On Tuesday night at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Joey Gallo hit the first pitch he saw — an 82mph slider from Matt Shoemaker — over the ficus trees and into the history books. It was Gallo’s 40th home run of the year, and given his age, it put him into some very rare company. Here is a list of every other player in MLB’s long and storied history to have hit 40+ home runs in multiple seasons before turning 25 years old:
Johnny Bench, Troy Glaus, Juan Gonzalez, Ken Griffey, Jr., Eddie Mathews (who actually did it three times and was three home runs short of making it four), Willie Mays, Albert Pujols, and Alex Rodriguez.
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That’s four Hall-of-Famers, and one or two (depending on how you feel about A-Rod) that soon will be.
Here is a breakdown of the 17 seasons represented by all of those eight players:
- 16 All-Star berths (A-Rod in ’99 is the lone snub)
- 3 MVP awards
- 8 additional top-ten MVP finishes
- 10 Silver Slugger awards (in ten eligible seasons — the award didn’t exist before 1980).
Gallo, in his two seasons: No MVP votes (yet), no All-Star selections, no Silver Sluggers (not likely to change this season, particularly since Gallo has played so many positions).
This isn’t to suggest that he has been snubbed — we’re not yet evolved to the point that anyone is going to cast an MVP vote for a player whose batting average is lingering around .200 — but simply to reiterate something that people have been saying for a long time: Joey Gallo is a unicorn. A large, fast brutal unicorn with a horn made of spare parts from Atlas, who was found dead in a mysterious (possibly unicorn-related?) accident.
Check out how Gallo’s numbers stack up against those other 17 seasons.
- The next-lowest batting average on the list is Troy Glaus in 2001. He hit .250 that season. Gallo hit .209 in 2017 and came into play on Wednesday hitting .210 in 2018
- The next-highest strikeout total on the list is 163, also by Glaus, this time in 2000. Gallo had 196 in 2017 and notched a franchise-record 200th strikeout on Tuesday night in the at-bat after his 40th home run. This sounds bad, but…
- Gallo hardly ever hits into double plays. Like, ever. Gallo hit into just three double plays in 2017, and he has hit into just three more in 2018. No one else on this list has fewer than five in a single season. That mark was accomplished by Eddie Mathews in 1955. In fact, there are only four non-Gallo single-digit double-play seasons represented here, and three of them are Eddie Mathews (Griffey had nine in 1994). The rest range from 12 (many) to 21 (Pujols, ’04).
- By going 40/200, Gallo entered an even more rare club. Only five other hitters have ever hit 40 home runs and struck out 200 times in a season. Those hitters are: Mark Reynolds in 2009, Adam Dunn in 2012, Chris Davis in 2015, Chris Carter in 2016, and Aaron Judge in 2017.
So, Gallo won’t be getting any MVP votes this season. But while we’re on the topic of Joey Gallo, known unicorn, there are three more things that I think are noteworthy.
THE SHIFT
This might help Gallo’s case a little bit: he is playing in 2018, not the pre-shift days of, well, everyone else on this list. How has that affected Gallo’s batting average?
I asked our local expert, Eno Sarris. He speaks in a mathematical language I’m still learning to comprehend, but here’s where he landed: there’s reason to believe that the shift has cost Gallo as much as 39 points on his career batting average!
Whether that number is completely accurate or not, there’s no denying that the shift has provided an additional obstacle for Gallo to overcome. But there is evidence that Gallo — despite a pretty major early-season slump that spiked his season totals — is improving. Behold: spray charts!
Here’s a chart of every ball that Gallo put into play in 2017:
You know what, let’s take out some of the noise. Alexa, remove all the fly balls, since most of those are going to be caught anyway. Take away the home runs, too. Nobody is catching those.
Ho boy, check out those ground balls and line drives. No wonder teams came into 2018 employing shifts like “Just put everyone in right field” and “Make George Springer stand on the fence”.
But check out Gallo’s 2018 spray chart, again with the fly balls and home runs taken out of the equation:
Should A.J. Hinch still tell Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa to hold hands and play “Red Rover” in shallow right field every time Gallo comes to the plate? Absolutely. But there have been more line drives to the left side in 2018 than 2017, and that’s improvement. Gradual improvement, but improvement, nonetheless.
Alexa, bring back the fly balls and home runs for 2018, I want to show the people something.
If you compare this to the first chart, you can see that there are more fly balls going to the opposite field in 2018 than there were a year before. That tells me this isn’t an accident, and Gallo is doing his best to try to beat the shift.
Will Gallo work on his bunts in the offseason, adding another weapon to his arsenal? Will he be able to go opposite field more consistently in 2019 and beyond? Who knows. But it’s trending in the right direction. Speaking of trending in the right direction…
VS. LEFT-HANDERS
Remember Barry Bonds’ 2001 season? That’s the year he hit an MLB-record 73 home runs and won the MVP award by about 200 votes over “Barney” Bonds, which was just Barry Bonds with a poorly-glued-on beard, so he could hit more than once in the order*.
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Bonds, a left-handed hitter, only hit 17 of those 73 home runs against left-handed pitchers, in 189 plate appearances.
In 2018, Gallo has 15 home runs against left-handed pitchers in 160 plate appearances. That’s up from seven bombs in 128 PAs in 2017. Again: that’s improvement!
In fact, Gallo’s total of 15 home runs against left-handed pitchers as a left-handed hitter this season is tied for the 25th-most, all-time. Here are the 14 names ahead of him: Ken Griffey, Jr. (’94, ’96, ’98), Barry Bonds (’90, ’93, ’01, ’02, ’03), Daryl Strawberry (’87, ’88), Ted Kluszewski (’55), Babe Ruth (’27, ’28), Reggie Jackson (’69, ’80), Stan Musial (’48, ’49), David Ortiz (’06), Don Mattingly (’85), Darrell Evans (’73), Ryan Howard (’06, ’07), Travis Hafner (’06), Curtis Granderson (’11), and, uh, Luke Easter (’50).
Those are certainly some names.
Oddly, Gallo strikes out more and walks less against left-handed pitchers than righthanders. But due to the raw, unbridled power he’s shown against southpaws, his OPS against them is 54 points higher — .859.
What’s the point of this? I’m not sure, other than to say that Gallo has been mashing against lefties this season, and once again: that’s improvement.
THE SAC FLIES
Or rather, the lack thereof. It’s amazing, given the sheer number of fly balls that Gallo hits (see the above charts) that he has zero sac flies in 2018. He couldn’t, in fact, because he has no sac flies in his entire big-league career.
Is that a problem?
I asked Eno for more help. When there’s a runner on third base and fewer than two outs, how often does the average big-league hitter get the runner home (by sac fly, hit, or any other method), and how does Gallo stack up?
Eno just so happened to have a chart handy from earlier this season, and while the 2018 number has no doubt changed since these numbers were current, eighteen years is a large enough sample size to get a feel for it: the runner scores somewhere in the range of 60-62% of the time.
How often does Gallo get the runner home?
Short answer: 21/64, or 32.8%
That’s not great.
But for the longer answer, I dug a little deeper into all of Gallo’s “sac fly” situations, and I found something interesting. He’s a better hitter in those situations.
Here are Gallo’s numbers in “sac fly” situations, by which I mean: [a runner at third, runners at second and third, runners at first and third, or the bases loaded] and one or no outs:
64 plate appearances
49 at-bats
6 singles
3 doubles
1 triple
2 home runs
14 walks
15 strikeouts
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That’s a .244 batting average, a .406 on-base percentage, a .469 slugging percentage, for an OPS of .875. All of those numbers (except slugging) are better than his overall career numbers. He can’t hit a sac fly, but he gets on base at a greater-than-.400 clip?
I don’t really have any more analysis on this, but it warranted inclusion in the article because it’s just so dang weird.
You may be expecting me to parse all this information and come down on one side of the fence or the other: is Gallo just fine — an underrated star just the way he is — or do his strikeouts preclude him from being a contributing piece, no matter how many home runs he hits?
But like any good diplomat, I’m holding out both arms, staring down at the fence as I wobble and cautiously mutter: “it’s both.”
On one hand, yes: he strikes out more often than most people who have ever played the sport, his batting average is low, and he seems cursed with the inability to provide a simple sacrifice fly.
On the other, he’s either the Rangers’ first- or fourth-most valuable player by WAR in 2018 (depending on whether you prefer Fangraphs or Baseball-Reference) and is also hitting more home runs — and more home runs off left-handed hitters — than most people who have ever played the sport. And we didn’t even get into his speed, defense, and arm.
So for now, it’s both. Yes, there are aspects of the game that Joey Gallo must improve on. But — at the risk of toppling all the way off the fence — he is just 24, and improving a little every year.
It will be fascinating to see what happens in 2019 and beyond.
*this is 100% false, though if Bobby Valentine had been involved, perhaps this asterisk would be unnecessary
