Making Fielding Adjustments to Victor Robles

Victor Robles was one of the top prospects in MLB before his major league debut, appearing in most lists' top ten prior to his call-up. Through 780 plate appearances in the majors, Robles has been a tantalizing player, displaying top of the line sprint speed and defensive ability that demonstrate the elite tools scouts fawned over before his call-up. Despite these prodigious tools, Robles' batted ball profile has slightly disappointed. His career hard hit rate is only 23.5 percent (per Baseball Savant), much lower than the major league average of approximately 34 percent. Some have pointed out his lack of hard hit balls (as a portion of his total batted ball events) can be attributed to his propensity to bunt for base hits.  His maximum exit velocity is about average (110 mph) which might indicate he can unlock some more power with a few adjustments. Take a look at the hitters who are grouped around Robles in maximum exit velocity on balls in the "sweet spot" (defined by MLBAM as batted balls between eight and 32 degrees):

Note I filtered the query by players with at least 75 balls in play at those launch angles. Forget, for a moment, that unseemly average exit velocity and take a look at the maximum for Robles and the players around him. Rhys Hoskins is a player known for his power. Cano, even in the later part of his career, is a very good hitter as are Blackmon, Canha, Winker, and Jose Martinez. Take aside Severino (who has had a great start to the 2020 campaign), Smoak (who has aged out of relevance), and Ramos (a lot of injury issues in addition to aging), this is a group of productive major league players. So there is some hope for Robles on the offensive side if he can get his approach in order.

Nevertheless, because he is an odd player that seems to be constantly talked about in baseball circles (especially by fantasy prognosticators), I thought he would be an interesting player to look it with regards to how an opposing team should deploy its defenders against him.

Robles has an unusual spray chart when you map out his batted balls from 2019 and 2020.

If the distinction I am trying to make is not clear, let me separate the batted balls by those which are ground balls and those which are fly balls. 

He has an extreme pull tendency when he puts the ball on the ground, but the opposite when he hits fly balls. The defense, therefore needs to adjust accordingly. So where should each defender on the diamond place himself? First I looked at all of his ground balls. I bucketed each ground ball into one of ten buckets based on the spray angle of the batted ball. There are five buckets on each side of second base. Here are all his ground balls labeled by their bucket: 

And the average locations of the batted balls in each bucket, in both tabular and graphical form, respectively: 

Based on the frequency with which Robles hits his ground balls, in addition to the locations of each average bucket position relative to the rest, I settled on this defensive alignment for the infielders: 

The third baseman is hugging the line, the shortstop is playing deep in the hole, the second baseman is around the bag, and the first baseman is shaded to the left (the further left the better, but obviously he needs to be able to get back to first base to receive throws. So consider the first baseman in the game at the time). Next I looked to position the outfielders. 

When hitting the ball in the direction of either of the corner outfielders, Robles hits the ball at similar distances and actually hits the ball the hardest to right field. Very unusual. Given the locations of his fly balls in the spray chart at the start of the post, I would position the left fielder around the cluster towards center field to the left of second, the center fielder shaded to the right towards the other large cluster, and have the right fielder hug the line. When all is said and done, the alignment should look as follows: 

As an addendum I wanted to see if there were certain pitch locations and types that induced contact at the locations of where I would place the fielders. First, I sorted the pitch locations that led to ground balls. Considering the infielders are placed around buckets one, three, five, and eight I filtered the entire data set for pitches that resulted in ground balls in those four buckets. 

Given his lack of fly balls and locations of these pitches, it seems he has trouble getting under the ball when its thrown down in the zone. He really pulls breaking balls down and inside, almost all of his balls in play for pitches with those characteristics were hit to the third baseman. Fastballs up led to a lot of grounders to bucket three, where the shortstop would be positioned. 

Here is a similar figure, for fly balls in each portion of the outfield:

Most fastballs on the outer half of the plate are going to find their way to the right fielder. Similarly, fastballs in the middle third go to center and in the inner third go to left. Robles is strictly adherent to the idea of "going with the pitch", a possible explanation for his middling power results despite his loud tools. Then again, his weakest fly ball contact is to the pull side. Maybe he needs to make a swing adjustment to unlock some more power? It is difficult to be an even above-average power hitter without hitting the ball to the pull side with authority.

All data scraped from MLBAM using the baseballR package