Adam Dunn is a statistical marvel. The only other player that has as many statistical anomalies is Juan Pierre. And the weird thing is that they are polar opposites as hitters. Dunn has a low contact percentage and a high homer and walk percentage. Pierre has a high contact percentage and the lowest homer and a low walk percentage. But I’ve already studied Juan Pierre, so this post deals with Adam Dunn. And yes, he bounced back a bit from his historically bad 2011, but that doesn’t mean that his 2012 wasn’t statistically amazing as well. Dunn is fascinating in so many ways that he is a category all by himself. There is no one else like him in baseball.
First, let’s start out looking at his entire career, which started in 2001. What I have done is limit all players since 2001 to those who have had at least 6,000 plate appearances. There are 38 players who fit that category. Dunn’s place among these players is totally unique. Then I will look at his last three years, two of which have been somewhat acceptable and one that was historically bad.
...In other words, the odds are strongly in the favor of the pitcher if he made sure the outcome was that Adam Dunn did not walk those 50 times. Every time a pitcher walks Adam Dunn, I scratch my head. It does not make sense.
All of this conversation does not even take into account Adam Dunn’s base running and fielding. Fangraphs.com tallies 128.3 runs Dunn has cost his teams on defense. Baseball-reference.com is even harsher and puts that measure at -152 runs. Fangraphs.com indicates that he has cost his team 13.8 runs on the base paths. And as my buddy, @dkulich44, points out, this has been a late phenomenon in Dunn’s career. He was a decent base runner until 2008. Since that time, his base running has cost his teams 16.4 runs!
Adam Dunn is truly a statistical marvel. His career has been truly strange. His three-outcome plate appearances are truly unique and make it very confusing to put him in context in this generation of players.
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1. Walt Davis Posted: February 18, 2013 at 04:33 PM (#4371470)Ruth, Bonds, Thome, Howard, McGwire, Dunn, Kingman, Reynolds, Pena, Branyan, Deer
Nope, no sillyball effect there. McGwire has the biggest gap with a stunning 62 points, Branyan is 2nd at 21 and Dunn is 3rd at 19.
He does not make the list that he probably really wants to be on (whether he knows it or not) which is the BA>BABIP list. To do this, you have to hit a higher proportion of HR/(HR+K) than BABIP. Tons of great hitters on this list ... and some of the really low K freaks like Buckner. Yogi seems to lead the way with a 23 point gap, followed by DiMaggio at 21, Bonds and Pujols are at 16, Musial and Mize not far behind. It would have taken me 7.2 million years to guess Carlos Lee who'd be a lot easier to guess than Dan Meyer.
I hope he can turn it around and maybe you know, bat over 230 this year, but I doubt it. Even with his 3 true outcome skills his slash line is garbage for a full time DH getting paid 11 million a year.
One interesting (and important) difference between Dunn and McGwire is that McGwire put the ball in play (or out of play, by hitting a home run) 40% more frequently than Dunn. And I honestly doubt they're pitching Dunn more carefully than they pitched McGwire.
Now of course some of this is just talent. McGwire could probably drive a wider range of pitches than Dunn could. But still, I think it's reasonably clear that Dunn could have stood to be a little less patient early in the count.
Well along this line of thinking Dunn has vowed to "be more aggressive" earlier in the count. We'll see how long this plan lasts if it's late May and he's hitting 180. I doubt he will have the patience -- ahem-- to stick with it.
There's a team to be built there. Dunn, Matsuzaka, but also guys who make the game slower for other reasons, e.g. Beckett, Hargrove. Joe Maddon would manage.
madvillain, would it make you happy to learn that Dunn is actually getting paid $15 million?
In the WAR calculation, there's one thing I don't understand. In translating from RAA (runs above average) to RAR (runs above replacement), there's a listing for "Rrep", or number of runs an average player is better than a replacement player.
Why is "Rrep" so much higher for Dunn (22) than for Campana (5)? Is this a matter of playing time? Because Dunn didn't have over four times as much playing time.
Those panels are from the only story I've ever read that made the Silver Surfer (in this case, of course, the Silver Burper) bearable. Well done, Jack & Stan.
And come to think of it, I saw the same panels yesterday on Facebook, courtesy of one of the few comics writers around today worth a damn, Kurt Busiek. Hmmmm ...
Ugh, just looked up the contract on BRef, deferred money hooray! Dunn's fall is just inexplicable really. He was about as sure as bet as it gets for an OPS+ around 130 and then he goes and has his two worst season in the bigs when he gets to Chicago, one of them a historically bad season that almost single-highhandedly prevented the club from making the playoffs.
Baseball is a strange game.
That's not all that odd given that 50% of all AL PA reached two strikes last year.
His propensity to draw full counts is more interesting.
when i was a kid, i lived overseas but every summer we'd come home for a month on leave and i'd buy everything i could carry back in a pan am flight bag. this was back in the 60s. by the time we came back to the states for good i had a steamer trunk full of comics. a butt load of fantastic 4, spiderman, avengers, nick fury etc. ... i held on to it for years, by the time i was in grad school i hadn't opened it for a while. by then i was out of my mom's basement, and i needed money. i saved an armful, but i sold most of the contents to some shyster comic book shop guy for a hundred dollars. i could just kick myself.
Don Stanhouse vs. Mike Hargrove was another one like this.
B-R incorporates its league adjustment into Rrep. Since the NL is weaker, players in the league get a smaller boost. (Personally, I would prefer that Sean separate the league adjustment from the playing time adjustment, but that's how it is for now.)
In 2012 - 12.6% of PA in AL vs 24.2% of Dunn's PA. Wow.
I'm in a sim keeper league where I am trying to do exactly that, and have been trying to collect other such players. Ichiro is another good one.
It's spelled F-R-A-N-C-O-E-U-R
Maybe. It's hard to know to what extent he's too patient and to what extent he just has a very limited zone in which he can mash. I certainly don't think it will do Dunn any good to swing at pitches outside the zone. Still, Dunn's BABIP has cratered the last two seasons -- he's had some awful ones before but he's now terrible which suggest he used to have more skill in this area. I suspect the bat has just slowed and he's got nothing to do but hammer whenever he swings. The collapse is not that unexpected -- he was old man skills as a hitter from the beginning and he let the reasonable speed and agility he started with go. Dunn at 28-29 looked like a guy who'd be done by 33. The main question to me was whether the game has really changed enough that a 220/320/450 line at DH would be OK (i.e. everybody is swinging as hard as they can and K'ing all the time).
My collection of somewhere over 2,000 comics went for $350, IIRC, to a guy in Jacksonville, Ark. A few years later, when I was a reporter (& later an editor) at the newspaper in Little Rock, the same guy popped up on our letters page every month or so, waxing conservative. I guess I helped fund his lifetime subscription to the National Review or something.
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