What happend to Hafner?Travis Hafner has been a collossal disappointment this year, and if you owned him last year you probably weren't too happy either. In 2006 he hit a whopping 42 HRs, yet he hasn't even come close to that level of performance since. Currently, I own him in my fantasy league, and I couldn't be happier to see him take some timeout on the DL. Heck, in a 6 keeper league, he was one of my keepers, and I dropped Torii Hunter and Carlos Guillein to keep him. Therefore, I have been struggling with the inevitablel question of whether or not to drop him for his lacklust performance. What I didn't know until this week is that he has been struggling with a sore shoulder. Geez, I sure wish someone told me that earlier. The other downside is that he has been riding the pine the past week with no stats, and not until today did they put him on the DL. Let's further into the numbers.
Hafner in 2006, when he hit 42 HRs, had a .326 BABIP, which was actually lower than his previous two seasons when he hit 28 and 33 HRs. Basically, his BABIP was consistently in the low .300s, yet he only hit .298 last year, and is at .278 this year. Normally, we would like to attribute this to a decrease in HR/FB% or a lower Line Drive percentage (LD%), but his LD% is actually way up this year. Take a look at the graph below:
Hafner LD/GB/FB
You can see that his GB% is down, and his LD% is up around 25% thus far this year. Therefore, what seems to be the problem? One thing is that his K% is up 7% this year to about 28%, which is only 1% lower than the infamous Adam Dunn. However, the main thing that has changed is his HR/FB%. In 2006 he hit an unbelievable 30% Fly ball to HR ratio. That is unsustainable for any stretch of time, yet he did it for an entire year. In 2007 he was at 16%, and this year is around only 10%. This ratio should increase this year to around 18-19%, especially given he is making good contact (see LD%). Either way, for those of us biting the bullet, we can only hope he turns things around.
