Two years into his seven-year contract, Jacoby Ellsbury has been more solid contributor than difference maker for the Yankees. He had a very good 2014 season while being miscast as the No. 3 hitter, then his 2015 season was totally derailed by a mid-May knee injury. Ellsbury was great to start the year, got hurt, and was awful thereafter. It earned him a spot on the bench in the wildcard game.
“Obviously I knew my team needed me to play. When I came back, you convince yourself that you’re 100%, you’re ready to go,” said Ellsbury to reporters when he reported to Spring Training last week. “I thought I was pretty close, but it wasn’t until the offseason — when I started working out, training, getting back — (it was clear) maybe I wasn’t where I thought I was. But you don’t have time for that during the season to wait to get there. I tried to get back as soon as I could, but it wasn’t really until the offseason when I started working out, training that (I felt normal). Now I feel 100%.”
Early last season Ellsbury showed he can still be a game-changing leadoff man. Before the injury it felt like he was on base three times a night and driving pitchers crazy by dancing off first base. Ellsbury’s ability to be an impact leadoff hitter has never been in question. The question has always been health and his ability to produce in a meaningful way when less than 100%.
Ellsbury, now 32 and 33 before the end of the 2016 season, is entering the phase of his career when age-related decline becomes a legitimate concern. Jeff Zimmerman (subs. req’d) recently recalculated aging curves based on different player types and found fast players — guys who stole 25+ bases with 8+ triples early in their career — tend to fall off quickly around age 32.
Every player is their own unique individual and they all age differently of course, plus Ellsbury is no ordinary speedster. He’s not, say, Willy Taveras or Chone Figgins. He has high-end contact ability, has historically held his own against lefties, and has hit for just enough power to keep pitchers honest. That ostensibly bodes well for Ellsbury’s ability to stave off a sudden descent into uselessness long-term.
In the short-term, Ellsbury’s importance to the 2016 Yankees is very high. He is arguably their best all-around player — I’d say it’s Mark Teixeira, but that’s just me — and the team invested an awful lot of money in his ability to drive an offense from the leadoff spot. We saw it last year. When Ellsbury fires on all cylinders, the offense is dominant. When he’s less than 100%, they struggled to manufacture runs.
It’s easy to understand how the knee injury could have affected Ellsbury’s offense last summer. Hitting starts from the ground up, and if he didn’t have a strong base, his ability to drive the ball would suffer. This all could have happened subconsciously too. Doctors declared the knee healthy, but Ellsbury could have altered his hitting mechanics to take pressure off the knee without even realizing it.
The interesting thing is Ellsbury’s batted ball profile didn’t change a whole lot after the injury. He did hit more fly balls, but not substantially so. Not enough to account for the 118-point difference in BABIP.
| BABIP | GB% | FB% | LD% | Pull% | Mid% | Opp% | Soft% | Med% | Hard% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before Injury | .379 | 47.2% | 28.0% | 24.8% | 38.4% | 34.4% | 27.2% | 23.2% | 54.4% | 22.4% |
| After Injury | .261 | 44.3% | 32.0% | 23.8% | 37.6% | 35.5% | 26.9% | 24.1% | 55.5% | 20.4% |
Ellsbury is neither a true talent .379 BABIP hitter nor a true talent .261 BABIP hitter. The real him is somewhere in the middle — he has a career .319 BABIP and set a career high with a .341 BABIP in 2013 — but it would be lazy to write this off as ball in play luck. The knee injury represents a tangible change. We just don’t know how exactly it impacted him.
More interesting to me than the batted ball data is the plate discipline data. Ellsbury has always been a low strikeout, middling walk rate hitter. He hasn’t drawn more walks because he’s always been good at putting the ball in play, not because he isn’t disciplined. After the injury, Ellsbury became something of a hacker and struck out more than he ever has as a big leaguer.
| BB% | K% | O-Swing% | Z-Swing% | O-Contact% | Z-Contact% | Zone% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before Injury | 11.2% | 13.5% | 30.7% | 64.8% | 82.3% | 90.6% | 44.5% |
| After Injury | 4.8% | 19.0% | 34.2% | 64.3% | 68.1% | 90.9% | 50.8% |
When it came to pitches in the zone, Ellsbury swung (Z-Swing%) and made contact (Z-Contact%) at the same rate both before and after the injury. Pitches out of the zone was the problem. He swung at way more pitches out of the zone (O-Swing%) and failed to make contact far more often (O-Contact%) after the knee injury, which equals way more swings and misses. That explains the major decline is walk and strikeout rate.
Could the knee injury have affected Ellsbury’s plate discipline? I believe it’s possible. Altering his hitting mechanics could change the timing of his swing and even the way he reads the pitch out of the pitcher’s hand. I am going to again refer back to these screen grabs I made last season:
They both show the instant Ellsbury’s front foot touches down as part of his leg kick. (He hurt his right knee, so his front leg.) The screen grab on the right is from before the injury, and the screen grab on the left is from after the injury.
Before the injury, the pitch had traveled much deeper by time Ellsbury’s foot touched down. He is already starting his swing (look at how he’s “loading” his upper body, so to speak) when his foot hits. After the injury, his foot touched down when the ball was just out of the pitcher’s hand. He had yet to begin his swing. That’s a problem! Ellsbury’s swing became more reliant on his upper body, which may have caused him to lunge at the ball.
This isn’t about last season though. This is about the coming season, and the Yankees will need Ellsbury to again drive their offense like he did early last year. Given his history, these are the two big questions about Ellsbury heading into the new season:
- Is he healthy?
- Can he stay healthy?
These are the Ellsbury Questions™ for this season and every season going forward. It’s all about health. When he’s 100% physically, Ellsbury is a dynamic leadoff hitter who disrupts the defense. When he’s something less than 100% physically, he rarely has an impact. That has been the case his entire career.
Joe Girardi and the Yankees have said they plan to rest their regulars more often this season and that includes Ellsbury. At a certain point injuries are going to be out of everyone’s control — Ellsbury hurt his knee when he caught a spike taking a swing, it was a fluke little thing — so all the Yankees can do is give Ellsbury more time on the bench to manage the nagging day-to-day stuff every player deals with. There’s only so much the team can do.
The general thought behind these big money long-term contracts is you take the elite years up front and live with the ugly years on the back end. The Yankees have yet to get those elite years from Ellsbury. Give the brain trust a truth serum and I’m sure they’d tell you they’d like a do-over on Ellsbury’s contract. What’s done is done though. Ellsbury is with the Yankees and he’s an integral part of the offense (and defense). When he goes, the Yankees go. Getting him to go more often in 2016 may very well be the difference between a great offense and one that struggles to sustain rallies or create offense outside the long ball.
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