Random Marcus Giles Leftovers

Yesterday, my Marcus Giles Player Profile went up at Baseball Prospectus, and as I plan to do from here on out, all the additional information I didn't include is going to make its way onto this site.

Giles has seemingly struggled this year, although the reasons seem somewhat flukish:

I'm willing to stick with that assessment for now, although 2007 should certainly shed some light on whether my feelings are correct. Giles struggled a great deal in the first half of the season as well, hitting only .239/.324/.354 from the start of the season to June 31, and .297/.371/.439 since then. One other random-ish stat that I want to throw out there, mostly because it was mentioned to me by various people, is how Giles has done out of the leadoff spot this year. He's only hit .253/ .337/.364 out of the #1 hole, which starts a discussion of whether or not he's struggling because he's in the leadoff spot or the two events just happened to coincide. Giles only had 246 at-bats out of the leadoff spot prior to 2006, but he did struggle in limited time there: .264/.339/.419. It's entirely plausible Giles feels uncomfortable out of the leadoff spot, and it has helped fuel his struggles a bit. Certainly an interesting angle to look at.

Thanks to fellow BP'er Dan Fox, I can take a look at the directional data for batted-balls in a much cleaner percentage form. Many thanks to Dan for tweaking his Balls in Play Chart:

So the picture is much larger than the previous ones taken from the MLB.com Hit Charts, but the data is also much more presentable. As far as flyballs are concerned, Giles was a pull hitter in 2003, but he sprayed liners pretty evenly to all fields, and grounders were usually poked the other way.

He stopped hitting flyballs to left almost entirely in 2004, but his line drives and groundballs were fairly consistent with the previous season. Giles 2004 season was actually worth a great deal more than you garner from his WARP-1 of 5.3, as it was cut short by injury about two-thirds of the way through the season.

2005 saw the first major shift in his directional data, with his line drives getting pulled more often, whereas they had been fairly evenly distributed before that. The flyballs and grounders remained relatively static in comparison.

Sadly, the 2006 data is not uploaded for the BIP program as of yet, so I'll have to use the Hit Charts once again.

This bugs me actually. I can't tell if ihs doubles were liners or flyballs, if the singles were on the ground or in the air. Hmmph. Interestingly enough, all of his homers at Turner have been to left-center or going the opposite way. His grounders are still bunched up on the left side, but he doesn't seem to be getting as many singles there as one would think from what is normally around 60% of all grounders. When the season ends and the 2006 data is up, I'll revisit this to see if anything in his groundball rate changed directionally. Everything seems fairly consistent though, which leads me to believe his 2007 will look much like the years before it.