MoKM: Matt Kemp’s struggles: A Statistical and Mechanical Analysis

Matt Kemp is struggling in 2010, there’s no real way around that. Even more relevant to the discussion, he has fallen well below the expectations of the fans, which in turn has caused a greater than normal backlash against him.

Most journalists and bloggers have wrote about Kemp plenty this season, and they have all speculated as to why his struggles have come so suddenly, but I think a lot of them have been taking the easy way out in this discussion. That is, when a good player struggles, it’s easy to write about his mental focus, his lack of effort, and any other external factors that are not related to actual performance analysis.

As for me, I’m not innocent of the charges I gave in the above paragraphs. Perhaps too often I’ve dedicated posts to what I perceived as illogical criticism of his personality, and while I’ve given my occasional take on possible reasons for Kemp’s drop in performance, I’m surely just as guilty of not analyzing his struggles in full.

And that’s the error i’m looking to rectify today.

Instead of endlessly speculating on his mentality, motivation, intelligence, and other factors that we can’t and never will know, I intend to focus on why he’s struggling on the field, and what he can potentially do to fix his problems.