Ian Happ’s All-Star Season — In Spray Charts & Defensive Positioning
Pretty much everyone who follows baseball knew that the Chicago Cubs were not going to be a great baseball team this year, or even a good team. I’ve lost track of what the Cubs’ brass are calling this season — rebuilding, restructuring, reset? Who knows.
But there have certainly been several bright spots this year, and one of those is Ian Happ. Drafted 9th overall in the 2015 draft, the switch-hitting Happ made his big league debut in 2017 (the year after the Cubs finally broke their World Series drought) and has stayed up with the big league club since then. I haven’t followed Happ’s career that closely, being distracted by Bryzzo and El Mago (Javy Baez), but it always seemed as if Happ was the subject of either a trade rumor, in danger of being benched/sent down, or just generally not living up to his high draft pick.
During the 2022 season, Happ was the subject of intense trade talks but was also selected to his 1st All-Star game. As the season winds down, I wanted to take a closer look at Happ’s career so far and see what may be in store for him over the next few years.
Since Happ is a switch-hitter, I’m curious to take a look at his spray charts and how opposing teams have positioned their fielders when he’s at the plate. A spray chart shows a hitter’s batted balls and their location in the field of play. Before looking at the whole season’s spray chart, I’m going to see where he hit during the first month of the season.
Happ definitely had more at-bats as a left-handed hitter during April, but his spray chart shows that while he definitely pulls the ball regardless of which side he’s hitting from, it doesn’t look like an extreme pull. Let’s see how his spray chart has held up throughout the course of the season (current as of 9/18/2022).
Happ has had a lot more AB’s as a left-handed hitter this year, and it looks like he has a higher tendency to pull the ball when he’s batting lefty than when he’s batting righty. Happ can still hit the ball to all parts of the field, but his right-handed spray chart is much more consistent and spread out than his left-handed one.
Knowing what we now know about Happ’s spray charts from both sides of the plate, I’m going to bet that opposing teams often employed an infield shift more often when he was batting left-handed.
Happ had many more AB’s from the left-side of the plate (meaning he faced more right-handed pitchers this season) but even though his pull percentages are basically the same from both sides of the plate, defenses shifted more frequently when Happ was hitting left-handed. Although this is just an examination of one player and how the defense positions itself when he’s hitting, this could indicate a more general tendency of how defenses play against left-handed hitters.
Happ has certainly had a very solid 2022 season despite being on a bad Cubs team and was well-deserving of his All-Star nod. He’s entering his prime career years and may be a foundational building block of the next good Cubs team. In future posts, I’ll take a look at his career progression so far and try to project future seasons for him.
