I have never said a bad word about Patrick Bailey in my life

Please do not fact check this

Patrick Bailey is a beautiful snowflake and I know that, okay? Please don’t get mad at me for what I’m about to do.. Patrick Bailey has been great and a breath of fresh air and the exact player the Giants have desperately needed. Please understand that I am in no way impugning his character or value as a player when I quizzically look at his walk and strikeout rates. I am not going to compare Patrick Bailey to Buster Posey, but I could, and it would only be marginally outlandish.

That paragraph is what I like to call a compliment club sandwich. Got another piece of bread in there!

Patrick Bailey has been outstanding this year. But when you look at his Fangraphs page, there are red flags to worry about.

Patrick Bailey is great! He’s hitting .323/.352/.535! Please don’t hate me!

It’s pretty hard to look at Bailey’s numbers and not notice that big, glaring .400 BABIP. Then you glance over and notice the 24.3% strikeout rate, which is a little bit below average, but sticks out like a sore thumb next to his extremely low 3.7% walk rate. For someone who did a pretty good job controlling the strike zone in the minors — Bailey never had a walk rate below 10% at any affiliate level — he hasn’t really shown those skills in the majors. That’s all just been obscured by 40% of the balls he hits finding holes. So you put on your Armchair Analyst hat, find a chalkboard, and write REGRESSION on it in unnecessarily large letters. Statistics conquered yet again.

But the thing is, even with all that, stats still say he’s good? Bailey’s wOBA this year has been an excellent .378, and according to the computers, his expected wOBA is even higher. Fangraphs and Statcast have different values here for some reason, but Statcast has his xwOBA at .382 and Fangraphs has it at a very impressive .396. Either way, they’re very clear that what he’s doing is actually sustainable, that the way he’s swinging the bat is getting him the results that he should be getting.

But why? I mean, don’t get me wrong here, Patrick Bailey is hitting the ball very hard, which is a good thing. He’s barreling the ball as often as Freddie Freeman and Mike Trout (he’d be 26th in baseball in that stat if he had enough plate appearances to qualify), his average exit velocity is 90.6 MPH, comparable with Corbin Carroll and Joc Pederson, and he’s hitting the ball on the sweet spot 42% of the time, about as much as the resurgent JD Martinez.

And because he’s hitting the ball so hard, and hitting it at the right launch angle — Bailey’s hitting a ton of line drives this year, 10% more than the average batter — those balls are and should be falling in for hits. His xwOBACON, and yes I know this is too many stupid baseball stats for everyone and I’m sorry, which measures just his wOBA when he makes contact, is .494. This is better than Pederson and Freeman, basically indistinguishable from Ronald Acuna Jr, and barely behind Trout and Shohei Ohtani.

In other words, the contact he’s making is so elite that it makes up for his low walk rate.

But even with all that, should we really expect a .400 BABIP to hold? I’d say probably not. Now, it’s possible that as he gets fewer hits (regression!) he will start seeing more of the hits he does get go for extra bases (also regression!). It’s possible that some of the contact he’s making that is currently falling for singles will instead roll to the wall in the future and be doubles, which would be great.

It’s also possible that xwOBACON isn’t a predictive stat, and that it’s just really, really incredibly rare for a hitter to keep up the kind of contact that Bailey’s been making all year. Acuna, as one example, has a BABIP of .341, and he’s significantly faster than Bailey, so if they’re making the same kind of contact, you’d expect him to beat out a couple more hits and also (as an aside) stretch a couple more singles into doubles. Since they make very similar contact, Acuna should come out a little bit ahead in turning batted balls into hits; the fact that he isn’t suggests that Bailey’s numbers will come down as the season continues.

It’s dangerous to read too much into the various numbers in the wOBA Cinematic Universe. Casey Schmitt, for example, was still looking very good by those stats even a couple weeks after his hot streak ended. They don’t predict future success, and it’s foolish to use them that way.

Yet even with all that, Patrick Bailey remains the best catcher in the Giants organization by a fair amount. There are parts of his game that he can still work on, but so far in his big league career, his strengths have been so strong that they’ve made up for them. Even if he doesn’t hit .320 forever, he’s proven that he has the talent to succeed on both sides of the plate at the major league level. That’s a huge win.

And man, look how I got through this entire newsletter without comparing Bailey to Buster Posey. Damn heroic effort if you ask me.