Three True Outcomes In 2019: Reliance and Resistance

In what is quickly becoming an annual tradition, MLB recently set yet another record for the number of strikeouts in a season. 2019 is also a year dominated by home runs. Meanwhile walks, or more generally OBP, have been sought after since the time of Moneyball. All these points congregate to create a year truly dominated by the so called three true outcomes.

To take special note of those players who most (and least) embody this contemporary phenomenon, below are several leaderboards. When held side by side, these leaderboards offer a quick glimpse into whether extreme reliance on three true outcomes paid off more or less relative to extreme resistance.

First, here is a look at those players with the greatest propensity to end their at bats in one of the three aforementioned ways.

This cohort performed extremely well offensively relative to league average. By wRC+’s measure, 23% better than average, in fact. Nelson Cruz and Mike Trout are obvious outliers here given their incredible seasons, but the group as a whole is strong regardless. Of these 15 players, just Wil Myers and Ryan McMahon had below average seasons offensively, motivated in part by strikeout rates on either right around, or above, 30%. For these players, a pitchers defense was taken out of the equation in nearly half their times at the plate, a fairly wild consideration in and of itself.

Below we find those qualifying hitters on the other end of the spectrum. Just roughly 20% of their cumulative plate appearances ended in a walk, strikeout, or home run. It doesn’t take much more than a glance to determine that this group performed worse offensively then the prior set. 

Rookies Kevin Newman and David Fletcher have maintained solid offensive production on the back of impressively low strikeout rates.  But the two players above that experienced considerable success despite spurning the three true outcomes are Yuli Gurriel and Michael Brantley; it’s somehow unsurprising that these players are both on the Astros, who seem to extract extreme value out of players of a variety of skill sets. After those two Astros though, the dropoff is stark.

Next, a look at pitchers. For pitchers, the three true outcomes are most often rolled up into their FIP metric. The charts below though will list walk, strikeout, and home runs allowed percentages to illustrate the percentage of their batter face offs that end in one of those three manners.

ERA, while a limited indicator of performance is used as a measuring stick here given the redundant nature of employing FIP in the context of the three true outcomes. Also, ERA is an interesting measure given that those pitchers who are more K/BB/HR prone are correspondingly more controlling of their own ERA destinies.

Average qualifying ERA this season was right around 4.5; clearly this cohort pitched very well relative to the average. Matthew Boyd is the only subaverage palyer here, by ERA standards, and that was largely due to his 5% home run rate. Six of 15 pitchers list owned sub-3 ERAs though, led by Jacob deGrom and Justin Verlander with 2.51 and 2.52 ERAs, respectively.

This group is also well below (in a positive sense) league average in ERA too. Both groups are better than average due to sampling bias, i.e. those players who pitched >162 innings must have been quite successful to pitch that many at all. Here though, the average ERA is still more than a half run higher than in the case of the first groups average.

Interestingly, that difference is in no way motivated by home run rates, which are nearly identical (0.033 vs. 0.032) between the two groups. The biggest contributing factor between the two groups are strikeout percentages, although Jose Quintana, Zack Greinke, and Hyun-Jin Ryu all struck out more than 20% of the batters they faced.

So far we have been examining just the outer edges of three true outcome players; roughly the outer deciles in the case of batters and outer quartiles in the case of pitchers. To end this post below are two final figures illustrating the cumulative relationship between TTO percentages and the performance metrics applied above. As you’ll see, embracing three true outcomes (for both pitchers and hitters) appears to broadly pay off.