Can the unluckiest hitters in recent history tell us anything about Ryan Mountcastle's bounce-back potential?

The Orioles' first baseman underperformed his expected statistics drastically in 2022. Does he have anything in common with those whose misfortune doesn't go away?

Ryan Mountcastle’s impressive expected statistics, and the assumption that simply based on that he will improve his actual production in 2023, is as woven into the fabric of this Orioles offseason as anything.

It’s hard to argue—he had the largest gulf between expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) and actual weighted on-base average (wOBA) of any qualifier last year, and by a wide margin. Same goes for his slugging percentage, which was .423 in-season and .509 based on expected outcomes.

As a believer in such numbers, I want to believe this is ahead for him as well. But it’s worth asking — what if it doesn’t play out this way? The good news for Mountcastle and the Orioles is that he was still an above-average producer even with his bad luck last year, and he can play a solid first base, so he won’t be some kind of production void over there a la the man who gave him his first first baseman’s glove.

But the last few years of data when it comes to those with the highest delta between wOBA and xWOBA show that many of those gaps come down, and a handful don’t. Perhaps in those instances where they stay static, there are indications as to which group Mountcastle will join.

The shortened 2020 season kind of skews the data set here, and we’re talking a rudimentary breakdown of players who end up with the worst luck in terms of outcomes with their slugging percentage and wOBA. (For Mountcastle’s purpose, these two are one and the same, as he is not exactly someone who is going to make his impact at the plate with plate discipline.)

By and large, players who fall in the 10 unluckiest in those categories in the last few seasons have normalized the following year, with largely neutral results or even outperformance in the other direction. A couple of hitters show up consistently as the unluckiest from year to year—Carlos Santana, Gregory Polanco, Max Kepler, and Danny Jansen, and Marcell Ozuna.

That’s a pretty eclectic list of players. Some, like Santana and Ozuna, have played on multiple teams since 2019, so ballpark influence is hard to factor in. Kepler’s is more a late-career development, whereas Jansen had two massive years of underperformance relative to his expectations but has evened out.

Broadly, there’s a lot of pull power on this list. Ozuna’s 2019 season seems pretty balanced in terms of his spray chart and home run production, but that’s the closest comparison to a 2022 season like Mountcastle’s where he hit home runs to all fields relatively consistently. Had Ozuna carried on like that after moving on to Atlanta, he may be the closest comparison for Mountcastle in the group, though he’s been pulling the ball for home runs more often lately.

It seems that relative to what this group did in their underperforming seasons, Mountcastle is relatively unique. He hit the ball to what they’ll call the big part of the field — center field and the opposite-field gap — hard and in the air often, and wasn’t rewarded for it. His spray chart (below) shows that even his hardest-hit and farthest balls to that area were all, somehow, outs.

Filtering that to balls hit over 100 mph or harder (shown below) illustrates a pretty solid concentration of balls just right of dead-center field that were all outs for Mountcastle, where even a couple of them going for doubles might have changed his luck last year.

That there are more balls hit hard to that area that were outs than the space in front of the new Camden Yards left field wall is of particular interest, since that’s where the expectation is that Mountcastle was punished most this year. He still may have lost a few home runs there, but not for the type of contact that necessarily explains the gulf between his expected and actual performance.

Often, I’ll set out on these ideas and make spreadsheets and fortunately find something to make it worthwhile. This may not have been one of those times, though I’m not sure whether that should bolster the belief that Mountcastle’s bad luck is the transitory type. Some players, it seems, just get into these ruts where the expected stats don’t line up. I suppose that’s the definition of bad luck, and those who have it know they do. Mountcastle doesn’t have enough on his resume to indicate whether he does or not, at least not relative to the ones who truly do.