Who Is Justin Turner Now?

You're certainly familiar with the trope of aging sluggers who sell their side pull power because they can't catch the fastball as well as they used to. They need to start preparing to swing early, forcing them to anticipate what pitch is coming instead of reacting to what they see. They hope that more homers will remove more whiffs that come when they are fooled by the slow stuff. What's interesting about this trope is that its strategy is exactly the same as the one that swept the baseball world about 10 years ago. Justin Turner was the leading light of the launch angle revolution, a move that emphasized getting early on the plane, attacking the ball up front, and pulling it into the air. In essence, that organization has turned the last refuge of the aging slugger into a normal way to hit. At 39, Turner is an aging slugger, with a wRC+ that has fallen in each season since 2020. His swing has improved, and now that he's been pushed back a lot in strikeouts, his 106 wRC+ just isn't cutting it.

Just looking at his stats would tell you that Turner has been unlucky this season. After all, he's posting his highest xwOBA since 2021 and his highest walk rate since 2018. Meanwhile, his BABIP is the lowest since 2011, and his wOBA is nearly 30 points below his xwOBA. Unfortunately, isn't it? Here's the problem: Turner's 30.6% hard-hit rate and 87.1-mph average exit velocity aren't just career lows, they're miles below his career averages of 39.6% and 89.8 mph. Turner's popularity has also arrived. If your communication quality is getting worse, maybe luck isn't what's lowering your BABIP. But there's still that pesky xwOBA to worry about. Why didn't it go down with the quality of Turner's barrels?

The answer is that Turner is using a line drive rate of 32.4%, the highest since 2018. xwOBA loves line drives for the same reason hitters love them: Line drives often turn into hits. But Turner approaches those drives in a different way than before. Since the start of the Statcast era, hitters have pulled their drives almost 37% of the time. Turner was near or slightly below that average draw rate. But now that he's hitting more line drives, he's hitting them less and pulling them more often.

A similar, though less extreme fate befell Turner's fly balls.

This is not the way it should work, and I know that because I learned it from Justin Turner.

Coming into the season, the concern was whether Turner could still catch the fastball. His performance has been declining for years. So far this season, it's been a hair loss, but a new problem has arisen. Turner was also terrible against breaking balls. He's been teasing them a lot, he's come up with a scary rate, and he's yet to break even one. Keep in mind that coming into the season, according to Statcast's run values, Turner was worth 79 runs against breaking pitches since 2015. That was the third highest total in all of baseball, behind Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. This year, he was worth -5 runs against them.

The book on Turner hasn't changed. Pitchers still try to counter his forward catch style by working away from him. However, while he used to look for that center field, he is now turning to the infield more often. Below are the heat maps of his conversion rates.

I've watched a lot of drives that Turner has pulled off this season. They were full of balls attached to the end of the bat or muscled over the infield. In other words, he's throwing to that very inside pitch, and he's making it work, but he's not really driving the ball up. Turner's flare/burner rate is 31.8%, a career high and sixth highest among professional players. That is an extremely variable figure; four of the five players ahead of him are also hitting career highs. It's hard to imagine him keeping that up for the rest of the season.

We now have bat tracking data that shows Turner has the slowest and shortest walk in the league against almost every pitch type. Slow bowlers need to make up for their lack of power by raising the ball more often. Although Turner is running his best contact rate in years, Stacast's data is similar to what I saw when I watched his film: He doesn't lift the ball up, and in the graph below, that puts him where you don't want him. be.

In some ways, this power hitter who has reshaped the baseball in its offensive image is in the direction of Luis Arraez, but without the strong connection that makes that profile work. We have no way of knowing how much slower or shorter Turner's swing is now compared to recent years, but common sense tells us it hasn't always been this way. There is no way that the way shown in the graph above is how he turned himself into one of the best hitters in the game. You don't put ISOs in the .200s four years in a row with compact, contact-oriented throwing. It's just not how it works.

There is one indication that the quality of communication with Turner will improve. His contact rate on pitches outside the zone increased to 78.7%, third highest among professional players. At the same time, his level of communication on the pitches within the area has decreased. That's the kind of thing that tends to pan out over time, but in the short term, it's likely to strain Turner's communication quality. Looking only at Turner's contact inside the zone, his 89.1-mph average exit velocity, while his career low, is at least close to his career average of 91.4. If Turner's contact rates start to even out, he should start hitting the ball more. Turner has also been in the limelight for the past few weeks. Since June 2, he has raised his wRC+ from 87 to 106. However, while his results are improving, he has actually been hitting the ball even softer this month.

I'm honestly not sure what to do with all this information. Maybe Turner really starts his swing early like an aging slugger, leaving him a long way from breaking out. Or maybe you're trying to find a way to communicate. However, when I watch his film, I don't see anything very different.

His stance isn't as open as it was during his time with the Dodgers, and his leg kick is maybe a little higher, but he looks like he's getting into his load and leg kick, and putting his foot down in almost the same order. Maybe this looks like Turner if the bat speed is gone, but right now, he seems like an outsider. In today's game, very few players can find lasting success by hitting flares over the infield. It's a safe bet that something will have to give one way or the other. Maybe he just got caught in the middle, and his time will come back. Either he's going to start hitting the ball more, or his line drive rate is going to come back down to earth and the expected stats are going to start to more closely match the actual stats. For now, all I can say for sure is that Turner looks very different.