Out of Curiosity

Brendan Harris, in the '07-'08 offseason, posits:

"What impressed me the most is that Delmon's so aggressive at the plate, yet with runners on base he's a very tough out. He's phenomenal with runners in scoring position. To me, that comes from his overall competitiveness."

Delmon essentially never walks, so I'm going to assume that Harris means Delmon was good at getting hits with runners on base. Was that true?

First, some averages that I looked up in the off-season:

.261/.324/.412, 3128 AB/team -- 2008 AL, none on
.297/.362/.452, 749 AB/team -- 2008 AL, RISP, <2 outs
.245/.350/.386, 659 AB/team -- 2008 AL, RISP, 2 outs

And then how did Delmon do in 2007 with the Devil Rays?

.250/.275/.344 -- Delmon, 2007 TBD, none on
.409/.410/.462 -- Delmon, 2007 TBD, RISP, <2 outs
.280/.330/.366 -- Delmon, 2007 TBD, RISP, 2 outs

Harris' statement largely holds up. Delmon was at his worst when pitchers had the bases empty, for whatever reason. That's definitely a small sample size in terms of projecting for the future, but if you take Harris' statement as an observation of what happened, it looks pretty accurate. What do his career numbers look like?

.276/.306/.375 -- Delmon, career, none on
.352/.378/.500 -- Delmon, career, RISP, <2 outs
.246/.299/.322 -- Delmon, career, RISP, 2 outs

So with a larger (but still relatively small) sample, Delmon's splits start to look more normal. Worse with RISP/2 than with no one on base, and best in the RISP, <2 outs situation.

If anything, this fits my intuition of how someone would do with Delmon's approach. With runners on and less than 2 outs, the pitcher is probably going to feel the most pressure to throw strikes, so as not to get himself in even more trouble, and swinging away at pretty much every offering is going to give you the best results when the pitcher is around the plate.

Also, consider this split from his bb-ref splits page:

.207/.246/.263 -- vs. Power
.279/.322/.391 -- vs. avg P/F
.387/.400/.558 -- vs. Finesse

With power and finesse defined as:

Power pitchers strike out or walk more than 28% of batters faced, Finesse pitchers strike out or walks less than 24% of batters faced.

Upon observing this split, I said aloud "holy shit." Delmon's career isn't all that long, but that's a huge split and it again follows my intuition that a hitter with no plate discipline/pitch recognition is going to do best in situations when the pitcher is going to be in the zone a lot.

(As an aside, yes, power pitchers on average do better than finesse pitchers, but the first link I could find on OPS splits has NL power pitchers at .707, avg P/F at .757, and finesse at .791, so there's a difference, but not anywhere close to the difference that we see with Delmon.)

Also, and I don't have as much founding for this conclusion, I don't think that Delmon has very good bat speed, and against true right-handed power pitchers, he seems to have zero chance at the plate.

I tried looking for players with an approach similar to Delmon's. Then I grabbed their career tOPS+ against Power and Finesse pitchers. Given the .707/.757/.791 splits above, I'd expect typical splits for this to be something like 93/104.

Power/Finesse -- Dude
42/163 -- Delmon Young
52/131 -- Carlos Gomez
57/117 -- Bo Jackson
70/122 -- Jeff Francoeur
80/117 -- Carl Crawford
81/138 -- Alfonso Soriano
81/118 -- Adam Jones
86/92 -- Andres Galarraga
86/109 -- Jacque Jones
87/104 -- Torii Hunter
87/104 -- RonDL
91/104 -- Jose Guillen
93/117 -- Juan Gonzalez
94/103 -- Adrian Beltre

I didn't check everyone, and these aren't necessarily the closest comps you could possibly find for Delmon, but he still has by far the biggest split here. And Delmon reminds me more of the guys on the top of the list than the ones on the bottom of the list.

Anyway, consider this another episode in an ongoing series aimed at understanding one Delmon Young.