Same disclaimer as before, there aren't going to be any graphs, I'm just no good at them.  Just some good clean information this time around:

In this segment I'm going to talk about Gabe Kapler:

Many wondered why we signed Gabe Kapler (or many people wonder now, after Zobrist seemingly ingests every performancing enhancing drug in the western hemisphere, why we signed him).  The point is he was brought in to complete a platoon, and contrary to most (if not all people) I think thats how it should stay.  In this piece I'm going to talk about Kapler, as I said, in the next I will talk about Gabe Gross (who sadly started his progression before I got a chance to officially call it), and then I'll talk about Ben Zobrist (who hopefully for the team doesn't start regressing until later).  Enough with the rambling; I'll continue.

Ok, so Kapler's slash line looks like so .197/.275/.311/.587 with a wOBA of .272, and an ISO of .115.  Not to pretty?  Well, there are alot of signs pointing up that people just don't want to seem to acknowledge.

First things first is the BABIP.  It currently stands at an ugly .240 which would be 12th among qualified players (for obvious playing time reasons he doesn't qualify).  Thats a far cry from his .300 career BABIP (even though BABIP isn't so repeatable I felt I'd bring it up).  Given the fact that he isn't so slow hes a hindrance (he is a hindrance because he has mental lapses, however), I would expect that to regress naturally.  In case it wasn't obvious (it wasn't obvious to me until I did the math), if his BABIP was at career levels right now his batting average would be a .300 and his OBP would be a .414 and his slugging would be probably be in the mid-high .300s.  I guess we have some looking forward to do in that department.

The next aspect I want to talk about is flyball rate.  Right now he is hitting fly balls out of the infield at a 53% pace (and a 26% popup rate just adds to the ridiculousness).  Just a note, the majority of these added fly balls are coming (mostly) at the expense of ground balls, which normally would bode well.  Why hasn't it for Gabe yet?  Well, obvious as it may seem, he has hit none of these fly balls out of the ballpark (yet).  For all the years we have batted ball data he has a 5.9 HR/FB% (whenever I say FB I mean outfield fly, just for reference).  Last year with the Brewers it was 11.6%.  This year... as I said before: none.  Quite obviously this is going to change.

I forgot to point out that he wasn't always platooned as he will/has been this year.  I think its safe to go for 6.5% HR/FB rate as our "conservative" baseline for this analysis and last years 11.5% HR/FB rate as our "exceeded expectations".  By the way, about 9% is the league average.  Now, I'm going to run some quick numbers and to all of them I'm going to put a big neon sign saying small sample size, because yes the sample is incredibly small:

Ok, so what I'll do is I'll use his current batted ball rates of 15.7% line drives, 31.4% ground balls, and 52.9% fly balls.  To get a shorthand version of expected BABIP I'll do the old .157 + .120 shtick.  Then regress it down 10 points for the far-sub league average GB rate (more ground balls generally means higher BABIP).  That puts his xBABIP at .267, obviously low, but still passable for what we're going to do here.  Now we'll take 26.7% of his 61 AB to get 16.3 expected non-home run hits.  Just for reference that is already 4 more hits than he has had so far this season.  So far 7/12 or 58.3% of his non-HR hits have been doubles and 0% have been triples, and as we're not trying to predict quite yet, merely evaluate his performace so far, I'm not going to regress that down to normal levels.

Now we factor in the home runs.  We'll do this by taking his strikeouts away from his AB leaving us with 50 batted balls.  At a 53% out field fly rate this has amounted to 27 balls hit into the outfield (I'm sorry I don't know the average distance on these balls).  Now we'l ltake the low end of our projection, 6.5% of these 27 batted balls to give us 1.75 home runs (given that we had 16.3 hits I'll just make it 18 hits with 2 HR), and the high end of our projection gives us 3.1 HR (I'll just say 19.5 hits with 3 home runs). 

This means that to this point he has actually performed somewhere between these two levels ((Also remember that there are 7 doubles factored into each the high)):

Low: .295/.410/.508/.918

High: .320/.434/.582/1.015

Now that is a little unrealistic as the doubles are sure to regress, so I'll do a quick regression on that by using a 25% doubles/hit ratio which is much more in line with his career numbers.  When I do that 4 doubles come up for the low end sample and 4.875 come up for the high (I'll just say 5).  When I redo the numbers they come out as such

Low: .246/.361/.410/.771

High: .287/.402/.516/.918.

----------

Personally, I like those numbers, and I fully expect them to be achieved from this point forward if he begins to be given an opportuniry, and if that opportunity comes solely against lefties.  I don't think any of us would be dissapointed with even the low end of that projection coming through.

Just a note for those of you who want to get nitpicky; currently Kapler's BB% is at 10.3%, 2% above his career norms, while his K% is 3% above his career norms.  If the K rate were to drop to career norms more batted balls would occur.  The regression of walk rate would probably depress these numbers to look more like .735 OPS on the low end and .850 OPS on the high end, but I don't want people who are going to criticize me for that to blindly forget about the K rate.  I would also like to point out that his K rate has been better against lefties for his career (so that 18% K rate probably has more like 5% to regress than 3%) and the BB rate has fluctuated but is probably about the same against righties as it is against lefties.

 EDIT:

I felt bad not mentioning that the last set of lines is the range I expect him to hit from this point forward on the year.  In truth I probably should've factored in the K% and the BB% and I should have made a caveat saying that this is from this point forward.

SECOND EDIT:

I just re-did the projection a bit to factor in the walk rate.  It takes away 1.5 walks out of the total 68 plate appearances.  5 more batted balls with the current type would mean 2.5 more flyballs, 1 more infield fly, 1 more groundout, and .5 more line drives.  with a .267 BABIP onto those 5 batted balls turns out to 1.3 hits added to both the low and high projections instead of 1.5 walks.  Given that over a large sample size the weights of 1.3 hits should be about equal to 1.5 walks I'm not going to redo the projection.  It might actually be more of a help to Kapler (as those hits might even be worth more than those walks by a slight slight margin) to do the projections, but I wont.

Just wanted to make sure that everyone knows that the OBP is inflated while the BA/SLG is probably a little on the low side.  Overall the OPS should come out around equal regardless.  Sorry for not factoring this in already.

THIRD EDIT:

God damnit I cocked this one up more than I thought.  I just inferred that I'm using a completley insustainable FB rate to predict future performance.  Expect that the FB rate goes down, the GB/LD go up so the BA/OBP rises a bit.  To be more specific if we use a 38% FB rate, a 15% popup rate it should result in a 3-5% jump in LD% to around 17-20%, and a 12-17% jump in groundball rate to around 43-48%.  His BABIP would probably be around .285 in that case so more hits, a few less home runs and an obviously stagnant walk rate.

I'm sorry for fucking up so many times.  I think I finally have it right, although I'm mad for not having the final numbers.  Just use your imagination on tweaking those last numbers, but if I were to take a stab in the dark I'd say something like

LOW: .270/.340/.400/.740

HIGH: .295/.375/.455/.830