Like everyone else on this site, seemingly, I've been confused as heck by Travis Buck's play this year. It's now June, and his batting average is still way south of the Mendoza line. He just doesn't look like the same player that we saw galvanize the gimpy A's offense from the leadoff spot last season. So what exactly is wrong with the Stag? Is it correctible? Is it just bad luck?

Well, thanks to Fangraphs and their awesome new stats on plate discipline, we can try to find out.

I'm going to dig into Buck's performance from the top down, meaning we'll start with the basic stats and then try to dig into the underlying reasons for them. The skinny: Buck has been what our British brethren would call "pants" this year. Or "bollocks."

Stats can be found here , except for PrOPS, which can be found here .

His slash stats last year were .288/.377/.474, for an OPS of .851. His slash stats this year have been .170/.234/.340, for an OPS of .574. Last year he walked 39 times and struck out 66; this year he has walked 7 times and struck out 28. That translates to a decline in walk percentage from 12% to 6.5%, and an increase in strikeout percentage from 23.2% to 28%. It's not easy to simultaneously lower your walks AND increase your strikeouts, but somehow Buck managed it.

So that's what he HAS done. Now we can turn to "why?"

Balls in Play

The first place to look is BABIP-- batting average on balls in play. This stat has gotten a lot of press for pitchers, but it's not nearly appreciated enough when evaluating hitters. Hitters actually have significant control over it. Cesar Izturis is going to have a worse BABIP than Miguel Cabrera. If you think about this for... oh... a second or so, you'll realize why-- Cabrera hits the ball harder. A lot harder. The harder the ball is hit, the less time the defense has to make a play on it.

Last year Buck was hitting the ball plenty hard-- a .354 BABIP. This year, he's been hitting like a girly man, with a BABIP of .203. That's a problem. But we can go deeper than this. Different kinds of batted balls have different success rates. In particular, line drives are way more likely to fall for hits than flies and grounders.

Last year Buck posted a solid line drive rate of 18.6%, right around the league average. This year? His LD rate is 10.8%. Yeech. That's abysmally bad-- worse than Ray Durham's 2007 mark, which earned him a cool .218 batting average last year. That explains a LOT. Buck is not squaring the ball at all.

Our friends at the Hardball Times have developed a stat called "Projected OPS", or PrOPS for short, which uses a hitter's batted ball types to create an estimate for what that hitter "should" be hitting. If you're hitting lots of liners that just happen to be finding gloves, you can expect your PrOPS to reflect that in your favor, and conversely if you've just gotten a bunch of ducksnort bloop singles.

Buck's PrOPS from last year was .765-- reflecting that he may have gotten a bit lucky to have a BABIP as high as it was. The rule of thumb seems to be that a player's line drive rate plus .120 is about his expected BABIP, so we would have expected Buck's BABIP to be .306 last year. And only .228 this year. Well, even THAT's an improvement on what he's shown so far, which is why his PrOPS for this year is .664. While that's not the retinoblastoma-inducing carcinogen his actual batting line is, it's unacceptably bad for a corner outfielder.

At the Dish

So we've noted that Buck is not squaring the ball like he did last year. That hasn't been his only problem, though. He's also striking out a ton and not walking. What's up with THAT?

Well, courtesy of fangraphs, we can find out. The first category in their plate discipline stats menu is O-Swing%. That is, the percentage of pitches outside the zone that a batter swings at (bad). This varies a LOT-- Giambi swings at maybe 10%, Vlad at 45%. Last year Buck swung at 21.4% of pitches outside the zone. This year, 29.6%. So he's gone from a hitter with average patience to a significantly impatient one. Or so it seems.

Next up: Z-Swing%. That's the percentage of pitches IN the zone that a hitter swings at (good). Last year Buck swung at 68.7% of pitches in the zone, which is somewhat better than average (average is about 66.6%). This year his protectiveness has been much lower, at only 62.6%. Wow.

Buck's overall Swing % is up by 2.8%. So what we're learning is that not only is he swinging more, but he's also taking more called strikes-- all of the extra swings are coming on pitches out of the zone.

Finally, we can look at Buck's contact percentages. His O-Contact% (percentage of swings outside the zone that make contact) is up from 52.5% to 62.5%. While it's good that he's getting wood on ball, making contact with pitches outside the zone is usually a bad thing. They don't call it the "strike" zone for nothing-- it's the zone where you can strike the ball effectively. Contact with balls outside the zone usually results in weak grounders, popups, broken bats and foul balls. (Unless you're Vlad. If there's one thing that you find out from looking at these plate discipline stats really fast, it's that Vlad is a unique freak of nature who should be enjoyed but not emulated.) So that's an ambivalent stat at best.

Meanwhile, his Z-Contact% is down, meaning he's missing more balls in the strike zone. It was a not-great 87.5% last year, and it's 82.5% this year (average here is about 89%). We add another epithet to Buck's Iliad of woes here, as he is also having problems hitting balls that are theoretically hittable.

Let's sum this up: Buck is swinging more at (what would be) balls, and putting more of them in play (weakly). He is also swinging less at strikes, and whiffing on more of the ones he is swinging at.

Conclusion

My usual process when writing something like this is to go in cold-- no assumptions, just look at the data. That's what I did here, and wow. I was stunned. Normally a slump is a bit of pressing and a lot of bad luck; this is not one of those slumps. Buck has been very nearly as bad as his numbers indicate. It's a chilling bunch of info. In virtually every aspect of the game, Buck has regressed from last season, in many cases to the point of no longer being MLB caliber.

I would be remiss if I did not observe that the sample sizes here aren't real large. Hitters go through bad stretches at times; it's just the way the game works. Nonetheless, the point here is that Buck's struggles are unequivocally the result of bad process-- not bad luck. Something that he is doing is wrong; let's hope he can fix it.