Will the real Christian Yelich please stand up?

As a newcomer to the Brewers internet sphere, I was surprised as I saw the vitriol from within the community aimed at Yelich and his recent performance. As a long-time Twins fan, the obvious comparison is to that of Joe Mauer: left-handed, hard contact, low launch angle, and the vitriol. So much vitriol.

That’s not the point of this piece, though; I wanted to see what we can glean from Yelich’s first two weeks of play. While there are no solid conclusions from such a small sample size, Yelich has made enough contact with the ball that there are some reasons to be optimistic about an offensive rebound coming in 2022.

This will be rather heavy on advanced stats, so bear with me a bit; I will attempt to quickly give bad/average/good parameters for each statistic for those unacquainted with the terms I’m using.

First, I want to look at FanGraphs’ wOBA (weighted On-Base Average) and xwOBA (expected weighted On-Base Average). These stats are used to give each hitter a single value for their offensive performance based on their hitting outcomes (wOBA) and then, using the quality of the contact - how hard the ball is hit and where - to give a value to what the outcome should have been (xwOBA). Average is .320, good is .350, excellent is .400. Here is how Yelich has scored using those metrics over his Brewers career:

Surprising to no one, in 2018-2019, Christian Yelich was an elite hitter. He was well past “excellent” and into perennial MVP territory, according to the OBAs. And, reinforcing our eyeball tests, he immediately plummeted to “decent” in 2020 and “average” in 2021, losing over .100 wOBA points in only two seasons of play.

In 2022, we’ve seen a big bounceback through the first 11 games of the season. As good as Yelich has looked over the past 3-4 days, his wOBA still sits at .380, roughly .050 points below his MVP-level seasons. The real story is in his xwOBA, which tells us that he is hitting the ball similarly to how he made contact in 2018 and 2019.

That’s promising… but it gets a little more complicated as we move over to Baseball Savant’s slew of StatCast-based data.

If you’re not familiar with Baseball Savant, it’s possibly the most helpful tool available to the modern baseball fan. I highly recommend everyone dive into that site; it’s easy to get lost in the numbers, a mathematical Wikipedia of sorts. I want to focus on three stats that tell a lot about who Yelich was and possibly who he will be going forward: Exit Velocity, Launch Angle, and Barrel Percentage.

The first two metrics are becoming more common in baseball broadcasts, so you probably have at least a passing understanding of them. Exit velocity is how hard you hit the ball, and anything over 90mph is good; anything over 95mph is excellent. Launch angle is the degree at which the ball travels off the bat, and if you’re looking at good power hitters, they usually sit in the 15-20 degree range. Barrel Percentage is the frequency at which the hitter “barrels” the ball. They often put “good wood” on the ball and drive it.

These metrics tell us important information that has always made Christian Yelich a rarity in baseball, at least in the world of MVP-level players: he hits the ball hard but he doesn’t consistently elevate it, which means he’s often - probably too often - driving the ball into the ground. And his barrel rate, while good, has never been top of the class, as players like Mike Trout routinely sit at 18% barrels. On the other hand, even in 2020, Yelich’s exit velocity was excellent.

We all knew that, though… which leads us to his early 2022 results. His barrel rate is way up to an unsustainably high 22%. His exit velocity remains in the good-to-very-good range, which confirms the wall-banging hits we’ve seen a few times out of him already this season. Unfortunately, his launch angle sits at only 3.1%, roughly ten points lower than you’d like to see out of a player with Yelich’s hit profile.

If Yelich continues to barrel the ball but not elevate it routinely, he’s going to be a feast or famine player in 2022, which is what we’ve seen in the first two weeks: he has only eight hits on the season, but six of those hits have gone for extra bases. Given the ubiquity of the shift in the modern game, it’s likely Yelich will either roll over to an infielder or take at least two bases if this approach continues, which it almost certainly won’t, given his unsustainable 22% barrel rate. If that barrel drops to be more in line with Yelich’s Brewers career, we likely see an immediate return to the 2020 version; which isn’t a terrible outcome, but given how the rest of the offense has struggled, the team needs more from their left fielder than a slightly above average offensive performance.

Unfortunately, we’re still seeing the biggest problem persist with Yelich, even if it has been masked over by a handful of 2022 balls that he managed to elevate. After his knee injury, something changed in his swing that caused him to stop elevating the ball with enough frequency to excel in baseball. And while some of his metrics have improved early in the season, it’s hard to see this early-season success continue without more elevation than we've seen.

It’s possible Yelich will continue his “elevation explosion” which led to multiple extra base hits during this homestand but ultimately, it’s unlikely he will return to being an offensive juggernaut with a launch angle under 5%… which is a 2% higher launch angle than he has today.