David Wright's Power Decline is Unprecedented

Written by Mike Mariano | 01 April 2010

Baseball Prospectus, a home of fantastic technical and sabermetric baseball analysis, ran a few numbers and concluded that no player as young as David Wright has faced such a drop off in power production as he did in 2009.  The long and short of their number crunching is that they took the average home runs from every MLB season and calculated where every player fell in terms of standard deviation from that mean.  Basically, it assigned a small manageable number to the amount of home runs a player hit in comparison to the home runs hit in that year to make for easier era-to-era comparison.

From 2005 to 2008, David Wright finished between .68 and 1.51 standard deviations away from the average amount of home runs hit by a single player.  More simply, he hit more home runs in those season than 75.1-93.5 percent of ballplayers in those years.  Then in 2009, DW finished at a standard deviation of -.60! Which equates to hitting less home runs than 77.4 percent of the league.  This sort of drop off has only happened five times in baseball history and the other sob stories include: Don Baylor, Vinny Castilla, Sam Crawford and Del Ennis.  The kicker is that David Wright was at least five years younger than them when in happened to him.  Opening up the search to smaller drop offs and drop offs over shorter periods of time (not five years) gives some more names, but still none as striking as David Wright.

Granted, he's only going to be 27 this year and he was hurt and the whole team was hurt and he had no protection and he was pressing and blah and blah and blah.  I'm sure he'll be fine Mets fans I'm not pretending that Wright is suddenly some slap hitting Sally who'll never hit home runs again.  I'm just relaying the facts found by smarter men than I.