Analysis: Castellanos is Crushing It
In baseball, as in life, good first impressions are important and difficult to make. Debuting for a new team is always a pressure-filled task, particularly when the weight of expectations and large contracts are involved. Just ask Bryce Harper, whose slow start with Philadelphia early last season led to widespread criticism from fans and analysts alike.
But for Nicholas Castellanos, it appears he’s hit a stride right away with his third team in two years. After being traded to the Cubs at the deadline last year and ultimately failing to get into the playoffs, Castellanos decided to move a couple hundred miles east and sign with the newly-competitive Reds. Heading into the season, his role was to be a complementary piece to an already-loaded lineup that featured the likes of Eugenio Suarez and Mike Moustakas. But during the first quarter of the season, he has quickly turned into the focal point of their offense.
Through his first 15 games in a Cincinnati uniform, Castellanos ranks second in baseball in home runs (7), fifth in wRC+ (215), and fifth in wOBA (.484). Additionally, his walk rate is up 2% from his mark last year, and his 16 RBI are tied for third in the league. Defensively, he hasn’t been very good (his -1.0 defensive runs rank him 17th among RF), but his hot start on offense has more than made up for it. As it stands right now, he is in a tie for the third-highest fWAR in the league, sitting only behind Mike Yastrzemski and Fernando Tatis Jr. at the top of the leaderboard.
So what has gotten into Castellanos? Well, so far I see two main differences in his approach at the plate that may be contributing to his sudden surge.
The first is that unlike many of his contemporaries, he has embraced his all-fields approach at the plate even more this season. Whereas typical sluggers are spending the majority of their time trying to pull the ball out of the ballpark, Castellanos is getting most of his hits up the middle and spraying it to both sides in equal proportion (roughly 29%/45%/26% pull/middle/oppo). This has been a small, but noticeable shift from his usual approach, which has traditionally leaned more toward the pull side. You can start to see this difference in the spray charts of his home runs below, particularly in how they have been heading more towards center and right field in 2020.
Castellanos’s Home Run Spray Chart from 2019
Castellanos’s Home Run Spray Chart from 2020
The second key difference can be seen in his approach toward off-speed pitches this season. Typically, Castellanos has been great at hitting the fastball, but not so great facing anything else (Devan Fink does a much better job of explaining this in his 2019 article on the subject, which you can read here). As such, pitchers have started to adjust accordingly in recent seasons. Just two years ago, 59% of the pitches thrown to him were fastballs. Now, that number has dropped to 49.4% in the young season, with the other 9.6% being replaced almost entirely by breaking balls. However, despite this shift, he is hitting better than he ever has before.
Of course, much of this has to do with his ability to still crush a fastball when he gets one to hit. In fact, he may be hitting fastballs better than ever. After all, six of his seven homers this season have come off of fastballs, and he currently has an ungodly wOBA of .617 on the pitch in 2020. However, he has shown some slight signs of adjusting to the greater amount of breaking balls being thrown his way, as can be seen in the table below. Here, the most important statistic to look at is his average exit velocity on breaking balls, which has so far increased significantly from his previous seasons. While he still may not be hitting them as hard as fastballs, a 3-4 MPH jump in average exit velocity would be a major improvement if it’s sustained for the entire season, and it would go a long way toward him getting better results on those pitches in the future.
The only real issue that can be had with Castellanos’s offensive output to this point is that most of his damage has been done in low-leverage situations. For all of his home runs and RBI, Castellanos has a Win Probability Added of just .32, which ranks him only 41st in the league. However, this isn’t really his fault, as he’s just not getting to the plate at key moments in the game. The best illustration of this is Castellanos’s Leverage Index during his at-bats this year, which has been .91. Since a Leverage Index of 1 is considered average, this would mean that he has had a considerable number of at-bats in low-leverage situations. And when looking at his splits, we can indeed see that he has only had one at-bat in a high-leverage spot (LI >2) this season. Now, this is not to say that he hasn’t been coming through when his team needs him. In fact, quite the opposite has been true. Thus far, he has hit about equally well with runners in scoring position (15 PA, .308 BA, 2 HR) as he has with no one on base (33 PA, .333 BA, 3 HR).
But now, we must ask the $64,000 question: how long can he keep this up? The honest answer is that I can’t say for sure.
On one hand, his inflated stats this season almost ensure that a regression will come sooner or later. His performance against fastballs, his .778 SLG, and .484 wOBA all seem too high to be sustainable, even over a sixty-game season. Every hitter is going to go through bad times, and pitchers are constantly adjusting their gameplans to get hitters like him out, so I don’t think he’ll continue at this breakneck pace for much longer. However, when the bad times do come for Castellanos, it will be difficult to predict how they will affect his overall numbers going forward. To this end, I think there are three things that we will need to look for over the next few weeks to assess his performance:
Can he continue to successfully spray the ball all over the field with power?
Can he show more improvement in facing the breaking ball?
Can he keep his walk rate up and his strikeout rate under control?
If he can do all of these things, I think this could be the start of something really good for both Castellanos and the Reds. He has developed into a good hitter over the past few seasons, but these changes could mean the difference between being a good hitter and an elite one. Should he make that jump this season and continue to produce at a high level, Castellanos’s four-year, $64 million contract may turn out to be one of the best moves the Reds have made in decades. But even if Castellanos regresses to his usual performance, I still view that move as a win for the Reds that moves them closer to contention.
Right now though, all we can do is sit back and watch what happens over the rest of the year. A quarter of the season may already be done, but for players like Castellanos, the show is just getting started. I highly recommend breaking out the popcorn.