Collette Calls: Breaking Down Tommy Pham

The outfield trio of Harrison Bader, Jose Martinez and Marcell Ozuna was a big part of St. Louis' second-half resurgence that had the Cardinals in contention for the NL's second wild card until the season's final week and helped them not even miss Tommy Pham. National League rules, plus Matt Carpenter's presence at first base meant only three of those bats could be in the lineup at any one point, and Pham was the one who was dealt. All three Cardinals put up good to excellent numbers since the deal, but Pham still dwarfed them.

St. Louis made the cardinal sin of trading a player at his low value, and Pham was red hot since the trade. The hot summer of the other three certainly lessened the blow of losing the type of offense Pham provided, but Pham's contributions were an integral part of the Rays reaching 90 wins in a season where some thought they would lose 100.

If you have read this column all year, you know the drill by now: what is the player doing differently that is leading to the resurgence at the plate?

We get started by looking into Pham's 15-game rolling wOBA over the course of this season:

Pham began the season picking up where he left off in his surprising 2017 season, but began a slump by May 1 that lingered throughout the rest of his time with St. Louis. His .358 April batting average fell to .197 across May and June. Pham injured his groin in late April and had a reoccurrence of it in mid-May. Neither time led to a stint on the disabled list, but both led to a handful of missed games.

One thing that plagued Pham this year was how he expanded the strike zone. His ability to control the zone was one of the critical pieces to how he broke out in 2017, but his ability disappeared in 2018 right about the time his hot start dissipated:

The Rays did not appear to have made any physical tweaks to Pham as much as they made mental tweaks. Pham shared in an interview with the St. Louis Dispatch late in the season the following anecdote:

Pham said Rays hitting coach Chad Mottola and Neander showed him "a piece of paper" on which the Tampa Bay analytics department had broken down Pham's at-bats and determined that he was hitting the ball as well as last year, when he batted .306 with 23 homers and a .931 OBP.

"The underlying stats – swing percentage, hard-hit percentage, all that fancy stuff," Pham said. "They said this year my numbers should look like last year with how I'm hitting the ball … they said, based on my hard-hit percentages and line-drive percentages, my numbers should be 'this and this.' I thought it was pretty interesting. They think my slugging is way down this year ... just because I've been very unlucky. They said, 'Keep doing what you're doing and it's going to even out."

Let's look at that fancy stuff. First up; swing percentage. We have already seen that Pham was expanding his zone more this year than he had last year, but now let's add the Swing% trends to that same graph:

The two lines are very much in concert. It appears as it was more of what Pham was swinging at than the frequency of pitches he was offering at.

The hard-hit percentage is where things jump off the page. The chart below shows Pham's hard contact rate the last two seasons:

Note that his hard contact for most of 2018 has exceeded where he was for nearly all 2017, yet his numbers from May through July did not reflect the increase in contact. That sentence is where expected weighted on-base average comes into play. Pham had a .320 wOBA on July 31, but his xwOBA was .361. He had 41 batted ball events that were classified as Barrels or Solid Contact by StatCast.

That gave him more hard contact, at the time, than the likes of Andrew Benintendi, Michael Brantley, Anthony Rizzo and Ryan Braun, to name a few. When a player with Pham's athleticism and speed is underperforming his xwOBA by 41 points, it is often because the rest of the contact they have isn't going anywhere. In Pham's case, it was the non-lasers that were hurting him because he was beating an inordinately high frequency into the ground for most of summer:

Pham had the fifth-highest wOBA in the league since the trade deadline at .444. Justin Turner (.465), Christian Yelich (.456), Mike Trout (.454) and Mookie Betts (.452) are the only players ahead of him on the list. His xwOBA of .414 tied him with Paul Goldschmidt, Shohei Ohtani and Betts for eighth place over the same time frame.

Pham appears to have righted the wrongs of earlier this season, and perhaps the change in organization from where he had a tenuous relationship to one that has given him a fresh start is just what he needed. He was OF 17 in 2018 drafts by NFBC data with an ADP of 132. Taking him over the likes of Khris Davis, Lorenzo Cain and Yasiel Puig is bad in hindsight, but the rebound over the final third of the season is likely going to leave Pham right where he is for 2019 drafts.

He had a late start to his career in St. Louis, which he never really got over while playing there and was more vocal about it after the trade. He was hurt twice earlier this season and has already been hurt twice with Tampa Bay, so that is the risk with Pham. We have seen what he is capable of at the plate with the quality of contact he makes, and now he will be playing every day his body allows him to play a renewed sense of confidence, which was already at a high level.