Hello and welcome back to FanPost Friday. Once again I am turning to our community's ace Jarred Kelenic anaylst, poster flygutifly, for what will probably be the last such AAA pitch selection analysis for Kelenic. Thank you for all your impressive coverage of our beleaguered prospect. After a fairly quiet first handful of at-bats, Kelenic smashed a homer in Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, which I am sure gave many fans a big sigh of relief. I know it did for me. Will such production continue? Flygutifly is about to tell you all about his predictions, take it away!

Welcome back Jarred! As you will see below (in what is hopefully my last update), Jarred has dramatically improved his approach in AAA. He looks like a completely different hitter at this point in terms of plate discipline and swing decisions. Though his outcomes weren’t the best over the last few days, the process is much, much better than it was before his demotion. Now we get to see if plate discipline metrics translate across levels. Previous updates:

Initial

Update 1

Update 2

Update 3

A bit on my process from the first article: I made an Excel spreadsheet and filled a few notebook pages with tallies going through every pitch he has seen in a Rainiers uniform. I am just a human tallying pitches up and though I was being careful, it is totally possible I made some mistakes. Basically, build some error bars into these numbers and don’t take them as exact, but we are here to do trend analysis anyway. Additionally, I put splitters in the fastball bucket, whereas I believe a lot of sources count the split finger fastball as an offspeed pitch, so probably a systemic error on my part (he didn’t see too many splitters anyway). For the sake of total clarity, my buckets are:

Fastballs – four seam, cutter, sinker, and splitter

Breaking – Curve, knuckle curve, slider

Offspeed – Breaking and changeups

The numbers in the tables below are up to date through the 29th of July. He has played a grand total of 53 games in AAA, with 247 plate appearances, and 935 total pitches. Of those pitches 47.7% were offspeed (446 total).

With 53 games down in AAA, I broke his numbers into thirds this time to more clearly show trends. Each third represents 17-18 games with around 82 plate appearances. I would recommend focusing mostly on the final third to get an idea of how he is doing!

Plate Discipline (%)

CSW% + Whiff%

And here is a 10-game rolling CSW% graph, for the visual learners. If you are comparing this to previous graphs, I had to adjust the y-axis because his results dropped so low:

To sum it up, he is swinging out of the zone less than the average hitter, in the zone more than the average hitter, and making more contact in/out of the zone than the average big leaguer. His overall CSW% is at league average and his Whiff% on each type of pitch has dropped to 30% or less, which would be quite good at the big league level. He has morphed back into the hitter that came up through the Minors: a high-contact guy that gets the bat on the ball and makes things happen.

I expect to see a different looking hitter at the plate than what we saw in April of this year. I think he should be really proud of the progress he made at a lower level and I am so excited to see what he can do with his next chance. I hope Jarred is here to stay.