Assessing Veteran Talent: Pat Burrell

By John Dorhauer

I’ve been talking a lot recently about the difficulty of knowing exactly what to expect from young, relatively unproven talent going into a given year. This does not imply, however, that players always become more consistent and predictable with age. While this may be true through a certain age range, every player will eventually meet a continued regression as they age. And in some ways, predicting at what point this regression will occur can be just as tricky, if not more so, than predicting the ascension of a young player. With that in mind, let’s take a look at Pat Burrell and see what we might be able to expect from this proven veteran quantity.

Taking a look at Burrell’s offensive numbers in 2008, there appears to be no reason to expect any sort of regression. He had 33 doubles and 33 homers, which were his best marks in each category since 2002. He had an ISO of .257, and that number has increased in each of the last five seasons (which happens to be every year since his stellar 2002 campaign). His line drive percentage was 20.4% - up 2.3% from ’07 - and he managed to hit 18% percent of his fly balls for homers, which happens to be near his career-best. And while he still has a knack for the strikeout (nearly a quarter of the time), he has leveled this mark off from previous years. This has been helped by his increased contact rate of 81.3%, another stat that has increased consistently for him. He’s swinging at more pitches out of the zone (20.1% – up 4.5% from ’07), but this has been counteracted with an increased contact rate on these pitches (66.5% - up 11.2% from ’07). Even though Burrell will be 32 for the 2009 season, it looks like he’s still growing through his prime.

But not so fast. Bill James projects Burrell to have similar power numbers next year with only slight declines in homers (32 projected) and doubles (29). If these numbers are accurate, then Burrell obviously carries a good deal of value in terms of his power. I’m just not a big believer that he can sustain these numbers, next year, though. The most telling indicator for me was how he achieved his power numbers in 2008. While he hit 33 homers this past year, almost all of them were straight pull shots, which means he’s hitting towards a closer fence and a shorter field. (To get a better sense of this, go to hittrackeronline.com and look for Burrell’s page – I’d copy the graph myself, but I haven’t had much luck with successfully putting any tables/graphs in these posts.) The graph that records the trajectory of home runs plots these in reference to the angle at which they left the bat: therefore, 90 degrees is straight-away center, 45 is the right field pole and 135 is the left field pole. This puts left-center at about 110 degrees. Assuming you’re able to check out this graph, you’ll notice practically everything is bunched between the 135 and 110 degree markings (28 of 33, to be exact). Using that information, we can deduce that only 5 of Burrell’s home runs this past year weren’t dead-pull shots, and only two of those were hit opposite field. And none of them were hit to straight-away center.

Perhaps this just means that Burrell is just that good of a pull hitter, but this isn’t the case. Looking at these graphs from his 2007 and 2006 seasons (the only other two with such a graphic), you notice a stunning shift in Burrell’s power distribution. 2007 doesn’t show quite as big of a departure (although there’s a much larger grouping around left-center than 2008, which is largely grouped around the right field pole), but 2006 shows a much more even spread of power. Burrell is not a guy with opposite field power, but you can see that he at least used to be able to go to dead center. This trend is also made apparent by the decrease in average standard distance, a stat that measures how far a homer will travel in optimal weather conditions and discounts the effects of wind and altitude. In each of these three seasons, Burrell experienced a significant drop in distance, going from 397.2 feet in ’06 to 389.3 in ’07 to 381.5 in ’08. If you think about it, that’s huge. In just two years he lost an average of nearly 16 feet in home run distance. In 2006 his average homer would’ve been a homer in practically every part of every major league park; in 2008 his average homer would barely make it out in left-center of most parks.

There are a number of other red flags for Burrell. While he has a solid HR/FB rate, his infield fly ball rate was an astronomical 13.1% last year. This has been above 10% each of the past three years, which could be another indication of a loss of power. If Burrell can’t keep that HR/FB rate up, he could experience a massive drop in homers. His groundball rate also took a jump from 30.6% in ’07 to 34.5% in ’08, which isn’t good news for a guy with Burrell’s speed. Let’s just say I don’t see him beating out those infield hits. Speaking of speed, this, paired with his overall bad defense, is also a bad sign for his fantasy value. Stolen bases aside, Burrell is a big risk to be taken out of close ballgames for either a defensive replacement or a pinch runner, which could lose you some valuable late-inning at bats. My favorite example of this came in the postseason when Manuel pinch-ran Eric Bruntlett for Burrell. How slow do you have to be to get replaced by a 30-year old guy that’s never gotten as many as 10 stolen bases in a season at the bigs who happens to look like a lumberjack?

It’s also worth mentioning that Burrell’s free agency status could have a potential effect on his fantasy league value. Perhaps he lands with an AL team as a DH, where he won’t have to worry about being replaced by a defensive sub. But if he leaves Philadelphia, I think this further hurts his fantasy stock. Not only is he leaving a very hitter-friendly park, he’s also leaving a very potent offense, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see his runs and RBI to take a hit.

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned injury. Burrell hasn’t had much problem recently with missing any playing time, but as he gets older he becomes more and more susceptible to injury, which would obviously be detrimental to his numbers. There’s no real way to predict this, but it is worth mentioning as a risk associated with him.

Overall, I would avoid Burrell in drafts, as he will likely be over-valued. Although he’s proven to be consistent in recent years, his only real value comes from his power. And because he appears to be losing a significant amount of power, I think he will lose much of the value that people are likely to give him. If his average distance of homers continues to fall, most of those fly balls will result in harmless warning track out, which will make for a long season for Burrell as well as anyone else who drafts him next year.