Seattle Mariners’ Leonys Martin Has Reinvented Himself

Seattle Mariners outfielder Leonys Martin is enjoying his best season yet at the plate. How has he become a more well-rounded player?

The 2016 MLB season has already been a rollercoaster ride in Seattle. At the start of June, the Mariners were 30-21, a half game back of the Texas Rangers in the American League West and in one of the two Wild Card spots. They have gone 6-16 since, falling to a game below .500, third place in the West and 7th in the AL Wild Card race. There’s plenty of baseball left, but, as a Mariners fan heavily invested in both the team and the community, I can tell you that things aren’t particularly cheerful in Seattle as of now.

That said, there have been a few bright spots in an otherwise dull campaign, with center fielder Leonys Martin possibly being the brightest of the bunch. After wearing out his welcome in Texas — which included getting sent down to Triple-A and being left off their 2015 postseason roster — he was traded to Seattle along with right-hander Anthony Bass (now in Japan) in exchange for reliever Tom Wilhelmsen, outfielder James Jones and minor league outfielder/first baseman Patrick Kivlehan. Wilhelmsen and Kivlehan are now back in the Mariners organization, making it essentially Martin for Jones straight up. That’s quite the steal.

Martin was seen as a solid get for a team that has long lacked any semblance of outfield defense, but he was generally expected to be the same great-glove-bad-bat player that he had been in the past. The speed and defense haven’t gone anywhere, but he has also managed to turn himself into a legitimate offensive threat.

Coming into 2016, Martin’s career high wRC+ was 89, meaning at his best he was 11 percent worse than the league average hitter. That was enough because of his elite speed and defense, but still below average with a lot of room for improvement. And improve he did.

Through 56 games, Martin holds a 114 wRC+, 30 points higher than his career mark, and 64 points higher than the 50 he put up last year. It’s not a large enough sample to be completely sure that he will continue at this pace, but he has shown genuine improvement in multiple different areas, which does suggest it’s something that can stick.

In his limited time in the minor leagues, Martin flashed some power, hitting 12 home runs with a .251 isolated power (ISO) in just 260 AAA plate appearances back in 2012, but that had all but disappeared in his major league career. Prior to 2015 he held a career ISO of just .107, and had just 20 career home runs in 429 games. He’s found that power again in Seattle, and that’s been a big reason why he has become an offensive threat.

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He already has a career high 11 home runs on the year, along with a .202 ISO. His contact ability leaves something to be desired (career .254 average), and his strikeouts have climbed even higher this year to 26.1 percent, which makes his newfound power that much more important. But he hasn’t become a one-dimensional, power-only guy either.

Martin has found a way to elevate his walk rate to 8.7 percent (league average is generally around 7.5 to 8 percent), which also helps make up for his contact and strikeout issues. He is running an OBP right around league average at .324, which helps guard against the possibility that the power is a mirage. He isn’t an elite offensive player, but he is sufficiently above average at this juncture.

That is the big picture, but what about the nuts and bolts of the situation? How has he gone about this reinvention more specifically?

One way is that he was altered his swing mechanics. Now, I am no scouting expert, so I will defer to Jason A. Churchill of Prospect Insider who is more in tune with that side of the game. He wrote about Martin last month, and specifically talked about how his hand placement has changed for the better this season:

"The hands are in a better position to trigger the swing, the bat head is in a better spot to be sent to attack the pitch and the bat angle helps Martin create a more consistent and healthier bat path (swing plane). The swing itself is a bit shorter, too, which can help with contact and consistency."

Churchill includes comparison photos in his piece as well to help you actually see these changes for yourself, which is particularly helpful if you, like me, are not a swing doctor.

I am personally more interested, though, in how the mechanical changes manifest themselves into actual production. We see hitters make changes to their stance or swing all the time, but it doesn’t always make a difference. With Martin, it has.

Fangraphs tracks the percent of hard, medium and soft contact that a hitter makes, which is very useful in digging into why a hitter is (or is not) getting desired results. Prior to this season, Martin’s Hard Hit rate peaked at 25.9 percent, and bottomed out at 23.3 percent — those seasons also happened to be his best (2014) and worst (2015) offensive seasons.

This year, Martin’s Hard Hit rate is all the way up at 35 percent, and while a lot of that has been him turning medium contact into hard contact, his soft contact rate (generally balls in play that have little to no chance of becoming hits, i.e. weak grounders and pop-ups) is also down to 20.7 percent, the second lowest of his career.

This has led to — or at least happened in conjunction with — a change in his batted ball profile, meaning ground balls, line drives, and fly balls. While he had previously hit around 50 percent grounders, that rate is down all the way to 37.7 percent, as he has traded in balls on the ground for balls in the air, with his fly ball rate jolting from ~28-30 percent up to 47.7 percent. So not only is he turning his fly balls into home runs more often, but he is giving himself dramatically more opportunities to do so by adding a substantial amount of lift to his hits.

Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs notes that Martin increased his launch angle off the bat around 10 degrees from last season, which is a top ten increase in all of baseball.

It seems Martin has also learned to take advantage of these improvements in his approach at the plate. I already mentioned the improved walk rate, and that comes in part from him swinging less often at pitches out of the zone — from 33 percent for his career down to 29.9 percent on the season. At the same time, though, he has become more aggressive in the zone, swinging at 68 percent of strikes, up from 64 percent for his career.

This is the mark of a legitimate improvement in approach. Analytical-minded fans like myself love guys who are patient and are willing to take walks, but it’s more complicated than that. The ideal player lays off of pitches out of the zone — and yes, is willing to walk — but also attacks pitches in the zone, and isn’t necessarily looking to take a walk. Swing at good pitches, don’t swing at bad ones. Simple enough, and Martin seems to be doing that better than he had before.

We can’t really know what exactly triggered all of these changes, from the mechanics, to the loft, to the power, to the improved eye at the plate. Many will speculate it is the influence of hitting coach and should-be Hall of Famer Edgar Martinez, and while I am generally hesitant to give coaches too much credit, or too much blame, Martin himself — along with plenty of other players — have talked about the “Edgar Effect,” if you will, so we can’t write it off.

The new Mariners front office and coaching staff have stressed that they want to let players be themselves, so maybe this is an example of that. Maybe Martin just needs to be allowed to hit for power and be aggressive, even if it means he strikes out 26 percent of the time, and doesn’t have the prototypical leadoff profile that some may want from a speedy center fielder.

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Whatever the cause, it is clearly working, and if he keeps up this kind of offense, in conjunction with his still elite defense and speed, Martin is looking at topping his previous career high in Wins Above Replacement of 3.5, and perhaps significantly so.