What the Hill?

Last year, Blue Jays fans were all wondering what the heck was up with Wells and Rios. They had come off of decent although unspectacular 2008 seasons with a fair recent history of being stars. For all of the first half, I was hoping that they'd snap out of it, that they would join guys like Hill and Lind (who were mashing opposing pitchers like boiled potatoes) and create a very deep, potent offence.

Never happened. Rios ended up being given away for free to the White Sox, unloading the remaining $60MM of his long contract from the Jays' books. He ended up sucking harder than ever in the Windy City, posting an OPS of .530 (you read that right). Although I was pissed as heck at Ricciardi for giving up so quickly on a young star, seeing Rios take his "I don't give a f&ck" act to Chicago and produce slightly less than a cornfield irrigated with seawater alleviated some of that annoyance.

Wells, meanwhile, continued to suck in Toronto. I remember going to a game in September and yelling at him to not suck next year (this year) and got a lot of confused looks from fans around me. I still stand by what I said (it's not like I was booing him pointlessly or insulting his family), and hey, maybe he listened. He hasn't sucked this year. Neither has Rios, for that matter. In fact, Rios has probably been one of 2010's most dangerous hitters. I'm not even going to bother checking on his stats because that will just confirm all of our suspicions that dumping him FOR NOTHING was an idiotic idea. Especially when they were offered prospects for Rios at the deadline. And now they've traded for another young player with similar mental issues as Rios. But I digress.

I was wondering when Rios and Wells were stinking it up last year if this kind of thing could ever happen to Hill and Lind. People around me were telling me that was impossible; their mental game is much stronger. But look at Wells - he's always managed to keep a straight head and play hard, even if it didn't look like he was doing it last year. The thing is, hitting a baseball is such a difficult task that if one little thing goes wrong, everything can go wrong. If your mechanics are off by an unnoticeable sliver of a toenail, a would-be line drive can turn into a harmless grounder. Even worse: an unlucky draft of wind that blows the ball down by 1 cm before it makes contact with the bat can do the same thing, and there's nothing you can do about that. All you can hope for is that, over time, it all evens out. You expect to get a stray draft to blow the ball just onto the barrel of the bat just as often as it will knock it off.

Sounds stupid, doesn't it? Well, maybe not. Think about it - his .180 BABIP is the lowest in the majors, driven largely by a 9.2% line-drive rate (less than half his career 19%). His struggles have admittedly made him more prone to chasing pitches, swinging at 32.4% of pitches out of the zone, compared to 22.9% in his career. But he's still made contact overall 84.4% of the time, which is exactly his career average. This has generated a 14.6% K rate, which is about the same as his 14.1% in his career. Moreover, he has walked at a career high 8.9%.

I'll argue also that he has been ridiculously unlucky on balls he has hit hard. If you've been watching, you'd have noticed a lot of hard-hit ground balls and liners of his have been turned into outs. The worst thing about this is a caught line drive is much more likely to be considered a flyball than one that drops in. I don't have the statistics to back it up, but I cannot believe for a moment that he's hitting line drives 9% of the time. A lot of balls that I am certain would have been scored line drives had they been in the gaps have been snared by outfielders, making them look like simple flyballs. Finally, it seems that he's hit a ton of balls just foul down the lines. With a little more luck, his line drives in play will fall in front of outfielders or between them, and his balls down the line will be just fair. Had he been a little luckier, his line drive rate this year could have easily been 15% or so. Logically, that would likely have made him press a little less and perhaps swing at fewer bad pitches.

Maybe I'm going down a slippery slope with this argument. Fact is, it seems to me that Hill has been just barely missing a lot of pitches or barely missing spots to drop his hits in. When his luck picks up a little, you can be sure he'll be back to his former self. Although their struggles were somewhat different, it happened to Rios and Wells after an atrocious 2009 for both of them.

I'm predicting that Hill will put up a .290/.350/.480 line in the second half. If his luck takes a HUGE correction, making up for his first half, that could go to .350/.420/.580 at best. But that's the gambler's fallacy, if I'm not mistaken, so I'll stick with the first line.