Will Tyler O'Neill have more HRs than Walks?
Tyler O'Neill is like a video game creation, and that makes for an interesting statistic to track... will rack up more HRs or BBs this season?
Tracking numbers in baseball is fun. Sure, you could focus on the traditional big ones… will Jacob DeGrom break Bob Gibson’s single season ERA record? (Looking less likely.) But isn’t it more fun to focus on Weird Baseball?
So let’s keep an eye on whether or not Tyler O’Neill hits more HRs or takes more Walks this season.
At the All-Star Break, O’Neill had exactly 15 HRs and 15 BBs. Since then, he has hit one HR, so he now stands with slightly more HRs than BBs.
How unusual is that? Well, it’s pretty uncommon, but not completely unheard of. 57 players have hit 20+ HRs while recording 20 or fewer walks. More than 30 HRs and 30 or fewer walks? 35 have done that. No Cardinals appear on either of these lists, though former Cardinal Luke Voit did it in 2020 and Adolis Garcia is on-pace to do the same this year.
The early 2000s was the heyday for this rare feat, which makes sense: Steroid-era high HR numbers coupled with not everybody having read Moneyball yet. But there are still guys with this profile around. Salvador Perez has done it four times. You’ve got some Hall of Famers on the list too, like Ernie Banks and Andre Dawson. But the more common profile of these guys is in the Dave Kingman or Dante Bichette mold.
In Tyler O’Neill’s rookie season, he did belt 9 HRs to just 7 BBs over a smattering of 61 games. In 2019 and 2020, he walked twice as often as he homered.
In 2021, O’Neill has gone Full Video Game. The HR rate is up and the Walk rate is down. Can he keep that going? Will a more cautious approach from opposing pitchers lead to more Walks? That seems plausible, but it hasn’t happened yet. (Though his Walk rate has increased to 6% from the absurd 2% it was at just a few weeks ago.)
I’ll be tracking this over the rest of the season, and likely posting a couple updates here via the Substack. But more often, I’ll be posting updates on the Cardinals Off-Day Twitter. Give us a follow there if you haven’t already.