Why You Should Avoid Drafting Brandon Phillips

This article was inspired by a comment left by one of my uncles on a recent article of mine from my family’s new 3-D Baseball site. The article addressed candidates to become the fifth member of baseball’s 40/40 club (to learn about my ultimate conclusions, you’ll just have to read that article), and my uncle mentioned a guy I didn’t address whom he thought might have an outside shot at achieving this feat: Brandon Phillips. My uncle’s not the only guy who’s a fan of Phillips – despite suffering substantial drops in all point-getting categories for rotisserie leagues last year, he will likely be one of the first five or so second basemen drafted next year because of his potential as a speed-power guy. I’ll be the first to admit – I’m not that big on Brandon Phillips. It wasn’t until I profiled him more in depth, however, that I realized how big of a bust I think he’ll be next year.



Let’s start with his power numbers. Phillips dropped from 30 homers in ’07 to 21 in ’08. He did have about 100 less AB’s between the two years, though, so it’s not quite as huge of a gap as it may initially seem. (It comes out to 21.7 AB/HR in ’07 and 26.6 AB/HR in ’08.) But while these numbers themselves may not suggest an imminent nose-dive, his peripherals don’t allow for much hope of a turnaround. During his three full seasons with the Reds, Phillips has consistently hit just over a third of his batted balls for flies. Because he doesn’t hit many in the air, he needs a good ratio of those that do make it up to go out. He was able to do this in 2007 at his best career rate (15.9%), but not so much in 2008 (13.2%). A resurgence of power wouldn’t be completely out of the question, but because it appears that his flyball rate isn’t going anywhere, his HR/FB ratio would need to return to its 2007 levels.

The main reason that I’m not too optimistic about this is because of the trends I noticed from his homerun spray charts at hittrackeronline.com. Phillips is in the midst of two debilitating negative trends – his average standard distance and his direction of homeruns hit. While his ASD of 391.9’ in 2008 wasn’t horrible, it was the nadir of his three-year downward trend (393.9’ in ’07, 395.8’ in ’06). What was more telling to me, though, was that fact that his homers are now starting to skew exclusively towards left field. In the previous two years he had substantial power to both center and opposite field. His total number of opposite field homers went from 5 in ’06 to 12 in ’07 to 1 in ’08. It would appear that most of the flyballs he hit over the fence towards center and right last year stayed in the yard for 2008, and I would expect this trend to continue into 2009.

Phillips hasn’t really been known for his average, but even that took a pretty sizeable hit in 2008. The fact that he doesn’t hit for average shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone – he hits a lot of grounders (nearly 50% in ’08!) and not a lot of line drives (16.4% in ’08). Because of his lack of line drives, his BABIP doesn’t help him out any, either (.281 in ’08). To top it all off, Phillips swings a lot and doesn’t make great contact. He has yet to crack a contact rate of 80%, even though he swings over half the time. In fact, his swing percentage of 54% last year was tied for the ninth highest mark in baseball. He’s particularly susceptible to pitches out of the zone – last year, he swung at over a third of these pitches while only making contact 52% of the time. Basically, if you expect Phillips to hit anything around or over .275 next year, you’re quite the optimist.

The swing rates I just mentioned have also hurt Phillips’ walk rates (6.5% last year, which was actually his highest mark as a full-timer), which have conversely hurt his opportunities for base stealing. Many people view Phillips’ stolen base totals to be his most appealing trait, but I actually believe that it will be the biggest reason he’ll be a bust next year. His stolen base percentage is in a current three-year decline, going from 92% in ’06 to 80% in ’07 to 69% in ’08. What’s most fascinating about his stolen bases is his monthly splits. From the beginning of the season through July, Phillips’ numbers were pretty much in line with what he had done throughout his career. Throughout August and September, however, his stolen base numbers went sour with only one successful stolen base in five tries. This is a drastic shift. I suppose it’s possible that these two months were just an anomaly, but it seemed too significant to chalk up to bad luck. In reality it had nothing to do with luck and everything to do with something that happened with the Reds in early August last year – Adam Dunn’s trade to the Arizona Diamondbacks.

When Dunn was with Cincinnati, Phillips consistently hit directly ahead of him in the lineup, so it’s clear how this move would have such a substantial impact on Phillips. There are a number of factors that would explain how this might specifically affect Phillips’ stolen base numbers – the occasional extreme defensive shifts Dunn would get with runners on, more off-speed pitches for such a dangerous power hitter, a lack of focus on baserunners while Dunn was at the plate, etc. Because I didn’t have any concrete proof of this, I asked my brother, Adam (a statistical wizard who, coincidentally, also writes for 3-dbaseball.net), to see what numbers he could come up with in support of this. Instead of attempting to rephrase the results he sent me, I’ll simply quote him directly:

I looked at every baserunner who was on first at least 5 times with second base open and Dunn at the plate in the past 3 years. There were 12 such players who were in this situation a total of 309 times. I compared how often they attempted to steal and how often they were successful with Dunn at the plate and with anyone else at the plate. Here's what I found:

In those 309 opportunities, they attempted to steal 54 times and were successful 46 times. Had those 309 opportunities come with any other hitter at the plate, they would have attempted 31.3 times and been successful 23.0. So they both attempted quite a bit more often and were successful at a higher rate with Dunn at the plate. phillips specifically was 29 for 34 in 90 opps with Dunn at the plate, and was 12.5 for 16.5 for every 90 opps with someone else at the plate. Replacing those 90 opps with Dunn with 90 more of his non-Dunn opps brings his 3-year cumulative total from 60 for 75 to 43.5 for 57.5. If we assume he benefits from Dunn at the same rate as the rest of the sample and adjust his totals based on the overall rate changes, he drops to 45.5 for 60.7 over those 3 years. This is all considering only steals of second with the base open, so it doesn't account for double steals or steals of third, but if we assume the same rate of change, we're talking about his steals being cut by a fourth and a significant drop in SB%.

Some pretty heavy stuff here, but it clearly supports my hypothesis that Phillips was benefiting from Dunn’s presence in the lineup. With Dunn out of the picture for 2009 (as he was for that small window of time at the end of 2008), I wouldn’t be surprised to see Phillips’ stolen base totals plummet. If his steal totals do drop by a fourth as my brother speculates, he’d be down to 17 without factoring any additional loss of SB% or SB attempts.

Clearly, the evidence I found supported my belief that Phillips will be a bust next year. With a poor batting average and likely drops in homers and steals, I don’t see how Phillips is anything other than highly overrated going into draft day this year. There will be far better and far cheaper options for you at second base, so unless you’re really big on Phillips I would avoid him at all costs.

-John Dorhauer