given up than usual, and that combined with a dangerously low ground ball rate of 20 percent usually brings bad things, especially in a ballpark like Fenway. Kimbrel looked depressingly human, as far as elite closers go. But 2017 saw the return of some of that divinity that made him such an untouchable pitcher.

He also threw exactly 69 innings. What a stud.

What Went Right

Kimbrel’s first half was incredible, and that contains zero hyperbole. In fact, I might be underrating it. He held hitters to a .110/.158/.181 slash line. He had a 1.19 ERA with a 0.79 FIP. A few fortuitous bounces and Kimbrel’s monster first half could’ve been even better. He struck out over 50 percent – FIVE ZERO – of all the batters he faced, and in May, he had a strikeout rate of 61 percent. His walk rate was less than four percent. Craig Kimbrel was a human cheat code. To top it all off, here’s an immaculate inning.

Don’t get me wrong here, his entire season was fantastic, but that first half? That’s the stuff of legends. You’d be hard-pressed to find a stretch like that from any reliever that isn’t Rivera or Hoffman, and even if you include them, it would still be hard, given the sheer amount of strikeouts and the lack of walks.

2017 was one of Kimbrel’s best seasons, and he had some real all-timers in Atlanta. He improved in every part of the game that concerned us from 2016: the groundball rate surged by a full eight percentage points to 37 percent, the line drives went down, and just for good measure, Kimbrel added in the highest whiff rate in his career. He even had a negative FIP (-0.24) in 22.2 high-leverage innings, and he gave up four homers in that same sample! That’s just absurd.

He also got the win in the All-Star Game for striking out Michael Conforto in the ninth inning, and yeah, wins are garbage, but that’s pretty neat thing he can stick on his resumé.

What Went Wrong

It’s not wrong to say his second half was worse than the first half, but it was, since being as incredibly good as he was ends up being very hard to sustain. It wasn’t a horrible collapse or anything of the sort, but Kimbrel only held batters to a .174/.252/.315 slash line and struck out just 48 percent of them. What a bum, huh?

Of the postseason runs he’s been on, this is probably one he’d like to forget. In Game 4, Kimbrel came in to relieve Sale in the 8th inning, and promptly allowed a go-ahead RBI single to Josh Reddick, and then an RBI double to Carlos Beltran soon after. It was the Red Sox’s best reliever in a crucial spot, and Kimbrel just didn’t have it.

There’s really nothing else I can write here. Kimbrel was overall excellent, and you should all appreciate him.

What To Expect

How amazing would it be if we got any more of the same? While first-half Kimbrel is just wishful thinking, it’s not crazy to think that his second half is something to expect. That’s a 1.72 ERA/2.17 FIP, and he’s shown that he’s more than capable of putting up those numbers. It’s also fair to expect age to start chipping away at him, since he’ll turn 30 next season, and if you think he’ll do worse than those numbers, that’s also okay. Relievers are volatile, and even one as stellar as Kimbrel isn’t immune to aging. So hope for the best, expect another great year, and prepare for…well, more knuckle-curving goodness.

Photo by Bob DeChiara – USA TODAY Sports

The correct answer is: Maybe. Maybe even: Probably. But still: We don’t know. Which in a way is good because otherwise this article would be over now and I’d have to come up with something else to write about. Fortunately for me: We still don’t know! But we can guess and we can do even better than that: We can guess in an educated manner.

Sometimes slumps look different. I recall Xander Bogaerts in his rookie season chasing everything off the plate. You could see the slider off the plate coming and you knew he’d give one of those half-hearted weak swings, the kind where the batter himself is actively thinking, “Why am I doing this?” But if you watch Benintendi during his slump, it’s not like that. At least it’s not like that yet. He’s still making contact, not striking out at any increased rate, even. In fact, if you break it out by months, May has seen Benintendi cut his strikeout rate by over three percent and up his walk rate by almost four percent. Which is, I think you’ll agree, not something you typically see from someone who is slumping.

Major League Baseball publishes exit velocity for batted balls in play and Benintendi’s 50 batted ball rolling average exit velocity has only dropped ever so slightly of late. It’s gone from about 90 mph on average to about 88 mph. That’s not nothing, but it’s not the reason you went from a .900 OPS to 0-for 30 either. Fangraphs publishes exit velocity as well, though they do it in three buckets, soft, medium, and hard. Before Benintendi’s slump began, we’ll say from the beginning of the season until May 9 when he had three hits against the Brewers, 86 percent of his balls in play were either medium or hard. That’s five percent above the league average. Since May 10th though, that number (hard plus medium) has fallen to 78.3 percent, or below average.

More germane maybe is that his soft hits have gone from 14 percent to 22 percent. What has also happened is Benintendi’s hit types have changed. He’s gone from hitting line drives 22 percent of the time to hitting line drives four percent of the time. What that’s meant in practice is few guaranteed singles or doubles. In place of line drives, Benintendi has been hitting more ground balls (and a few more fly balls).

To sum up, Benintendi isn’t striking out more, but he is making weaker contact, and contact that is less conducive to getting hits. Also, this has happened over a very small stretch of time. It’s entirely possible that Benintendi is under the weather, has a minor nagging injury, or some other such thing that is making his best possible performance more difficult. We can’t know why his batted ball profile has changed, just that it has and, this being a bit under two weeks, that it could change back just as quickly.

A lost season for Benintendi would be far from a good outcome, but we’re not there yet. So far he’s only had a bad couple weeks. In a normal season for an above average player, two bad weeks barely registers.

The player Benintendi is repeatedly compared to is Michael Conforto of the Mets. Both are young outfielders, first round picks, who made it up to the big leagues very quickly. In Conforto’s case, he was drafted in June of 2014 and was in the majors by July the following year. Benintendi took a month longer, but took essentially the same path, jumping directly from Double-A. And now for the bad news and then the good news. The bad news is Conforto struggled for almost his entire rookie season. The good news is, so far in this, his second season, he’s hit like the star the Mets thought he was last season. Sometimes there’s an adjustment period required for a young player, especially one who barely spent time in the minor leagues. When that adjustment period has to take place at the major league level and the growing pains the player experiences are hurting the major league team instead of say, the Double-A team, the fans and sometimes even the organization can be quick to dump on the player. That was the case with Conforto.

But even in that worst case scenario that Conforto went through, he has emerged as the star player he was thought to be last season. A lost season for Benintendi would be far from a good outcome, but we’re not there yet. So far he’s only had a bad couple weeks. In a normal season for an above average player, two bad weeks barely registers. Last year Mike Trout, had a two week stretch where he hit .220/.333/.340.

So, watch Benintendi’s performance going forward for line drives, watch to see if he keeps his low strikeout rate, watch to see how he handles his first bit of major league stress. These will the indicators of his slump, and how we’ll know he’s out of it. That and dingers. If he hits lots of dingers, we’ll know then too.

Photo by Jesse Johnson – USA TODAY Sports