Austin Martin and Isolated Power - Blog jorgenswest

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A blog by jorgenswest in Twins Daily

Entry posted by jorgenswest in projection · March 30

We look forward to seeing if Austin Martin can translate his on base skills to the big leagues. Will those skills translate without more power? He has a career 105 ISO is the minor leagues which led to major league projections this year in the 80-99 range. That leads to the following questions.

There is at least some reason to hope that his ISO is trending up. One narrative is that the Twins messed him up trying to swing his approach and swing towards more power. I think it was the correct direction. Add a little power to his on base skills and defensive versatility and you find a valuable major league player. The adjustments may have helped. His ISO last year in AAA was 142 following a AA ISO of 93 over the previous two seasons. Somehow the narrative of the Twins failure to get more power misses this change in ISO.

Last year there were four major league regulars with an ISO below 100 in Tim Anderson, Myles Straw, Maikel Garcia and Andrew Benintendi. All were well be below average hitters on the season. In the 100-120 range you will find some average major league hitters in Steven Kwan, Nico Hoerner, Jeff McNeill and Ty France. Nick Madrigal has been average in this range in previous seasons. McNeill and France were on a career low end of ISO so it seems like Hoerner and Kwan are the best hopes here. Here is a comparison of their last year in the minors.

Martin has more walks at the cost of more strikeouts and a lower batting average. The window is small and he does need to continue with the upward ISO trend to make up for his lower batting average but there is a window for success with a low ISO.

I should add that you will also find Luis Arraez here with an ISO of 115 last year. I think he is one of a kind but we can hope.

Ben Revere had a 0.058 ISO and played 7 years with a career fWAR of 7.5. Denard Span had a career ISO of 0.117, played 10 years with a career fWAR of 27.5. if Austin Martin has a career similar to Denard Span, I think that would be considered a success.

If Martin had a career similar to Span it'd be outstanding since it's well beyond his projection at this point. Like most light hitters, Span (with an ISO 50% higher than the .090 the writer was talking about) accumulated his value by being a starting player covering a defensive premium position. Not many players have more than 2-3 seasons where they produce significant value with ISO numbers below .090. If you're looking at fWAR, the players with significant value over the past decade usually have a totally broken OAA defensive metric pushing their value up in one season. Billy Hamilton (CF), Jarrod Dyson (4th OF), Alcides Escobar (SS). Those are the guys I saw who pulled off the sub-.090 ISO and were reliably decent contributors in the past decade. 3 of 550 players who qualified at over 1,000 plate appearances. Not great odds. Martin isn't close to any of them in terms of defensive chops. I do think Martin has a chance to stick at the MLB level, but he will need to be better than projected at the plate to do so.

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