Analytics give insight on McCutchen’s performance

Andrew McCutchen has more incentive than most to heavily lean on advanced analytics and all of the information at a player’s fingertips nowadays as the Statcast era reaches a decade of full implementation in MLB.

The Pittsburgh Pirates’ designated hitter has navigated through a slow offensive start to the season, slashing .226/.332/.384 with a handful of days left in May.

But analytics can be utilized to add more context to a given player’s performance — McCutchen’s in particular — at-bat by at-bat.

In that regard, McCutchen has found some consolation despite relatively unappetizing standard splits.

However, within the greater realm of analytics, there is an extent to which McCutchen decides to consume.

“(Analytics) can keep you positive and can help you, but there’s also just a lot of information out there that ultimately, you shouldn’t look at all of it,” McCutchen said. “You’re just going to take yourself down a rabbit hole.

“It’s good, but just like anything that deals with numbers, it’s also bad. You’ve got to try to simplify the game, at the end of the day, as much as you can. Use stuff that you need to use that can help you and just move on past it.”

One advanced statistic that adds interesting context to McCutchen’s performance at the plate in 2024 is his barreled balls per plate appearance percentage.

Barreled balls take into account exit velocity and launch angle off the bat.

Specifically, barreled balls require an exit velocity of at least 98 mph.

As exit velocity increases, so does the launch angle range that earns barreled designation.

Within the Statcast database of in-play balls dating back to 2015, barreled balls have registered a very high minimum batting average (.500) and slugging percentage (1.500).

McCutchen ranks 13th in all of baseball with a 10.3% barreled balls per plate appearance rate.

As of Tuesday morning, McCutchen led the Pirates in that regard, with Oneil Cruz (10.2%) close behind.

For further comparison, the respective averages of elite sluggers Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani are 16.3% and 13.4%.

Similarly, McCutchen’s hard-hit production (balls off his bat with an exit velocity of 95 mph or higher) falls in the top 22% league-wide.

On the Pirates, only Cruz (54.2%) accounts for a higher rate of hard-hit balls than McCutchen (46.4%).

“For me, you’re doing something right when you let the ball travel and get deep, so you’re getting hits that way,” McCutchen said. “You keep that and maintain that approach and good things happen.”

McCutchen’s expected slugging percentage (.501) being significantly higher than the actual (.384) is further illustrative of the kind of contact he’s been making on the year.

For a specific example, look no further than McCutchen’s second at-bat in May 23’s series finale vs. the San Francisco Giants.

After hitting his seventh homer of the year to lead off the game, McCutchen just missed hitting another in his next plate appearance, instead flying out deep to right-center field.

Per Statcast, the ball had an 100.9 mph exit velocity, traveled 392 feet and had an expected batting average of .670.

McCutchen putting balls in play like that constitutes a major reason why manager Derek Shelton has stuck with him, even when his batting average and accompanying offensive numbers remained low.

“This guy went through a week or 10 days of having the worst luck of any human being on the planet,” Shelton said. “It seemed like everything he squared up was getting caught, and now balls are starting to fall in for him a little bit. The quality of the at-bat has been really good over the past month.”

McCutchen’s career transcends the Statcast era.

His 2011-15 stretch, featuring five All-Star appearances, the 2013 NL MVP and four Silver Sluggers, took place before many of the aforementioned analytics became commonplace.

Comparing the present with the pre-Statcast era, Mc-Cutchen can appreciate what analytics offer from a process standpoint.

Being able to quantify his approach at the plate, while it hasn’t fully translated into the numbers he’d prefer to be putting up, has been important for him this season.

“You get confirmation when you’re going through things,” he said. “It used to be before (2015) you’d be like, ‘Man, I just feel like I’m squaring a lot of balls up, I’m just not really getting the knocks.’ Now, you say that and you have the numbers to prove it. ‘You are squaring the ball up (but) the hits just aren’t falling for you. You’re actually squaring the ball up more than you ever have and you’re also not getting the hits like you normally should.’

“So, you have both of those to prove your statement. … You get cold, hard facts on the things that you’re feeling.”

That said, while exit velocity in particular is increasingly used as a performative barometer in baseball, Mc-Cutchen is not a player putting all his energy into chasing the metric.

“In the sense of squaring the ball up three, four times and getting hits — that rarely happens,” McCutchen said. “When a guy is 3 for 4, 3 for 5, 4 for 5, 4 for 4 — a lot of those times all those hits aren’t hit on the barrel.

“Sometimes you’re getting jammed, you’re hitting one off the end, you’re beating out an infield single and mixing in a hard-hit ball here and there. That’s just the way the game goes.”

McCutchen would be the first to admit that his current numbers fall short of expectations, but over the past few weeks, he’s been heating up along with the weather.

Heading into Tuesday’s series opener vs. the Detroit Tigers, he owns a .263 May batting average with an onbase percentage of .359 and slugging percentage of .438.

McCutchen’s strikeout rate this month is 24%, down from 36% in April.

Taking some time to get going offensively is nothing new to McCutchen, who owns a career .239 batting average in April.

Over his 16-year MLB career, he’s hit .284 in May while June has routinely been when McCutchen’s been at his best at the plate, with a .315 lifetime average.

The strong underlying numbers around McCutchen’s performance to date give him confidence that he’s on the right track.

“They’re getting better,” McCutchen said of his atbats of late. “… I have to just maintain my approach. If I get to two strikes, I’ve got to battle and that’s what I’ll continue to do. But until then, it’s good but it can be better.”