Cleveland Indians: The Renaissance of Jason Kipnis

Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

The Cleveland Indians’ Jason Kipnis of 2015 Was a Different Player

It goes without saying that the Cleveland Indians‘ Jason Kipnis had a great year in 2015. Hundreds of pundits have written this before, and many more will write about it in the future. Instead of simply regurgitating the truth, this article will look a little deeper. In fact, if one takes a peek below the surface, then it quickly becomes apparent that Jason Kipnis was an entirely different player in 2015 than in prior seasons.

To show this fact, I will look at several underlying factors that led to his success. Today, instead of marveling at how Kipnis turned a dismal 2014 into a fantastic 2015, we will look at how he did that with a bit of an analytical twist.

Let’s start by taking a look at a few rate statistics across his career. K% refers to strikeout rate, which one calculates as the percent of plate appearances that ended in a strikeout. O-Contact% is the percent of swings at pitches outside the strike zone on which Kipnis made contact, and Hard% is the percent of batted balls that were hit hard.

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Well, there are a few things that we can pull from that table. First, Kipnis reduced the number of times that he struck out from 2013 to 2015. While reducing strikeouts is important to long-term success, Kipnis’ 2012 season was nothing special from an offensive viewpoint. Even further, many prominent baseball players have high strikeout rates, but they typically offset this fact by hitting lots of home runs.

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As a bit of a follow up on strikeout rate, Kipnis’ contact on pitches outside the strike zone has a very clear trend. Each season, Kipnis has put the bat on the ball with pitches outside the zone more frequently than the preceding season. Again, 2012 is the exception to the rule.

Finally, let’s look at how frequently Kipnis hit the ball hard. This statistic is a little finicky because it is calculated by outcomes instead of being measured directly. The reason why I tossed this in there is because it shows that, once again, Kipnis simply returned to something that he did before. In 2013, a season in which he had just as much offensive success as last year, Kipnis hit the ball harder than any other season. This is notable since his strikeouts jumped and his O-Contact% dropped.

Could 2014’s failure have been an over-correction to this fact?

While this question is pure speculation, it is not hard to believe. It seems perfectly reasonable that Kipnis tried to reign in his strikeouts by making more contact with the baseball, and, thus, he made more contact on outside pitches by sacrificing bat speed. Rather than swinging blindly, he would swing more gently to ensure that he hit the ball. Considering that he did not cut down on swings outside the strike zone, in fact, he swung at more pitches, this idea has some plausibility to me.

Besides returning to a prior level of performance as with the three statistics listed above, Jason Kipnis made a transformation to complete his renaissance.

Next: How Else did Jason Kipnis Transform?

Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

Batted Ball Outcomes

Last season saw Jason Kipnis completely change where and how he hit the ball. He drastically changed where he hit the ball, and he reduced the percent of pitches that he pulled – which had hovered in the 37-39% range for four seasons – to just over 35%. To complement this, the Indians’ second baseman began to hit the ball to the opposite field and the outfield more frequently. Below are two diagrams, courtesy of Baseball Savant, that clearly display this shift.

The top picture shows the 2015 season; the bottom, the 2014 season. Kipnis cut down on a number of pitches he grounded to the pull-side, and he increased the number he sent to left field.

Another big change in 2015 was how he hit the ball. As one might have noticed by looking at the diagrams, the top one had many more yellow dots. This perfectly displayed the second batted ball phenomenon Kipnis underwent. From 2014 to 2015, the percent of batted balls that were linedrives increased by over four percentage points.

While this may seem insignificant, this was a major change for the 28-year-old. After his home run per flyball ratio consistently dropped from his debut to 2012, Kipnis realized that it was inefficient to keep putting the ball in the air. Instead, he turned flyballs into linedrives. Rather than trying to hit for power, Kipnis switched to a more contact-focused approach.

The following table displays the percentage of pitches Kipnis saw that he turned into a linedrive. Note that the rate is as a total percentage of pitches thrown, not batted balls.

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This table tells the whole story. Kipnis had been gradually hitting more linedrives on fourseam fastballs, but he made big jumps on sinkers, changeups, and cutters last season. Kipnis did not just start hitting more doubles and triples for no reason; he started hitting more linedrives on pitches that did not move as much.

Explaining why this happened would be difficult. Kipnis possibly went home in the offseason and practiced making better contact with the ball instead of hitting grounders or flyballs. Equally possible, Kipnis simply saw the ball better last year. Typical pitch locations stayed the same, so he likely just made a few adjustments that culminated in a combination of the two above propositions.

Next: The new Kipnis has arrived