McCutchen’s numbers off the charts for June
We are going to deviate from our usual Bucs By Numbers discourse today, and for good reason.
Today we are going to deliver some facts and figures behind Andrew McCutchen鈥檚 incredible resurgence. McCutchen took home National League Player of the Month honors for June, on the back of a stout .411/.505/.689 slash line. He racked up 37 hits during those 30 days, and slugged six home runs in tallying 23 RBI.
From a sabermetric point of view, some key peripherals underline just how good the 2013 NL MVP was. Here now is a hard look, by the numbers:
11.0% 鈥� McCutchen struck out at a very-low 11 percent clip, well below the current National League rate of 20.1. Previously a low-strikeout prone player, McCutchen鈥檚 disastrous 2016 season saw some ugly months in terms of swing and miss. For his career, he punches out at a 20.5 percent rate, showing that his June rate is nearly 50 percent better.
15.6% 鈥� Likewise, McCutchen brought back the patience he built his career on. By walking in 15.6 percent of his trips to the plate, McCutchen was able to get on base over 50 percent of the time, and that just does not happen in baseball for any extended stretch.
213 鈥� McCutchen put up a wRC+. Weighted runs created-plus, previously covered in this space, is a stat that aims to eliminate any unnecessary variables such as luck, park factors, etc., and judge a hitter鈥檚 ability to create runs, with 100 being an 鈥渁verage鈥� score.McCutchen鈥檚 stellar play in June doubled what an 鈥渁verage鈥� player would produce.
16.1 鈥� Part of how he was able to do it was his wRAA rating. wRAA stands for 鈥榃eighted Runs Above Average,鈥� or the number of offensive runs created overall by a player, with 鈥�0鈥� always being set to be the MLB average. It can get a bit confusing, after all, if a player had 23 RBI in a given month, should he not have a 23 wRAA? The important thing to remember about wRAA is that it is adjusted for ballpark factors. Meaning, a hit in one ballpark may not have been a hit in the next. But 16.1 is still a fantastic number no matter how you slice it, and is equivalent to about 1.5 WAR (wins Above Replacement).
27.8% and 32.9% 鈥� These figures represent Cutch鈥檚 line drive and ground ball rates, respectively. McCutchen was simply spraying the ball around in June, to the tune of a 6.8 percentage point-higher clip than the current MLB average. His 32.9 ground ball rate was conversely 11.1 percentage points lower than the current MLB rate. Baseball sure seems easy when you are making great contact.
These figures shown here bring to life the fantastic month of June that brought the Pirates鈥� best hitter back to his own glory days. The month of July has also been kind to McCutchen thus far, and though he would be hard-pressed to replicate numbers such as these, he can certainly carry this momentum into what may be his final days in Pittsburgh.