Kendrys Morales Looking for Better Fly Ball Fortune

Mandatory Credit: Joy R. Absalon-USA TODAY Sports

The more I think about it, the more I think the Royals could have signed Kendrys Morales without giving him the second year guaranteed, along with the Dayton Moore Special of a mutual option after that. Morales’ market likely wasn’t that crowded to the point where the Royals needed to commit that kind of contract. Buster Olney reported that rival evaluators were surprised Morales got that deal, so it seems the Royals may have overpaid. Regardless, the deal is done  – reportedly – so it’s time to figure out if Morales will be worth what he’s receiving.

As I mentioned yesterday, it’s possible that his long layoff hampered Morales’ ability to make an immediate impact in 2014, and to some extent, the numbers bear that out. Here are his month-by-month wRC+ numbers:

June – 52
July – 46
August – 103
September – 81

Like I said, it’s only to some extent. He did get better in August, but then it looks like he took a step back in the season’s final month. Part of that struggle was certainly BABIP-related, as he hit just .183 on balls in play during September. It actually could have been worse that month, but Morales hit 4 home runs in his last 105 plate appearances, so he actually had his best isolated slugging percentage mark then (.172). This may have been a sign that his power was rounding into form, or it may have just been small sample noise.

To find out, I first wanted to see if Morales was still hitting balls with authority in 2014. His batted ball profile wasn’t drastically different, although he did hit line drives less frequently and infield fly balls more frequently, which may have played a part in his .244 BABIP, the lowest mark of his career since becoming a regular player.

But that batted ball data doesn’t tell the whole story in regards to batted ball authority, so I looked up his average fly ball and home run distances from the last few seasons on Baseball Heat Maps. They don’t have it broken down by month, but there’s still some information to be gathered. Besides, we’ll learn more about his season if we look at it as a whole, instead of piecing bits together.

2012 – 286.34
2013 – 292.63
2014 – 287.04

Clearly he regressed some from 2013, but Morales had a longer average fly ball distance this past season than he did in 2012, when he had a wRC+ of 119 and 22 home runs. The biggest difference between the 3 years is in the respective launch angles. Morales hit balls at a steeper angle in 2014 than he had in previous seasons, and while he still hit balls a pretty long way – his average distance was longer than that of Bryce Harper and Jose Bautista, among others – he was getting under them too often.

Live Feed

Call to the Pen

That’s reflected in his higher than usual infield fly ball rate (he hit 9 infield flies in 2014 after hitting only 15 of them in the previous 3 seasons combined), as well as in his production on fly balls. Since becoming a full-time player, his home run per fly ball rate had not been lower than 14.5%, but it fell all the way to 7.9% this year. Also, here are his wRC+ stats on flies in his 4 seasons prior to 2014 (remember that he missed 2011 due to injury):

2009 – 240
2010 – 258
2012 – 251
2013 – 233
2014 – 75

One of these things is not like the others. To put it in other terms, his OPS on flies in 2013 was 1.207. His OPS on flies in 2014 was .658. And that 2013 season was one in which Morales had a .563 ISO on fly balls, which was 100 points lower than any previous season as a regular. His ISO on fly balls in 2014 was .316. Relatively speaking, that’s awful.

Morales’ production on ground balls was also worse – his wRC+ was 0 in 2014 – but he did just as much damage with line drives as he had ever done. His wRC+ on liners was 353, 30 points higher than it was in 2013. So clearly, the fly balls were the biggest culprit here.

The question now becomes: was this a step toward a steep decline, or was this merely an aberration due to missing so much time on the diamond?

We know that players with Morales’ body type don’t age well, and he is 31 years old now, so it’s certainly possible that he won’t return to the production levels of the previous 4 seasons. However, I find it hard to believe a player’s true talent level would fall off a cliff like that in his age 31 season. His swing and contact rates don’t indicate a major shift in approach, and he actually made more contact on fastballs than he had before, so it doesn’t look like the bat speed is a major concern. This appears to be a case of some bad luck, combined with a lack of big league training time.

My guess is that Morales’ time away from competitive baseball, and particularly away from live pitching, affected his timing at the plate, which in turn affected his swing. When he made contact, the ball carried quite a bit, but because of something in his mechanics, he was hitting too many playable balls. It also didn’t help that his home parks were not friendly to home runs (which won’t change in Kauffman Stadium). But a full offseason of work, along with Spring Training, may allow Morales to make the adjustments he needs to make to get back to his old self. He’ll need to tweak some things in 2015 so he makes better contact than he did in 2014, particularly on fly balls, but that’s something he’s done before.

This is just a theory based on the numbers, of course, but intuitively it makes sense. Good hitters don’t always look good in Spring Training or at the start of the season, but if they struggle early on, they’ll fix whatever part of their game that needs fixed, and then return to form. For much of his career, Morales has been a good hitter. He wasn’t a good hitter this year, but the Royals are betting on him to rebound. If he can make the necessary adjustments, that bet could pay off in a significant way.