Can Christian Yelich Be Christian Yelich Again?
Christian Yelich.
At one point, the utterance of his name was synonymous with genius front office dealings and explosive offensive performance. Entering the 2022 season, that is no longer the case. In 2021, Yelich managed to post a .325 wOBA along with a 101 wRC+, producing 1.5 fWAR in the process. Compared to his MVP season in 2019, he appeared to be a shell of his former self. The mighty has fallen in many fans’ eyes. They believe that the peak of this young star’s greatness is a thing of the past that and that he will never regain his old stature.
Are they right though?
Even before his days with the Brewers, Yelich was a standout. During his five-year tenure with Miami, he managed to produce 4+ fWAR in three separate seasons. With the team out of contention and and looking to shed salary (they are, after all, the Marlins), Yelich was traded to the Brewers for a relatively small package of low-grade prospects.
While impressive already, after the deal, Yelich turned into a slugging machine. In his first season with the club, he produced 7.7 Wins – the fifth-highest ranking in all of Major League Baseball in 2018. At first glance, it appeared to be a fluke. After, that was over 2 wins more than his previous career-high. A repeat of this stellar performance seemed highly unlikely.
Yelich promptly silenced this view. In 2019, he posted a .329/.429/.671 line, 174 wRC+, and 7.8 fWAR (a new personal best). As the team leader, Yelich was primarily responsible for the Brewers Wild Card appearance. Accordingly, he took home the NL MVP honors – seven years after his career first began. But Yelich’s time at baseball’s peak was short.
Like everyone else, Yelich’s 2020 season was a scramble. Despite hammering in his previous years, the slugger only had a 112 wRC+ (62 below his 2019 number). In fairness, though, 2020 was crazy. We all responded to the pandemic and everything else in different ways and its not only tempting but reasonable to want to toss all the 2020 stats out the window. Surely, Yelich would recover in 2021.
Only, he didn’t, surprising several projection systems. Yelich managed the worst season of his entire career. At the age of 29, that makes little sense and so now we’re faced with the question of whether the last 2 years were outliers, or the median of the bell curve?
To answer this question, I intend to go to the numbers below the numbers. Utilizing Statcast data, we can try to tell the difference between a lack of luck and declining skill. Pictured below are the year-over-year changes for each major category for him:
Look at the average exit velocity, or the measure of the speed of the ball flying off the player’s bat. Compared to 2019, Yelich lost 2.3 MPH – a relatively large chunk of the difference in player performance. A loss of this measure suggests that his overall power has declined, which is evident through his slugging.
I should note, though, that he has produced at a higher rate with a lower exit velocity – he could be underperforming.
Another measure to note is his Barrel %, which is the percentage of times he hits a ball with the utmost quality of contact. For 2021, he did this at around half the rate of 2019 – a major red flag. The inability to produce quality contact consistently leads to a much lower BABIP, which then consequently lowers every other number.
The last thing that needs clarification is his Whiff %. The whiff percentage is the percent of times a player swings and completely misses. Counterintuitively, Yelich’s whiffs decreased to 24.9% (from 28.2% in 2019). When choosing pitches to swing at, he did a better job at making contact than in his MVP year. While somewhat odd, it might be the window we need to tell what the future holds
Since Christian is not struggling to hit the ball, the majority of his declining performance has to be due to his lack of power. Faced with decreasing exit velocity and several lower quality-of-contact measures, it appears that he could not simply drive the ball as he used to do.
The majority of this can more than likely be attributed to his injuries. In 2019, he underwent season-ending knee surgery. Throughout 2021, he was consistently placed on the IL for an ailing back. The most important parts of his hitting posture were breaking down – his body was physically unable to drive the ball as it used to. Does this mean that he’s finally healthy and ready to break back out in 2022, or that his days of healthy production are in the past?
The numbers definitely show that Yelich was the victim of some bad luck in 2021. On the other hand, the Christian Yelich of old is more than likely gone. Many of his underlying numbers, as evident in the data, are similar to that of his 2016 and 2017 self and no longer having a body free of major injuries, a bounceback to NL MVP seems unlikely.
I do imagine that 2020 and 2021 are a bit of an outlier compared to his true talent, but that does not mean 2018 and 2019 were not as well. 2022 will prove to be a bounceback year – just not in the way many fans probably expected. Even producing at the past rate of his Marlins days, the ex-star will still prove to be an extremely valuable piece to the Brewers. Adding a few wins to the team total, the Brewers newfound pitching should continue to take Yelich and the team into the postseason.
By: Dylan Drummey
Author’s Note:
Thank you for reading my first ever piece with Off the Bench! I hope you enjoyed the insight, and maybe even learned something. If you enjoyed my thoughts or logic from this article, you can find more of my writing at thedrummeyangle.com. Figuring out the “Why?” for everything happening in baseball is my true passion, and I’m very glad I could share an example of that with a group of dedicated fans.
