Just throw out 2020 for everyone

A’s Semien shows human side of small sample size

Everything that could go wrong for Marcus Semien in 2020 did go wrong. Sound familiar? The Oakland A’s shortstop followed up his AL MVP finalist season in 2019, by far the best of his career, with his worst batting average, OBP and slugging percentage since his early days with the Chicago White Sox.

Now, instead of cruising into his first free agency as the best player money can buy, Semien is cornered into a bad market compounded by his bad play. Every team can irrationally rationalize their way out of spending to get better. (Or, less cynically, wait for other star level shortstops like Francisco Lindor, Javier Baez and Corey Seager to reach the market.) The A’s didn’t even extend the one-year, $18.9 million qualifying offer to one of their best players, a sign that Oakland doesn’t think he’ll do much better in free agency.

Was 2019 an outlier? What happened? Semien told the Daily News that the 60-game season wasn’t enough to get a fair look at him.

“I felt like I got to a lot of balls,” Semien said in a phone interview. He was more frustrated with the “touch and feel with my throws.”

“You’re never happy when you make errors, but I just think it was a small sample size.”

Those are the three magic words for every MLB free agent this winter. In Semien’s case, a closer look shows that on both sides of the ball, he’s right. Accepting two inevitable caveats:

No player has any incentive to tell the media “Yeah, it’s true, I suck at my job now” while job-searching.

Validating his claim means judging a small sample size by scrutinizing an even smaller sample size.

A look under the hood not only reveals Semien’s top-notch, prime-level talent is still there, but broadly demonstrates the issues with holding anyone’s 2020 against them.

Let’s start with Semien’s defense, an area he appeared to regress in after making serious strides since the A’s acquired him in 2015. Much of the supposed downturn came from his eight errors in 62 games between the regular season and playoffs.

However, even the best public defensive stats are prone to sample size issues, and MLB in 2020 was nothing but one big sampling error. A close look at his errors indexed in the MLB Film Room video database back him up.

In each of his three gaffes on Film Room — two fielding, one throwing — Semien was able to make his way to grounders to both his left and right before fumbling. He’s not hustling his way into fielding position, which could force him to overcompensate by the time he’s ready to field the ball. Combined with Semien’s Statcast-measured sprint speed ranking in the top third of all shortstops and remaining stable since 2018, one can see the athleticism hasn’t dipped, even as he crosses into his thirties.

Trash errors are trash errors and though they count all the same, paradoxically, they aren’t created equal.

Compare Semien with a more local (and more concerning) demonstration of poor shortstop play. Gleyber Torres barely has the range to handle his position, exemplified in his ALDS Game 5 bobble of a Yandy Diaz grounder. Torres’ failure to get his body in front of the ball precipitates his struggle to field it, leading to Diaz, a slow-footed runner nursing a hamstring injury, reaching safely at first.

As Semien put it, “I feel like if you can make the routine plays as consistent as you can, and you end up with a couple of errors, that’s part of the game.

“Ultimately, at shortstop, you get a lot of chances.” In 2020, what he, and everyone missed, was chances.

The same argument extends to Semien’s offense, where once again, the pandemic was the biggest obstacle to a second 2019. The numbers are bad: a career-worst .233 batting average, and he slugged .374. The stumble is especially pronounced after hitting 33 bombs in a year everyone thought was influenced by a juiced ball doing its dirty work. (MLB has denied intentionally altering the ball to change its performance.)

But much of Semien’s line was weighed down by a miserable 13-game start to the season, where he went 10 for his first 58, slashed .179/.207/.232, and chased 30.8% of outside pitches — about average for the league, but Semien’s worst rate since his 2014 debut.

Usually, 13 games is nothing to sweat, just two bad weeks in a sixthmonth season. But when the calendar gets chopped from 162 games to 60, that’s one fifth of the year. And convenient as it may be, once more, the pandemic offers a real explanation for a downswing, one that depends on a player’s individual circumstances.

“I was excited to get back into a big league stadium,” Semien said, which is perhaps the nicest thing anyone has ever said of Oakland’s famously decrepit home. “I’m so used to using the offseason to work out in the Coliseum, where you have a weight room, a cage and a field.”

But, during the spring and early summer, Semien was locked out of the stadium and, thus, his usual routine. No longer permitted to use a world-class place to work out, the Bay Area native tried to maintain his conditioning and hitting stroke from his home in nearby Alameda, taking swings from a friend’s backyard batting cage. “I don’t have the greatest equipment in my garage,” he said. That meant resorting to pushups and lunges, and a friend’s backyard batting cage. Not exactly the same as barbell presses and squat racks and a high-tech video room. “I definitely lost some strength,” he admitted.

As the season progressed, the power improved: seven home runs over his last 40 regular season games, plus an extra two in seven postseason games as part of his monster .407/.484/.667 playoff line. Even more impressive was that he played through a lingering rib cage injury he suffered in August while — wait for it — trying to fix his early season slump. The issues of a small sample size compounded.

“I was tinkering a little bit after slumping and I think that over time, my work in the (batting) cage, just trying to change stuff... I started to feel this pain in my ribcage,” said Semien. “It was kind the kind of thing that I was like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t feel great.’ But usually, these things go away.

“Then it started to get worse and worse. And it sucked because I was starting to swing the bat really well.”

Again: defensive slumps, offensive slumps, getting dinged up during a pennant race — none of that is new, and all of it is baseball. You know what’s not baseball? Replacing video rooms and training staffs with backyard dips, cardboard cutouts and canned crowd noise in a 60 game micro-season. A fleeting (or cynical, if you’re a team trying to underpay players) glance at 2020 stats could confirm a rough stretch as skill change. ut don’t sleep: Semien isn’t that guy. A lot of players aren’t. Confusing the noise for the signal might save some teams a few bucks; it might also cost those teams a chance at playing for a championship. And that’s no way to start a new year.