DJ LeMahieu, A Fundamentally Misunderstood Star
DJ LeMahieu grabbed a lot of headlines in the final week of the regular season when he became the first player in the modern era to win a batting title in both leagues. He did it again on Wednesday night in the ninth inning at Progressive Field when he squeaked a 27-hopper up the middle to push the Yankees past the Indians and onto an intriguing ALDS matchup with the Rays. The supremely talented hitter is rare baseball figure equally adored by sabremetricians and batting average traditionalists alike with his rare combination of bat-to-ball skills, occasional power, and plate discipline.
But while “LeMachine’s” talent is almost universally undisputed and sure to be confirmed as one of the most valuable free agent this winter, his ascent to stardom has seemingly coincided with a dramatic addition of power to his game when he burst onto the scene as the Yankees best hitter in an injury-riddled 2019. While the draw of baseball’s biggest brand name certainly has something to do with the sudden reexamination of LeMahieu, many have simply failed to recognize him as one of baseball’s best pure hitters for years, in large part because of the hitter-friendly offensive environments he’s played in for his career with both the Rockies and Yankees.
Let’s first establish what has always been a part of LeMahieu’s game: contact. Whether it’s in Yankee pinstripes or Rockies purple, he’s always been an elite bat-to-ball skills player. The former LSU Tiger owns a 14.7% strikeout rate in his career, more than six points below the MLB-rate of 20.9% since his debut in 2011. LeMahieu took this to a new level in 2020, striking out just 21 times in 216 plate appearances (9.7%), a K-rate bested only by Tommy La Stella in this year’s shortened season. Since his first full season in 2013, his overall contact rate (87.3%, 23rd), contact rate on pitches in the zone (93%, 23rd), and swinging strike rate (5.6%, 29th) are all top-30 marks in baseball, surpassed by mostly diminutive, singles-type hitters like David Fletcher, Ben Revere, Eric Sogard, and Joe Panik. If we had all these players stand in a police lineup, LeMahieu would stick out like a sore thumb as a 6-foot, 4-inch, 220-pound specimen.
In an era where games are getting longer, in part because players are intent on seeing more pitches and taking their walks, LeMahieu has gone against the grain in that respect. He seldom walks, touting just a 7% base on balls rate in his career, and instead uses his knack for getting wood to baseball to put the ball in play and make something happen; he’s even better equipped to do this than most of his contact-oriented counterparts because of his propensity to hit the ball hard.
Prior to his time with the Yankees, LeMahieu was a little talked about, former Cubs farmhand who regularly competed for batting titles in Denver, often unfairly attributed to him calling Coors Field his home ballpark. Now through the lens of expected statistics that factor in exit velocity and launch angle, we can look back and see that many in fact did improperly discount the former Michigan prep standout’s batting acumen as Coors Field noise. Since Expected Batting Average solely considers quality of contact and does not take into account the effects of hitting at higher altitudes, we’d expect LeMahieu to have significantly outperformed his xBA while a member of the Rockies. Although he’s been the benefactor of a few cheap hits here and there while a member with the Yankees, he actually hit for lower averages than expected based on contact quality in all but one season with Colorado:
DJ LeMahieu Batting Average/xBA Differential by Year (Statcast Era)
| Year | BA | xBA | Diff |
| 2020 | .364* | .315 | +.049 |
| 2019 | .327 | .319 | +.008 |
| 2018 | .276 | .282 | -.006 |
| 2017 | .310 | .311 | -.001 |
| 2016 | .348* | .342 | -.005 |
| 2015 | .301 | .280 | +.021 |
*Won batting title
After moving out of Coors and continuing to hit, it was LeMahieu’s explosion of home run power in addition to donning the Yankee pinstripes that led many to start noticing the towering righty bat last season. In his first season with the Bronx Bombers, the former Madison, Wisconsin Little League standout went deep a career-best 26 times, more than he had hit the last two years with the Rockies combined (23). While a Yankee, he has undoubtedly taken advantage of the right field short porch as much as any right-handed hitter. Using exit velocities and launch angle estimates, LeMahieu has outperformed his expected home runs (xHR) by 13.5 over the last two seasons, second in MLB only to Alex Bregman (+14.5) who has unloaded on the Crawford Boxes to the horror of visiting teams for years. Using the xHR model, we can estimate that 27 of LeMahieu’s 36 homers since joining the Yankees would have gone out in less than half of all MLB ballparks, including nine of them that were round-trippers solely with the help of Yankee Stadium.
This isn’t to say that LeMahieu doesn’t have power or that he has not made adjustments since moving away from Coors Field. His 7.5% barrel rate and 91.9 mph average exit velocity with New York in 2019 each marked a career-highs. His average launch angle was up a tick at 6.5 degrees last year, but notably still one of the lowest-15 in baseball in 2019. LeMahieu has been record saying that when he joined the Yankees, he actively went away from some of the pull-for-power changes he had made during his last year with the Rockies. While the adjustments made with the Colorado staff in 2018 produced at the time a career-most 15 longballs, he only slashed .276/.321/.428, good for an 87 wRC+, his worst offensive season since 2014. He prefers a low line drive, all fields approach and is happy to cash in on a flair to right that clears the fences.
In a small sample of 2020, LeMahieu hit the ball on the ground more than ever (57% of his batted balls) but still reached double-figures in homers thanks to the help of a career-best 27% HR-FB ratio and an 82nd percentile hard-hit rate. The point of all this is to say that maybe outside of a errant experiment his last season in Colorado, LeMahieu has never been a power-driven slugger and instead carbon-copied his line-drive, opposite field approach to one of the better home run hitting environments in baseball, like another Yankee great who played high school baseball in Michigan.
When LeMahieu stepped up to the plate with the game on the line on Wednesday night, many baseball fans who’ve only followed the cool-headed slugger since his renaissance in New York might have expected a towering, decisive game-winning fly to right field. They instead got a slow dribbler up the middle (a 95.4 mph exit velo with an xBA of .170 on the play) that had eyes, a play that shows the knack for finding a hole much more characteristic from one of the soundest pure hitters in the majors today.
-Matt Dean
